TAMPA, Fla. – Palma Ceia Golf & Country Club dates to 1916, with a driving range that runs parallel to the par-5 third hole and measures just 110 yards. At Palma Ceia, you dial in your wedges at the range and then figure things out on the course. The first and second holes run in parallel, out and back to the clubhouse, and you’re permitted a breakfast ball off the first if things go awry; out-of-bounds resides just left of the first fairway, with a tree line to the right side.

PGA TOUR rookie Jackson Suber grew up at Palma Ceia, playing the first and second holes on repeat into the twilight hours, often alongside childhood best friend Gunnar Raney, with his mom Elayne watching from a white rocking chair on the porch just outside the clubhouse door. A young Suber progressed from the opening two-hole loop to the regulation layout, eventually eschewing the long-standing permission of a mulligan off No. 1. The reason? He didn’t want an asterisk if he someday shot the course record.

History echoes across the property that seems hidden between city blocks in South Tampa. Walter Hagen won a TOUR event here in 1935. Palma Ceia hosts the Gasparilla Invitational, a premier amateur event, which Suber often attended as a fan and where he befriended Matt Parziale (a firefighter who won the 2017 U.S. Mid-Amateur to qualify for the 2018 Masters). Suber entered the Palma Ceia history books with a course-record 59 (including a bogey) in the spring of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic hiatus. It will likely be the most special course record of Suber’s career.

Suber, 25, returned to Palma Ceia in advance of this week’s Valspar Championship, his hometown PGA TOUR event, an opportunity to look back before he moves forward. Suber attended the Valspar a few times as a kid, and he made his TOUR debut at the 2022 Valspar as an amateur. This time is different, though, in that he earned his spot in the field at Innisbrook Resort’s Copperhead Course as a full-fledged PGA TOUR member, after finishing No. 20 on the 2024 Korn Ferry Tour’s season-long standings.

Suber played collegiately at Ole Miss, finishing No. 9 on the 2022 PGA TOUR University Ranking to earn PGA TOUR Canada membership that summer. He started strong on the 2023 Korn Ferry Tour as a rookie but fell outside the top-30 threshold for a TOUR card at the season finale – after being projected for a TOUR card for most of the summer. The normally mild-mannered Suber took that setback hard: “That was as upset as I’ve been over golf,” he said. But it fueled him for a redemptive 2024 campaign where he notched 10 top-25 finishes in 24 starts, highlighted by a runner-up finish at the Compliance Solutions Championship in Oklahoma – where his mentor and former PGA TOUR pro Jonathan Randolph, a fellow Ole Miss alum, helped him game-plan for the week.

After a rough end to 2023, Suber and Randolph assessed what went wrong and how Suber could evolve his competitive edge in 2024. The fourth-year pro considered everything, refining areas like his pre-round routine, alignment and stance width. It paid off.

“It’s like the slow-motion car wreck,” said Randolph of Suber’s finish to the 2023 Korn Ferry Tour season. “I’m sure he wouldn’t describe it as such, but when you have everything that you’ve worked for right in front of you and it’s kind of like sand slipping through your fingers, it’s a tough thing to handle physically, emotionally. And to be able to take something good from it and learn from it, clearly he did, because he came back and did everything he could to get the job done.”

Resilience got Suber to the PGA TOUR, and it got him to this week’s Valspar Championship as a PGA TOUR member. He pulled up to Palma Ceia on Monday morning in his courtesy car, the definitive sign of a TOUR pro, yet he projected a childlike aura as he toured the property with PGA TOUR Digital. He walked through the trophy area in the clubhouse foyer, remarking that he was never able to win a junior club championship (hence he was unable to locate his name on a trophy). He’s featured in the pro shop, though, with his course-record scorecard prominently displayed just outside the door that gives way to the opening two-hole loop and its adjacent rocking chairs.

Both opening par 4s play straightaway: The par-4 first measures just 382 yards, with the par-4 second even shorter at 320 yards. For the many hundreds (if not thousands of times) that Suber has played the loop, he has never recorded an eagle on the opening hole. He has eagled the par-4 second, which he is now able to reach with a driver off the tee, but he has yet to record an albatross (albeit with a few narrow misses). The two-hole loop is perfect for elementary school-aged golfers, with shortish holes on flat terrain that provide birdie opportunities, but with narrow corridors that require a focus on accuracy – sometimes a lost art in golf’s bomb-and-gauge era. It also offered Suber and friends like Raney (who flew to Indiana to watch Suber collect his TOUR card at the Korn Ferry Tour finale last October) the opportunity to fall in love with playing golf, without the seeming imposition of a multi-hour round.

On a sun-kissed Monday morning before the Valspar, Suber made the short walk from the second green to the driving range, where he struck many thousands of short-iron shots in his formative years. He remembers the time when he could hit an 8-iron or 9-iron on the range; now the sand wedge is his max. Some might resent the inability to warm up with a driver, but Suber relishes it. The throwback setup forced a young Suber to figure things out on the course, an ethos that he carries to this day.

“It made me not think that the range was end-all, be-all,” Suber said Monday. “It kind of made playing golf more important to me than practice, which I think has helped me develop a lot and been a blessing in disguise. When I got to Ole Miss in college, I definitely started using the range more and building a routine that I would use for my practice, but I feel like it’s still ingrained in me that the range isn’t where you figure everything out, and knowing that on the golf course is the most important to scoring and my game. That’s really where it matters. It doesn’t matter how good you can hit it on the range.”

Suber was known on the Korn Ferry Tour as “the detective” for his desire to learn as much as he could about as many things as possible.

“He’s an inquisitive guy,” said Randolph. “He stays pretty even-keel and is always trying to find something new, whether it’s in the town or something about equipment. They call him the detective for a reason; he’s always out there trying to get something figured out.”

Suber’s curiosity dates to his childhood at Palma Ceia, where he’d hang out in the cart barn and chat with the staff about anything and everything related to golf and life. At times in his adolescence, Suber maybe didn’t realize how good he was; Raney remembers that his friend was nervous for high school golf tryouts as a freshman, unsure of where he’d stack up against his peers (as it turned out, he had no reason to worry).

At Palma Ceia, Suber has no reason to worry about how he rates in golf – or in anything. He’s just a kid who fell in love with the game at a place that loves him back.

“I just wanted to have fun and keep getting better,” Suber said, “so I just kept playing.”