Skins game: Harold Varner takes aim at becoming one of the rarest things in golf--a black pro.

• Author: Campbell, Spencer

Teenage golfers with skill, ambition and wherewithal play American Junior Golf Association tournaments. The Braselton, Ga.-based nonprofit holds multiday events on elite courses from Maine to California that attract college coaches and sponsors such as Polo and Rolex. The usual entry fee is $280, but that doesn't include qualifying fees ($95 to $120) and expenses (many teens travel the circuit like PGA Tour pros). Harold Varner Ill's folks couldn't afford that, so he competed in Carolinas Golf Association tournaments, where entry fees are no more than $120. It was at one of those that Press McPhaul first noticed him. Varner was 14 or 15, not much taller than his golf bag and, East Carolina University's men's golf coach swears, wearing tennis shoes. His loopy swing produced a powerful and occasionally wayward hook. "But he was having more fun than anyone else."

Something else that made Varner stand out: He's black. Though he starred at Forestview High School in Gastonia, finishing runner-up at the state tournament his junior and senior years, top college programs didn't recruit him. McPhaul pursued polished players, too, but they passed on ECU. So he took a flier on the energetic kid he had spotted a few years before. "Press called me and was, like, 'I want you to come to East Carolina,"' Varner recalls. "Deal! I'll forever be indebted to them because of that."

Shortly after arriving in Greenville in 2008, he went to McPhaul's office to discuss his ultimate goal: the PGA Tour. In the preceding three years, 3,859 men had attempted to qualify for golf's elite circuit. Ninety-four succeeded. The best players in the world stood only a 60% chance of making it. Men of his race nearly never did. Still, McPhaul began outlining steps--such as exercise, eating right, practicing--in the lower-left comer of a grease board in his office. He worked diagonally across it, creating stairs to the opposite comer, where he ran out of room. He had to scribble the final step, "PGA Tour," on the cinder-block wall above it. "It sort of stuck up there in perpetuity. He had a really long staircase to climb."

Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.-based PGA Tour Inc. barred black players until 1961, when Charlotte-born Charles Sifford became its first African-American member, but the sport clung to segregation for decades after. "Golf has many ways of keeping the black man in his place," Sifford wrote in his 1992 autobiography, Just Let Me Play. "We're still not invited to some tournaments, and the endorsements and appearance fees and special bonuses of golf continue to elude us." In 1990, a black kid from California shared Sifford's sense of exclusion. "Every time I go to a major country club," Tiger Woods told a reporter, "you can always feel it, you can always sense it. People are always staring at you. 'What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here.'" He won the Masters Tournament by 12 strokes seven years later, supposedly throwing open the gates to black pros. Nearly two decades later, he is the only one on the PGA Tour. "Tiger seems to be on his way out or close to it," says Earl Smith, professor emeritus of sociology at Wake Forest University. "There's been no trail, there's been no coattails after...