Grief changes everything. For Corey Pereira, it has reshaped not just how he plays golf, but how he sees life. In his first Tour-sanctioned start since the passing of his wife, Leah Bertuccelli, the 29-year-old carries both deep emotion and a special tribute to her on the course.

Pereira plans to honor Leah by carrying a sunflower garland on his bag, a symbol of sarcoma patients. “It’s funny, I was going to tie, I don’t know what to call it… I was going to put it on my bag, and I just flat-out forgot this morning. It’ll be on the bag tomorrow,” he said at his Procore Championship press conference. For him, it’s a way to keep Leah close on every walk through Napa’s fairways.

The couple got engaged in Napa last December during the Asher Tour. Less than a year later, Leah is gone. Pereira told Monday Q he still struggles to accept it: he often reaches for the phone to call her, only to be hit by the painful reality that she’s no longer there.

Leah’s fight began in October 2022 when she was diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), a rare and aggressive cancer. Just 25 at the time, the former collegiate track athlete had no warning signs. From then on, it was a relentless battle: 32 rounds of chemotherapy, over 50 radiation sessions, countless alternative treatments, and every clinical trial they could find. Pereira drove her to Stanford twice a month, sometimes for multiple rounds of radiation in a single day.

Despite it all, the cancer kept returning. Leah went into remission four times, and each time the cancer kept coming back. Pereira says how unusual all of it was. “We knew that the outcome wasn’t going to be good from the start, and that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to feel incredible at times…It was a really unique type of cancer.” Leah’s RMS was one of the rarest cancers found in adults, as it normally strikes children. It accounts for less than 1% of adult solid tumors and only 3% of all soft tissue sarcomas in adults. The doctors told the couple that the chance for an adult in their 20s to contract the illness was “one in a couple of hundred million!”

“I had no symptoms. I didn’t feel sick. You find yourself thinking that this [illness] is a part of life, but you didn’t think it would be a part of your life at this age,” Leah told Golf Digest 75 in an interview two years back.

By June of this year, the reality became inescapable. Pereira shared on Instagram how Leah’s cancer had “evolved past the point of reasonable treatment,” and that she had entered hospice. She was spending her final weeks at home with her close ones. Not long after, she passed away, leaving Pereira to face a life and a career without her by his side.

The story of Corey Pereira and Leah Bertuccelli

Their story goes a long way back. They had met years earlier at the University of Washington. Leah was a pole vaulter then and was introduced to Pereira through a bunch of mutual friends. Their connection was easy, with a common interest in sports, with also a tinge of humor and energy. Even during her last days, Leah was distracted from her evil reality by playing tennis with Pereira. But back then, she was always by his side. “My career belonged to both of us,” Pereira once said. When Leah’s illness worsened, he stepped away from golf and Q school to look after her.

Things got bad really soon, but even amidst all this, Leah made it a point not to let the disease define her. Throughout her final days, she continued to inspire her husband. To him, she was a special human from whom he learned a lot, especially how not to take things too seriously. Pereira recalls how she joked about cancer as if it were trivial. “She would joke about cancer, she would talk about cancer like it was completely insignificant,” he told the press. This perspective has now shifted the way he sees his own profession, which he is eager to bring back this week, but still, none of this matters anymore. “This week is big for me. If I have a good round tomorrow and the weekend, it could change my career. But it’s not as important as it used to be.”