LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) – Golf could do itself a favor this week by fussing less over Tiger Woods and more over Rob Corcoran.
Corcoran is a 38-year-old club pro whose story is only too familiar to the 19 other members of his fraternity who earned a spot alongside the tour pros in this year’s PGA Championship field. Any one of them will be lucky to stick around until Sunday. Nearly all of them were sure they’d get here one day – just a lot sooner.
Instead they wound up giving lessons, selling clubs and clothes in the pro shop and looking after everything required to run a golf club, from the food in the kitchen to the balls on the range. In the time left over, they work on their own games and play mini-tour events, in search of small victories or to gauge their slimmer-by-the-day prospects of moving up to the big time.
Corcoran did – and still does – all of those things five months out of the year. Where his story veers off from the rest of the club-pro pack is where he does it: at the Poxabogue Golf Center, a nine-hole public course that sits alongside the Montauk Highway on Long Island, New York, and in the shadow of three of the best and most exclusive private clubs in America.
If the folks who run golf are serious about growing the game, about making it fun and accessible for beginners, and keeping them involved, Poxabogue (Pox-a-bahg’) might just be ground zero.