CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Sam Matton never saw the call coming. It was last summer, sometime around June. Matton was home in Swindon, England, what he calls, “a s—-y little town about 70 miles west of London.” Luke Donald was on the line. “Really, even now, I don’t know why,” Matton says all this time later. “He was scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Following an 18-hole stretch at the 107th playing of the PGA Championship highlighted by mud balls that led to differing opinions and plenty of clubhouse controversy, Round 2 was highlighted by a man rising up the leaderboard who has dealt with his fair share of adversity.