Fans invariably focus on the glamorous end of a leaderboard—triumphs, trophies—but stories are often no less compelling at the hardscrabble end of things, where blood vessels pop more often than flashbulbs. If there’s truth in the cliché that it’s lonely at the top, the bottom can be downright desolate.
While attention was trained on the WGC Dell Technologies Match Play in Austin, the PGA Tour’s foot soldiers—the best of the rest—were at the Corales Puntacana Championship in the Dominican Republic. In Thursday’s first round, Parker McLachlin teed off early in a strong wind and was 2-over par through eight holes.
“I felt like I was hanging in,” he told me Saturday morning from the bleachers of a Scottsdale ballpark, where he was watching his 8-year-old son’s season-opener.
