MEMO from the publisher

For the more than 160,000 mainlanders who visit her each year, Hawaii is a scenic dreamland of mountains and bright colors, waving palms and breaking waves. But increasingly Hawaii is also something else, a place where sport thrives as happily as pineapples and where wandering sportsmen who once found their reward in looking now add to that the pleasure of doing.

Next week, Associate Editor Coles Phinizy describes how this happens and, in color, Photographer Toni Frissell documents the action while it happens.

This is a Hawaii where the native art of surfboarding, once almost an item of scenery like Mauna Loa, is these days as apt to be a part of a visitor's activity as of his vista; where hunting for big game and upland game is an imported and important sport; where the marlin, and even the bonefish, are huge (the world's record for the latter was taken from the waters off Kauai); where trail riding is a dizzying trip down and around the vast crater of Haleakala, and the guide spins whoppers intended to alarm. It is a Hawaii which lies beyond the palms and dancing girls and one which—it's fair to say—has until now been one of sport's most uncharted territories.

To the role of explorer for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Coles Phinizy brings some special qualifications. In her account of skin-diving in the Bahamas last summer (SI, Aug. 11 and 18) Clare Boothe Luce introduced her companions on the adventure. She wrote of Phinizy: "He believes the more participants which sports produce among Americans of both sexes and all ages, the richer in the end will be America's crop of real champions, the happier and healthier our people and the better our chance of national survival. No man, Coles thinks, can wholly realize himself—and therefore can never be wholly mature or free—who does not reasonably develop his own physical strength and skills and recognize in action his instinctive need to make contact with the speechless creatures of earth, sky and sea."

The Hawaii which Phinizy reveals next week is, I think you will agree, a perfect place for that.

PHOTO

COLES PHINIZY