Baseball, not golf, was the first sport that Paul Sugimoto took up. But it's in golf that Sugimoto, who will retire at the end of this month after 10 years as executive director of the Aloha Section PGA, will be most remembered.

Sugimoto played baseball for the University of Hawai'i after graduating from Waipahu High School, where he played infield for Masa Yonamine's Marauders.

"I never played golf until I started fooling with it in college and later in the service," said Sugimoto, who plays to a 15-handicap.

While he tries to stay in touch with his former UH baseball teammates, including Ken Nakakura, Mel Hirano, Carlton Loo, Fausto Grado, Les Akeo, Dick Matsuwaka and George Anzai, Sugimoto's buddies today are mostly golfers. It was Nakakura, a whiz at shortstop, who kept Sugimoto riding the bench.

So it's a testimony to the man and the job that he has done as executive director of the Aloha Section PGA that more than 60 players, including 18 golf professionals, took part in a send-off tournament and party yesterday at the Pearl Country Club.

One of them, Tom Eubank, flew in from Atlanta. Eubank won last year's State Open.

"That's what I will miss the most. The camaraderie with the golf professionals," said Sugimoto, who will help with the transition when his replacement is named. The final three candidates will be interviewed by the ASPGA board of directors in the coming weeks.

Then it's "just play golf and travel to play golf," says Sugimoto, who will be 70 next January. His first travel destination will be Japan with Hal Okita to play some of the military courses there.

"Australia and Las Vegas, of course," adds Sugimoto.

Gee, all my golfing buddies are retiring. Sugimoto joins former UH men's basketball coach Riley Wallace and Judge Jim Burns in retirement, meaning they'll have more time now to work on their golf handicaps and make it tougher for me in $2 Nassau bets.

Sugimoto is proud of the growth of the Hawai'i section, one of 41 in the nation under the aegis of the PGA of America, during his stint. There are now 190 members with 65 apprentices in the local section, which observed its 30th anniversary last year after once being a chapter of the Southern California section.

Record-keeping is perhaps the biggest duty of the executive director, according to Sugimoto. Keeping the job classifications in order so that golf professionals can get re-certified as required every three years.

The Aloha Section also conducts 14 tournaments a year, oversees the Hawai'i Golf Hall of Fame, publishes a golf guide and conducts training workshops on every island for its apprentices and seminars for outsiders, including high school coaches and other people in the community.

Perhaps the biggest accomplishment Sugimoto is proud of has been the establishment of a tax-exempt PGA Foundation for scholarships and contributions to charitable organizations.

"It's one of the biggest steps forward we've made as a section," Sugimoto said. "That and the accelerated movement of our apprentices to membership last year." Eleven became members in 2006, the most in a single year, according to Sugimoto.

"He's always had the interests of the section and its members in mind," said Matt Hall, Aloha Section president and Turtle Bay Resort's director of golf. "But, to me, his biggest contributions involve things that nobody notices. He has taken his bonus money and donated it back to our foundation and also paid for military personnel to play in our (fund-raising) PGA Scramble."

Whoever becomes the next executive director, Sugimoto says his biggest challenge is to raise sponsorship money to keep section tournaments going. The section is still looking for a sponsor for the stroke-play championship to replace the Mauna Kea Resort, which shut down its hotel operations because of damage from last October's earthquake.

The first priority, though, is making sure that Aloha Section secretary Joy Kunishima remains on board.

"She really runs the whole show. Without her we'd be lost," Sugimoto said.