AUGUSTA — Jon Rahm spent some time Friday afternoon, as golfers often do, vaguely aware he might sound like a lunatic. Rahm can be temperamental on the course—he looked like he would snap his driver over his knee Thursday before he restrained himself—but is generally genial off it. And so he smiled Friday, allowing himself long pauses, and he answered every question, and ultimately, this is how he summed up his game:
“It feels very close. I wish I could explain it. It feels a lot closer than the score.”
Rahm is 2 over par for the Masters. This is his fifth major championship since leaving the PGA Tour for LIV Golf, and he has not contended in any of them. Whether this is causation or correlation is an interesting question.
Rahm was the No. 3 player in the world when he made the switch. Of all the PGA Tour golfers who left for LIV, Rahm was the only one who left after the June 6, 2023, framework agreement for the two tours to merge. Other players might have hoped the tours would unite eventually, but Rahm had reason to believe they would unite quickly. He has been clear, since then, that he wants a merger.
This question will hang over Rahm until he answers it on the course. He has won two majors, the 2021 U.S. Open and ’23 Masters, and by the time the second one ended, he looked like he would be the dominant player of his era.
Unless you watched that Masters for four days, it is hard to appreciate how much better Rahm was than everybody else. It was a wild weather Masters—this was the year when enormous trees uprooted and collapsed along the 17th hole—and due to some rough tee-time luck, Rahm kept getting the worst of it. He still finished 12 under, four shots clear of the field. It was an extraordinary performance.
On Friday, Rahm got the best of the weather before the wind kicked up and toyed with the last golfers on the course. He was not surprised by the low scores on the leaderboard: “It was out there.”
He can give a partial explanation for why he did not go low himself. He has had eight putts from between 10 and 20 feet, and he missed all eight. He only made seven of 12 putts from between five and 10 feet. That’s a good way to not win a Masters.
But the man they call Rahmbo is inexplicably even par on Augusta National’s par-5s this week: one birdie, one bogey, six pars. This is the same guy who finished in the top four in strokes-gained off the tee in six consecutive PGA Tour seasons.
In the second round, Rahm hit 3-wood off the tee on the par-5 13th, but he ended up farther left than he would have liked. He was right on the cutline at the time, but he resisted the urge to go for the green. His layup was perfect. Then he missed the green with a wedge.
“Just a mistake that you can’t make,” he said.
I asked Rahm if he can look back on a time when he felt like he does now: closer than the scores suggest. He said it happened a couple times leading into the Tour’s fall events, and “even 2023, the month leading up to the Masters, I played really bad golf.”
That year, Rahm shot a pair of 76s at the Arnold Palmer Invitational; withdrew from the Players Championship after one round because of a stomach illness; and was eliminated in the group stage at the World Golf Championships match-play event. But he had also won at Riviera in February.
LIV events have a different format and vibe from Tour events, and no matter what anybody says, they have much lower stakes. People aren’t watching, jobs are not on the line, tournaments are not as long, fields are not nearly as deep. Surely, there are golfers for whom LIV events are inadequate preparation for majors. If Rahm is one of those golfers now, he will not say so—and if he is, that doesn’t mean the condition is terminal.
Rahm sounded both encouraged and appalled by his play this week. He basically spent two consecutive days proving to himself that he should be playing better golf. He did make the cut, and he is still Jon Rahm, and when he was asked about climbing into contention, he smiled.
“I think I can let myself try to somehow make a positive out of that,” he said, and then he went into the old bit about posting a low number in the morning and hoping the weather turns and the afternoon scores are high enough to put him in contention, and on a scale of one to 100, I would say his level of belief in this scenario was negative-942.
If Rahm shoots a course-record 62, that would put him at 8 under par, which is where Justin Rose is right now. Eight players are 5 under or better. Rahm is not kidding himself. At least, not about that.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Once on Track to Dominate His Era, Jon Rahm Has Been Irrelevant In Majors Since Joining LIV Golf.
