He is descended from golf royalty, yet he is grinding to gain a foothold on the modern-day PGA Tour.
Sam Saunders meets both situations head-on.
Saunders, a 29-year-old Florida native, is a grandson of Arnold Palmer, and is in his third season on the big tour. He played the Web.com tour full time from 2012-14 before "graduating."
He has played at least one PGA Tour event each year since 2010 - legacies sometimes attract sponsor exemptions - and he played in the inaugural Greenbrier Classic that year. Palmer, then 80, attended a round.
Saunders has committed to return to the Old White TPC for the fourth time, looking to make his first cut.
That's a hard reality of the sport. He has four top-25s this year and a top-10, but he has made just seven of 17 cuts and is currently 138th in the FedExCup rankings. That's 13 spots below No. 125, the magic number to retain full privileges.
Whether he's playing well or poorly, the questions about his grandpa - "The King" - never stop. And that's OK.
"I don't think you can block it. I think it's more about embracing it," Saunders said. "It's like when you're missing cuts, two or three in a row. Rather than acting like it's not happening, just say, 'Hey, I'm struggling right now. Let's turn things around.
"It's the same thing [relation to Palmer]. It's there, it's always there for me. And it's not a bad thing. The distractions, the fact that people want to tell me about my grandfather and get to know me a little bit more, I'm flattered by it."
Saunders finished 148th last season, and his current status can be termed "tenuous," high enough to get him into 17 events but leaving him short on several others.
If he finishes short of 125th, he will have to play in the four-event Web.com Finals to regain full PGA Tour privileges. He did that in 2015, but he played just one of those events and last year and missed the cut.
Therefore, he is riding on his lower status.
"It's the normal route," Saunders said. "I'm on the track that 90 percent of the guys who play on Tour for 20 years are. People watch a lot of TV, though, and think you're going to come out of college and do what Jordan Spieth did. I would have loved to have done that, but I'm extremely grateful that I've had to grind and go through that.
"Looking at pictures of all of these guys, Jim Furyk, Ernie Els, Fred Couples, most of those guys played the mini-tours. They played the Web.com Tour and they earned their way to the PGA Tour. The first couple of years they struggled on Tour, because it's hard."
For the Classic, the eligibility order will dip into the category of those finishing between 126th and 150th the previous season, so he is probably safe when the field is unveiled Friday. With just eight weeks left in the regular season, he needs results.
He is reasonably accurate off the tee (63 percent), but he said improvements in putting are the key to a late-season rally.
"I've always been solid inside of 10 feet. I never felt I was a bad putter from short range," he said. "I just never rolled the ball well enough to make a lot of 15-, 20-footers, and you need those putts to keep a round alive, whether it's par saves or birdie putts.
"Because if you hit it from 15, 20 feet all day and you never get it to go in, it wears on you, and you start hitting bad shots because of it."
He'll certainly be aggressive on Old White, even if the greens on the restored course will be unfamiliar. He has to, to avoid another year in limbo.
What he won't do is shy away from the shadow of his grandpa, the King.
"I'd like to think, I'm still banking that some day, hopefully, when I'm one of the top players in the world, I've had to deal with so much throughout the early part of my career before I was ever one of the big names in golf, that I can handle it better," he said.
Contact Doug Smock at 304-348-5130 or dougsmock@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @dougsmock and read his blog at http://blogs.wvgazettemail.com/dougsmock/.