Rich Barcelo

When Rich Barcelo turned 11 in the summer of 1986 he found himself on national TV, playing against the powerhouse Taiwanese Little League baseball team for the world championship at the famous Williamsport, Pennsylvania ballpark.
Barcelo, then affectionately called “Radar’’ by his teammates from the southeast side of Tucson’s International Little League All-Stars, was a starting shortstop for a team that won the city, state, western and national championships in a memorable summer of baseball.
By the time Rich was 16, he was a star forward for Sahuaro High School’s Hall of Fame basketball coach Dick McConnell. In 1992, he finished second by one shot in the state golf championships, a down-to-the-wire sudden death playoff.
Baseball, basketball, golf. Barcelo excelled at all three sports.
After becoming an all-conference golfer at Pima College, Barcelo accepted a scholarship to the University of Nevada where he became the 1998 Big West Conference golfer of the year, an honorable mention All-American that led to his induction into the Nevada Wolfpack Sports Hall of Fame in 2016.
But the biggest accomplishment of Barcelo’s remarkable sports career was yet to come. He qualified for the PGA Tour in 2010 and went on to play in 84 PGA Tour events, which included a fourth-place finish at the Tahoe-Reno Open. He also played in the U.S. Open and the British Open.
The triumph of his sports career surely came in 2009 in the Nationwide Tour’s (today’s Korn Ferry Tour) Cox Omaha Open. Barcelo shot a 62 in the second round and won it and the $130,000 winner’s check with a 65 in Sunday’s final round.
It was that finish that gave Barcelo enough prize money to qualify for the PGA Tour.
“I’ve been a professional golfer for 10 years,’’ he said that day in Omaha. “There comes a time when you doubt yourself, but this is a good exclamation point on a great week.’’
After three years on the PGA Tour, Barcelo became a teaching pro in Texas. The exclamation point to his teaching career came in 2015 when Tiger Woods hired him to be the head instructor and teaching pro at Woods’ new course, Bluejack National, near Houston.
Barcelo and his older brother, Marc, the former Pac-10 Pitcher of the Year at Arizona State, a second-round draft pick of the Minnesota Twins, used to spend their summers playing as much golf from sunup to sundown as they could at the Randolph Golf Complex. Their father, Frank, would give them $5, which, in the 1980s, paid for the day’s golf and a hot dog and coke for lunch.
That dedication to the sport paid off; both Barcelo brothers went on to become pro athletes.