Why would any golfer not want to play in Hawaii?

	Jason Gore certainly seems happy to be in Hawaii this week. AP

KAPALUA, Hawaii -- On New Year's Day, Jason Gore began his 2006 by playing a practice round for this week's PGA Tour season opener.

Teeing it up for the first time at Kapalua's Plantation Course -- the rollicking Maui masterpiece crafted by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw -- last year's Cinderella-in-a-golf-shirt didn't acknowledge his surroundings. Instead, he quickly fell into conversation with his caddie, Lewis Puller, whom he hadn't seen in a couple of weeks.

"We were just catching up and talking," Gore said. "I think we were on the seventh tee, and I turned around and I looked at this big blue sign that said, 'Mercedes Championships.' It's like, 'Holy smoke!' It pretty much caught me off guard a little bit."

Gore's point was his sudden appreciation of his berth in this winner's-only event. But the feeling was something any Kapalua visitor can relate to. This place can sneak up on you.

It's not like its charms are subtle -- they're anything but. Yet the swaying palms, the mountain-meets-chasm topography, the frolicking humpbacks, the sublime vistas of neighboring islands, the palette-of-the-gods sunsets -- there's almost too much to marvel at. Try to embrace it all at once, and you wind up like that creepy kid with the eyebrows in American Beauty. You know: "Sometimes I think there's so much beauty in the world that I can't take it, and I think my heart's going to cave in."

OK, maybe that's overstating it. But add the fact that Gore, like every other guy in the field, is getting paid $70,000 (guaranteed last-place money) just to show up, and you have every right to freak out.

Cinderella, welcome to Wonderland.

Of course, the greatest wonder this week is how anyone could turn down an invitation. If 70,000 frequent-flier miles will get you here (that's the going rate), $70,000 will probably pay for a family's worth of first-class tickets, or at least a couple of tanks of Gulfstream fuel.

By now almost every participating pro has publicly renounced the week's gang of four absentees: Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Retief Goosen and Padraig Harrington. But the commentary of one who hasn't, Ben Crane, was perhaps the most eloquent.

Asked on Wednesday if he could explain why anyone, however rich or family-committed, would pass up a chance to be here, Crane poked his head out of his pro-am golf cart, took a quick pan around the property, raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

It was right about then that Crane's caddie, Brett Waldman, as if for emphasis, looked up from a text message and announced that Jessica Alba was lying out at the pool down the road at the Ritz-Carlton.

If all this makes it sound like the Tour's Hawaiian fortnight is its answer to Club Med, that's because it is. From what I hear, the next stop, Honolulu, will be just as much fun. In a certain way, it's all downhill from here. Indeed, these are the two weeks that the Tour spends the rest of the season apologizing for.

Aloha, Tiger, Phil, Retief and Padraig. Wish you were here.