Catawba Creek Golf Course

Now known as Catawba Creek, this Gastonia course opened in 1930 as Gastonia Municipal Golf Course — a Donald Ross design — and it's where Harold Varner III learned the game. From about age nine until high school, HV3's father, a car salesman, dropped him off nearly every summer morning, and his parents scraped together $100 so their son could play as much as he wanted all summer long. When he wasn't on the course he practiced at a makeshift hole near the house, aiming at a water tank beyond a line of trees. A Ross pedigree didn't belong only to the grand clubs: here it sat on an affordable public muni in the Charlotte metro that raised a PGA Tour player — and one of the game's most magnetic voices for opening golf up to the next kid like him.