Journeymen Climb Champions Tour Leader Board Hunter Martin/Getty Images Joe Daley, 51, a marginal player on the PGA Tour, recently broke through with a victory in a Champions Tour major. Roger Chapman is still grinding. It was dinner time, and he was the last man standing on the practice putting green on a Friday night. His commitment has not wavered since his breakthrough victory at the Senior P.G.A. Championship in May. Five tournaments and two majors have come and gone, but Chapman smiles every time one of his fellow pros greets him as champ. "It's a great feeling," Chapman said. When they keep doing that, it rubs off on you. Pretty soon it feels like, Yeah, I am the champ. Let's go play like one. Chapman's confidence has continued to rise since his wire-to-wire victory at the Senior P.G.A. If only his putter had cooperated on the final day of the Constellation Senior Players Championship earlier this month, he might have bagged his second major title. "I felt comfortable," said Chapman, a 53-year-old Englishman. "Before, I often wondered, "Do I belong here?" I really wanted to prove my victory wasn't a one-off thing. Instead, Joe Daley, a 51-year-old nonexempt pro from Scottsdale, Ariz., became the latest golfer to turn pedestrian tour credentials into senior success when he outlasted Chapman and a star-studded field to win the Senior Players Championship, one of the five Champions Tour majors. "Who would've thought Joe would beat Fred Couples and Mark Calcavecchia head-to-head?" said Michael Allen, who has won twice on the Champions Tour this year after never winning on the PGA Tour. But he did. He rolled them. And that's the beauty of the game. With two unheralded players already victorious in the senior majors, some pros are wondering who will be next when the United States Senior Open begins Thursday at Indianwood Golf and Country Club in Lake Orion, Mich. Earlier in their career, Chapman and Daley fit the mold of a major championship front-runner, the type who starts fast and then folds faster. "Not to discredit what they've done, but where's this been all these other years?" said Jeff Sluman, a six-time winner on the PGA Tour, including the 1988 P.G.A. Championship. Victories by journeymen at the Senior Open have been the norm in recent years. Since 2000, Hale Irwin and Bernhard Langer are the only winners of the Senior Open to have won a major during their PGA Tour careers. To some, the lackluster record of many distinguished pros on the senior circuit defies explanation. Mark O'Meara, Nick Price and Lanny Wadkins, winners of a combined 55 PGA Tour titles and six majors among them, have won a total of seven times on the Champions Tour and have gone winless in majors. Hall of Famers like Ben Crenshaw, Sandy Lyle and Curtis Strange have been shut out on the Champions Tour. The players list a variety of reasons for this strange turn of events, including injuries, lack of desire and a shift in work ethic. Fewer of the top players reach age 50 and leap at the chance to play on the senior circuit, thanks to bulging bank accounts. For some, Champions Tour success is not going to lift their stock. Paul Azinger, Nick Faldo and Greg Norman are among the superstars conspicuous in their absence from the tour (only Norman, making his second start of the season, is scheduled to compete this week). Some top pros have spread their time among new pursuits. Faldo is primarily a television analyst. Crenshaw has become an accomplished golf course designer. O'Meara and Price, who are both battling injuries that have kept them out of action this year, have spent more time fishing and with family. "The foot is slightly off the gas," Chapman said. They've done it. They're financially secure and we're still out here trying to earn a living. Maybe their hunger is not as much as ours. Sluman, for one, rolls his eyes at the generalization that past success makes a player less hungry. He noted that no one works harder than Langer, a two-time Masters champion and winner of the 2010 United States Senior Open; and Irwin, a three-time United States Open champion who at age 67 recorded his third top-10 finish of the year at last week's Nature Valley First Tee Open. But there is no doubting that Daley and other pros who did not break the bank earlier in their careers see the Champions Tour as one last chance to cash in. When asked after his win if he would make a special purchase with the largest check of his career, Daley said, "Really what I want to do is pay off my mortgage." Daley, a former credit manager in Philadelphia, said he went broke on more than one occasion and resorted to waiting tables. "Whatever I had to do to get it done," he said. When he finally did, Calcavecchia was the first to congratulate Daley, giving him a high five. But it still might bother the former stars to lose to players they made a habit of beating earlier in their careers. "I hope so," Chapman said. Because I was certainly teed off when they were beating me.