Rahm brightens an olive-drab Masters
At 28 he wins his second major in a week when even the weather was out of sorts.
The entire staff directory of the PGA Tour, along with a good portion of the global elites that wear green jackets, made up the wind beneath Jon Rahm’s wings at the Masters on Sunday.
The 28-year-old was standing in the doorway of the tour’s Alamo, fending off the defectors who sailed into Augusta National on a carpet of LIV money and fresh legs.
Rahm did not fail the establishment. His eerie consistency kept him in charge, even when he thought he’d lost his drive on the 18th hole and would have to get to the house on a provisional ball, which would have profoundly shrunk his four-shot lead over Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson. But he found the errant drive and scraped his way to a par, and at 12-under-par he became the first European to win both the Masters and U.S. Open (2021, at Torrey Pines), a fact he found hard to believe when someone told him.
Rahm was the crowd favorite the way Seve Ballesteros and Nick Faldo never quite were. The Spaniard was fully Americanized, having played at Arizona State for coach Tim Mickelson, now toting his brother’s bag. He has a quick, angry swing and isn’t afraid to show his consternation, but otherwise he radiates kindness and perspective. At the green jacket ceremony, he first singled out the maintenance crew that rescued the course from two inches of Saturday rain, and got it into competitive form for the fourth round Sunday, after the whole field had to finish the third round that morning.
Rahm began his tournament by four-putting the first hole for double bogey and shooting 65 anyway. He was four strokes behind Koepka when play was suspended Saturday afternoon. He had trouble putting on Sunday morning but eventually closed to within two of Koepka, and he noticed that Koepka wasn’t playing in straight lines anymore, having hit only nine fairways in Round 3.
When Koepka began the fourth round with a pull into the left tress, he managed to survive with par, but he kept leaving himself improbable chip shots. On No. 6 he missed the par-3 greeen on the high side and Rahn missed it on the low, and Rahm saved par when Koepka couldn’t. That broke the last tie between them, and when Koepka pulled another drive on the eighth and couldn’t match Rahm’s birdie, Rahm said he no longer considered the 4-time major champion a problem.
However, the 52-year-old Mickelson and Jordan Spieth were turning Augusta’s back nine into a champagne room. They had a best-ball score of 58, and Mickelson rammed in a birdie on 18 to shoot 65 and finish 8-under. “I was watching the scoreboard and was having some bad thoughts,” Rahm said. Those disappeared when Rahm got up and down to birdie the 13th, and when his approach on the 14th caught the slope on that ski-jump of a green and nestled close to the hole, letting him birdie again.
Still, the LIV group represented well. Mickelson, Koepka, Patrick Reed and Joaquin Nieman all finished in the top 16. Harold Varner III was 29th, Cam Smith and Talor Gooch 34th, Mito Pereira 43rd, Thomas Pieters 48th and Charl Schwartzel 50th. Only Bryson DeChambeau, Sergio Garcia and Jason Kokrak missed the cut. Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas, two tart critics of LIV Golf, were also gone after Friday, which energized those who run LIV’s meme factory.
There were no reports of LIV golfers throwing rolls at PGA Tour stalwarts at Tuesday’s Champions Dinner, and, as Koepka pointed out, they all see each other year-round at various golf clubs in the Jupiter, Fla. area. But will Varner, Kokrak, Gooch and others be able to qualify for next year’s Masters when they don’t earn World Ranking points? That’s usually the emergency method of getting into the Masters if you don’t excel in the other majors, or you don’t win a PGA Tour event, an opportunity they are denied. It’s absurd to pretend you’re playing host to an elite field without most of them.
There were other sore spots. Kokrak played his first two rounds with Gooch and Sandy Lyle, the ‘87 champ. Lyle and ‘88 champ Larry Mize were playing in their final Masters. Play was suspended on Friday after three pine trees fell near the 17th tee, in the rain and near darkness. Lyle was on 18 when the horn blew, but Masters officials wouldn’t let him putt out. That forced Lyle to return Saturday morning for perfunctory putts, with no spectators to provide a curtain call.
Kokrak called it “chickenshit” and pointed out that Lyle and Mize had their families waiting for them. “I think Augusta National and the rules committee should be ashamed of themselves,” said Kokrak, who may or may not know that there is no tangible record of Masters officials feeling those feelings.
There were a couple of Internet-fueled rules arguments, as to whether Collin Morikawa moved his ball illegally or whether Koepka gave club-selection advice to playing partner Gary Woodland. No penalties ensued. There was also the promise, from LIV golf boss Greg Norman, that his minions would be surrounding the 72nd green and would celebrate on it if a LIV golfer won.
Surely Norman remembers that the 18th green is pretty much encircled anyway. Norman also complained that he hadn’t been invited onto the grounds, but Augusta chairman Fred Ridley said the tournament didn’t need such a distraction and, by the way, Norman hadn’t attended eight of the past 10 Masters.
Koepka, playing with Rahm, said that Sunday’s round was “brutally slow,” and others pointed the finger at Patrick Cantlay, who was having a rough day on the greens and, with Viktor Hovland, was playing directly in front of the two leaders.
The weather was grumpy, too. It was high 80s and humid and windless on Thursday, and wet for much of Friday, after Koepka had taken advantage of happy scheduling and carded a classic Masters 67 — even-par on all the par 4s and 3s, five-under on the four par 5s. Rahm was in the other half of the draw. He equalized things on the weekend.
On Saturday the rain intensified in bitter, mid-40s temperatures. When it cleared on Sunday, the wind came in to mess with minds, and golf balls no longer landed and stuck on the greens. So Rahm won a tournament with three different weather systems.
It’s been a while since the Masters busted out all over, or gave us a brawl that set off sequential roars throughout the property. Maybe Tiger Woods’ win in 2019 was the ultimate. He won with a fused back, and knees that had taken more knives than a lover’s tree on Prom Night. Just four years later Woods couldn’t slog through 72 holes, calling it a week and citing plantar fasciatis. Did you ever think you’d live long enough to see Woods in the Thursday morning ceremonial group? Did he? It might happen.
The 2020 Masters didn’t happen until November, with the crowds gone, and Johnson shot a record 20-under-par. The 2021 Masters was historic, with Hideki Matsuyama winning, but it was over basically when Xander Schauffele’s tee ball found the water on 16. The 2022 Masters was put to sleep by Scottie Scheffler, who could have done the same thing this year if his putter hadn’t come down with distemper. Scheffler led the field in greens in regulation and was 50th, of 53 who finished, in strokes gained putting
It didn’t help that the 13th hole was lengthened, and fewer players were going for the green in two, especially on Saturday when drives were sometimes landing with a splat at the 260-yard mark. However, the effects were inconsequential. This year, the average score at 13 was 4.703 with the same six eagles that the 2022 Masters field managed, at a 4.852 score. In 2021 the players had eight eagles and averaged 4.621. If golfing integrity was saved, you couldn’t tell.
Rahm ends the week with his fourth win of the PGA Tour season, and seventh Top Ten finish in 10 events. He and Scheffler have separated themselves. It’s been a glorious ride since the day he showed up at ASU, unable to speak English, learning it through repetition and hip-hop music. “He shot 62 at Whisper Rock one day and gave me a pretty good beatdown,” Phil Mickelson said. “He was one of the best players in the world when he was in college. I’m not surprised at all by this.”