In its 59th year, the Jennie K. Wilson Invitational seems to be in a strange time warp. Its champions have increasingly grown younger and more athletic, while its storied history becomes more blurred by the year.

Students in general, and junior golfers in particular, have dominated the first women's major of Hawai'i's golf season the past two decades. Michelle Wie won when she was 11. Stephanie Kono was all of 13. When Xyra Suyetsugu won last year, at age 21, she was the oldest champion since 2000 — by four years.

"It's more competitive now," said Cathy Kobayashi, 85, who has played every Jennie K. but two since learning how to golf in her 50s. "Before, it was not all school kids with high-tech clubs, training when they started walking. We stayed home with our kids. Most mothers didn't golf until they were older. The youngest ones were like 30. We had lots of fun though."

A handful of the 125 golfers who tee off in today's first round at Mid-Pacific Country Club can't drive yet. Allisen Corpuz (11) and Kacie Komoto (12) aren't even in their teens, yet they are playing Championship Flight and have the junior golf resume to back it up.

But do they have a clue that Jennie K. Wilson was a dancer in the court of King Kalakaua and wife of former mayor John H. Wilson?

Do they know her full name was Ana Kimi Kapahukula Kamamalu Ku'ula Wilson and she was born in 1872? "Auntie Jennie" didn't even play golf, but accepted the original organizing committee's invitation to be "title sponsor" — offered because of her widespread popularity — because she too wanted to foster interest in championship golf.

Do those who have benefited from the tournament's rich tradition realize that all but three of the dozen women in the Hawai'i Golf Hall of Fame were Jennie K. champions? That includes inaugural winner Edna Lee Jackola, six-time champion Joan Damon, Billie Beamer, Jackie Yates Holt and Tura Kahaleanu Nagatoshi, who won by 21 shots in 1970.

Do they have any sense of the history that comes with a Jennie K. championship? Is anyone giving them a history lesson?

"The thing is, nobody passes it on to them," says Bev Kim, another Hall of Famer who won Jennie K. in 1981 and has been playing it nearly 50 years. "They don't bother to read about it and neither did their parents. I think that's too bad. We walked on that (Mid-Pac) ground and it was sacred.

"The kids are missing the tradition and respect afforded the game. ... They're 11 — they don't have any history."

They do have lots of time to learn, and lots of game.

Kim considers Damon the grand dame of Hawai'i women's golf, self-taught and able to focus on the game, unlike most of her era. There was no junior golf when Damon won her titles from 1957 to '66. She was beating working women who grew up without paid coaches and programs. Kim, Jackola and a few others were coached some by Guinea Kop, and paid him with "fish, pineapples and cigars, stuff like that."

But today's best kids "could beat Joan Damon in her prime," according to Kim, who started playing Jennie K. at age 15, and winning even earlier.

"Quite frankly," Kim said, "I was nowhere as intimidating to those ladies as these little kids are now. ... It's a whole new caliber."

It has put Hawai'i back on the golf map, in large neon letters. But 20 years from now, how many will remember? How about 60 years from now?

Kobayashi, who won her fourth Jennie K. (flight) medal at 81, could give them a little history. The Jennie K. banquet no longer goes deep into the Lanikai night with singing and dancing, and fewer women come from off-island, but members still raid her garden for decorations and the ambience is unlike any other.

"I play just for friendship now," she said. "If I shoot 100, that's OK."