CHOCTAW — The alumni list of the National Golf Association’s Hooters Pro Golf Tour truly reads like a Who’s Who of superstar PGA golfers.

During the week of Aug. 7-13, avid golf fans in the area might just get to see the next Lee Janzen or Tom Lehman or maybe even the next John Daly play right here at Dancing Rabbit.

For a second straight year, the NGA Hooters Tour will come to Neshoba County for the Pearl River Resort Golf Classic — a professional event which will consist of a field of 168 and a prize purse of more than $143,000.

“To be the host course for the only NGA Hooters Tour event in Mississippi for the second year is very exciting for us,” said Pearl River Resort president Chuck Miller, who was given much of the credit for bringing the event to Dancing Rabbit.

An NGA event was dropped on the Mississippi Gulf Coast last year, and officials scrambled to get the event moved to the Pearl River Resort. This year, they feel like the tourney will be bigger and better.

“The support here has just been phenomenal and the courses here are truly championship-caliber,” tournament director Todd Barbee said of Dancing Rabbit, which was recently named as the top golf course in the state by Mississippi Magazine.

Janzen, Daly, Lehman, Jim Furyk and David Toms are just a handful of the names who have played on the NGA Hooters Tour, which is the third-largest professional circuit behind the PGA and Nationwide tours. But it’s not uncommon for those who succeed on the Hooters Tour to also succeed as a PGA golfer.

“It’s a professional tour,” Barbee said. “We run it just like a PGA event. And we make them walk, and that’s a test — especially in Mississippi in August.

“What we do really prepares them to be professional golfers and it prepares them for qualifying school. When they get to that last day in Q-school, they might be huffing and puffing, but usually not nearly as much as the other guys.”

The 2006 NGA Hooters Tour is made up of 22 events with prize purses totaling more than $3.5 million.

The Pearl River Resort Golf Classic will get under way with a Monday (Aug. 7) open qualifier — with the top 10 finishers earning spots in the tournament. Practice rounds and a junior golf clinic follow on Tuesday (Aug. 8) and a pro-am on Wednesday (Aug. 9). The first of four rounds will begin Thursday, Aug. 10, with cuts made after the Friday, Aug. 11 rounds. The tourney champion takes home $24,000.

The NGA Hooters Tour is in Miami, Okla. next week and will head to Dothan, Ala. the week after the Pearl River tourney, and the Tour Championship is set for Oct. 2-8 in Atlanta.