Former Kapalua golf professional Dick McClean thinks "it's so fantastic" to be inducted into the Hawai'i Golf Hall of Fame later this month.

"It's a great honor for someone not being from Hawai'i and having been gone for a while," said McClean in a telephone interview from his home in La Quinta, Calif. "And especially following David Ishii, who was the only inductee last year."

Not bad, too, for someone who was born in London, grew up in Chicago and graduated from a California high school whose home course was Pebble Beach.

"That's where I got the golf bug," McClean said.

Who wouldn't? Especially, if you had a chance to tee it up at Pebble Beach after school every day at 3 p.m. as a member of the Carmel High golf team.

"In Carmel, you're either a hippie or a golfer," said the 61-year-old McClean, who took to golf and followed the flagstick that eventually led him to Hawai'i, where he became a six-time Aloha Section PGA Player of the Year.

McClean is a founding member of a golf club in the Palms Springs area called The Palms, whose general manager is J.D. Ebersberger, former Mauna Kea Resort director of golf. It was Ebersberger who spearheaded a movement that finally made the Hawai'i Golf Hall of Fame a reality in 1988.

McClean will become its 60th member when he is officially inducted April 30 at a dinner ceremony at the Waikiki Prince Hotel. Besides Ishii, McClean is the only inductee singularly honored. They met for the first time in 1982, when Ishii won the Kapalua Open, an event that McClean first played with a couple of buddies from California.

Their relationship has continued over a quarter of a century. Both played in the Senior British Open last year in Turnberry, Scotland. Each just missed the 36-hole cut.

McClean views Ishii with so much respect that he feels his playoff win over the 14-time Japan PGA Tour winner and 1990 Hawaiian Open champion in the 1988 Tournament of Champions at Mauna Kea remains the "most memorable" of all of his victories in Hawai'i.

And McClean certainly crammed in a lot of W's in his 14 years here, including back-to-back Hawai'i State Open titles in 1990-91, five Aloha Section PGA Stroke Play championships (three in a row from 1985 through 1987 and again in 1989 and 1992) and, appropriately, four Hall of Fame Tournament titles at Kapalua.

Appropriately because Kapalua is where it all began for McClean, in terms of local golf.

Mark Rolfing, another Hall of Fame member, and McClean first met at Pebble Beach and found out the other came from Chicago. They played on mini-tours together before Rolfing got a job at Kapalua Resort.

Meanwhile, McClean finally passed the Tour Q-School in his sixth try in 1976, but didn't earn enough money to keep his playing privileges.

Rolfing conceived an idea of starting an off-season tournament at Kapalua and persuaded McClean to bring some players over. McClean did such a good job selling the event that he moved to Maui in 1984 and became its tournament director for 12 years.

The rest, as they say, is history. From its beginning as the Kapalua Open, it became the Kapalua International. The Plantation Course caught on as an attractive venue now hosting the Mercedes-Benz Championship, a winners-only event opening the PGA Tour season.

"Dick added a lot of credibility to the Kapalua International," said Rolfing. "His duties were so widespread that I used to tell people I don't know what he does, but he does it well."

In 1998, McClean moved from one Plantation to another Plantation, a golf course in La Quinta designed by Fred Couples.

"I wanted to give the senior tour a try and the transition from the Lincoln-Mercury Kapalua to Mercedes seemed like the right time to do it," McClean said about his decision to leave.

He will be arriving a couple days before the induction ceremony and play in the Hall of Fame Pro-Am May 5 — at the Kapalua Plantation Course, where else?