Rahm proves the Masters really aren’t invite-only

AUGUSTA, Ga. •Spain’s Jon Rahm speaks excellent English. Naturally, he honed his language skills by rapping.

“Yeah, it wasn’t so much to learn new words but to help with pronunciation and enunciation and to be able to pronounce certain words and be able to talk faster, talk without pausing,” he said on Monday — without pausing. “Because otherwise, if I hadn’t done that, right now I would probably still be in the first part of the interview trying to explain how I felt.”

Rahm, 22, who was born the year Jose Maria Olazabal won his first Masters, earned his way to Augusta by winning at Torrey Pines in January. So, what was it like to get that first Masters invite?

“I haven’t got it yet,” Rahm said, laughing. “I haven’t been at home for a long (time). I haven’t seen it yet. It might be in the mail right now,” he added.

Apparently the invite was not required for admittance to the grounds.

“I mean, I do have plans of framing that first invite and keeping it at home, that’s for sure,” Rahm said. “I’ll let you know when I get it, though.”

Relatively inexperienced Masters players like Jordan Spieth and Danny Willett have won in recent years, which has blown a hole in the notion that several appearances at Augusta National are an absolute prerequisite for success. Jimmy Walker offered one theory for the change: years of long television coverage.

“This place is a place that, as a golf fan growing up, I think you’ve watched a lot of golf (here). I know when I played here for the first time, I felt like I had played it a hundred times just from watching on TV,” Walker said.

“I really remember standing out on 14 the first time I played it, and it was a back left pin and I knew that if I was short and right of it, it was going to roll back down the hill. It was, like, you wanted to draw it in left of the flag because that green caroms to the right — and sure enough, I hit the shot just left of the flag and it rolls down there, (it was like) man, I’ve played here before. So there’s a lot of that out here for everybody…

“I’ve been watching this tournament since I was a kid and I’ve seen lots of golf shots. You know what’s what.”

Tommy Fleetwood is one of 11 English players at Augusta — a Masters record for any country that is not the United States. He was asked Monday if players like Lee Westwood and Luke Donald, both of whom became world No. 1 but haven’t won a major, have got their due back home.

“It’s tough. It’s tough when people’s careers are defined on majors, really,” he said. “And I think that if you talk to anybody about Lee, at the time that he was at his peak, they would say he was among the best ballstrikers they have ever seen. So I think he deserves a lot of credit for that.”

Westwood, at Augusta this week due to his ranking of 32nd in the world, finished with this thought: “They do deserve a lot of credit for doing that. It’s very hard nowadays because there’s so many good players. I think world No. 1 is as good as it gets, isn’t it?”

Jimmy Walker