The fire still burns bright inside Corey Pereira.
The first thing he did after winning the Mexico Championship at La Hacienda Golf Club in Mexico City on June 7, was look up to the sky for Leah Bertuccelli, his wife, who died of cancer a year ago at 28, and raise his arms in delight.
“I wish she was here to celebrate,” he said in the aftermath. “She was my best friend.”
That night, Pereira celebrated alone at a restaurant, reflecting on the long, painful journey back to the winner’s circle after putting his golf career on pause to serve as Leah’s caregiver.
“I gave myself a little pat on my back thinking just how difficult some of those days had been,” he said. “It’s been an incredibly hard road considering the mental, physical and the emotional challenge.”
Pereira, 31, tied a ribbon with sunflowers, the symbol of hope for patients suffering from sarcoma, to his golf bag about a month after Leah died as one small way to carry her memory with him on the course as he mounts a comeback in professional golf.
“I was clearing out her things and found it in the spare bedroom,” he recalled.
It’s a bit tattered from his travels throughout Latin America and weathered from the sunshine and he’s pretty sure nobody who sees it understands its true meaning, but it brings him comfort as he competes on PGA Tour Americas, the equivalent of Double-A baseball, with hopes of graduating at least to the Korn Ferry Tour, the PGA Tour's top developmental circuit, next season.
Pereira should be a familiar name to those who have followed the development of homegrown junior talent from NorCal chasing their dreams of reaching the PGA Tour someday. Pereira picked up the game at a young age from his parents, who both played at Cameron Park Country Club, about 30 miles east of Sacramento. He won the 2013 NCGA Junior Amateur at Spyglass Hill with a 54-hole total of 213 and still remembers lighting it up during the first two rounds and persevering when the wheels began to fall off in the final round.
“I remember I made a late birdie and won by a couple,” he said, “but it was kind of a shaky performance down the stretch.”
He had an even more brilliant summer one year later, capturing both the Pacific Coast Amateur and the California State Fair titles in 2014.
He competed against the likes of Cameron Champ, a Tour winner, and Austin Smotherman, who is enjoying his best season on the PGA Tour as well as Bryson DeChambeau, a two-time U.S. Open champion, who competes on LIV Golf. Pereira played collegiately at University of Washington, which is where he met Leah during his senior year. She was a track athlete and two years younger than him. They dated long distance while Pereira launched his pro career after joining the play-for-pay ranks in 2017. He earned his Korn Ferry Tour card via a top-five finish on PGA Tour Canada points in 2018, the same year when he won for the first time at the ATB Financial Classic.
But then came the cancer diagnosis in October 2022 of rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer that affects the skeletal muscles (only about 1 in 5 million), typically to someone much younger and has proven to be incurable. Pereira took several breaks from the game, including in early 2023 while she was going through the initial 12 rounds of chemotherapy and 30 rounds of radiation. He noted that he was lucky to have access to the Stanford University golf facility thanks to the generosity of men’s golf coach Conrad Ray while Leah was being treated at nearby Stanford Cancer Institute as a top priority patient. He would often hit balls for a couple of hours in the morning, then hang out with Leah and her parents at the hospital.
On four separate occasions, her cancer went into remission but every time it would return again. They tried clinical trials and hoped for a miracle but all along they knew her particular gene mutation remains undefeated. “To be honest, three to four years was a success,” he said.
Each time she got a clean bill of health, he ratcheted up his practice and play and just as he began to find footing again in the pro ranks, such as qualifying for the 2023 U.S. Open, Leah would get another bad scan and golf would be swept to the backburner. Eventually, when the cancer returned in October 2024, he stopped competing to make her health his focus.
“I haven’t really had a fair shot at things yet,” he said. “I’ve been a pro for nine or 10 years but it only feels honestly like four or five.”
After Leah’s passing, Pereira needed golf as an escape from reliving what he described as some “pretty awful moments,” and “spiraling” during the grieving process. It gave him a reason to get out of the house and off the couch because there were days when he didn’t want to get out of bed.
Just a few months later, he Monday qualified for the PGA Tour’s 2025 Procore Championship in Napa and made the cut. He was the medalist at first stage of Q-School, which earned him status on PGA Tour Americas this season and a road back to making his dream a reality.
He would tee it up wherever he could, including on the Asher Tour, a minitour formerly known as the Golden State Tour, because there’s no replication for performing under pressure. He’s a man without a home, traveling to Peru, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico and exploring Latin America during the first half of the season before a shift to Canada for the remaining portion of his schedule. Even before his victory in Mexico, he sensed his game was trending in the right direction thanks to several solid finishes, including a 10th in Brazil, an 11th in Argentina and a first-round 63 in Peru. “I’m not out here trying to reinvent the wheel. I just need to tighten things up and add a little polish,” he said.
He posted a winning score of 22 under in Mexico to edge Riley Lewis, who didn’t make a bogey over his final 29 holes, by two strokes. More than 100 kids waited for Pereira's autograph at the 18th green, and, in addition to the winner’s check, tournament organizers awarded him an oversized bottle of tequila. He usually doesn’t imbibe in alcohol, but he made an exception to enjoy a celebratory drink because as he noted, “The only way off this tour is to win."
It's hard to fathom how anyone manages to bounce back from losing the love of their life let alone when the loved one who was seemingly a model of health one day is taken in such an unfair and arbitrary manner. Pereira has fallen back on golf to bring some much-needed structure as he seeks to prove that it's not too late to achieve his pro golf aspirations.
"It feels great to have some success and something to work towards, but it doesn’t make what happened any easier,” he said.
He left the rest of the tequila bottle behind at the hotel the next morning. “I think housekeeping had a big score that night,” he cracked.
Eyeing a return to the Korn Ferry Tour would take Pereira one step closer to his ultimate goal of earning his PGA Tour card. But if he has to make a pit stop along the way, he’s ready for that too: “I didn’t have my best year last time on the Korn Ferry Tour, and I want revenge.”