Harold Varner Opens His Tour Card-Carrying Days With A 65

Harold Varner III is the first black player to earn a PGA Tour card on the Web.com Tour and the most prominent of African American descent since Tiger Woods. While Varner has played PGA Tour events, opening with a 65 and T3 start at the Frys.com Open is still noteworthy.

Adam Schupak profiled Varner in this week's Golfweek.

To those who say the PGA Tour lacks color, meet rookie Harold Varner III, the first black player to earn a Tour card on the Web.com Tour. By virtue of finishing 25th on the regular-season money list, he joins Tiger Woods and doubles the number of blacks on Tour. But Varner, 25, said he was raised color blind and his stock response to such inquiries about golf and race is to declare that he doesn’t want to be the best black golfer; he just wants to be the best golfer.

“He doesn’t want to carry a torch,” said Bruce Sudderth, Varner’s teacher and golf pro emeritus at Gaston Country Club in Gastonia, N.C. “He just wants to be known as Harold.”

Bob Harig profiled Varner at the start of the season-opening week and included this:

Varner has never met Woods, who was committed to play the Frys.com Open until back surgery last month forced him to cancel all of his golf tournament plans for the rest of the year.

Varner expects to meet him at some point during his rookie year on tour, when his immediate  goals will be more about securing his playing privileges for another year than tackling golf's social issues. When the subject has come up in the past, Woods typically cited a lack of caddie programs and, of course, funding.

It’s Back! PGA West Stadium Hosting TFKA The Hope

Last time we saw it on the PGA Tour, poor Tip O'Neill was stuck in a bunker and Corey Pavin won there barely making it to some of the fairways. But since then players started doing yoga, ditched the persimmons and even played a bunch of Q-School rounds at PGA West's Stadium course.

The iconic Pete Dye design returns to the Bob Hope Classic CareerBuilder Challenge In Partnership With The Clinton Foundation.

Larry Bohannan reports the addition of PGA West Stadium and the Nicklaus Tournament Course to replace the Nicklaus and Palmer private courses. It was, gulp, 29 years ago that the Stadium got its one shot at hosting the Hope.

The Stadium Course is famous in the desert for hosting the Skins Game from 1986 through 1991, but also for the one year it was played in the PGA Tour event known as the Bob Hope Classic. Designed by Pete Dye, the Stadium Course was different than almost any golf course in the course in 1987, and the scores reflected the course difficulty. Corey Pavin won the event, then a 90-hole tournament, at 19-under 341, well above the typical low winning scores of the time.

With an island green on the par-3 17th, a 200-yard carry over water on the par-3 fifth and a 20-foot-deep bunker on the par-5 16th, the Stadium Course presented strong challenges to the tour players and 384 amateurs in the field in 1987. The pros grumbled, with Ken Green saying the course needed a few sticks of dynamite and other players saying the one-year-old course was just unfair. The pace of play was slow for amateurs and celebrities, including Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill who found himself flailing away at the bottom of the bunker on the 16th hole on national television.