Rahm in elite club after Memorial win
Spaniard joins fellow countryman Ballesteros in reaching No. 1 ranking
DUBLIN, Ohio — He was still holding on to the unripe age of 17 eight dizzying years ago when he ventured 5,496 miles from Basque Country on Spain’s north coast to shorts country at gigantic Arizona State. He began with an economics class of 375 and briefly thought he had wandered into a cinema because only 1,500 people graced his entire hometown of Barrika. He knew little English but learned some by memorizing rap, including Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank).”
He started off at a college tournament in Minnesota, shot 81 out of the box and seemed to have given his golf bag some sort of wallop. He got an exemption to the Phoenix PGA Tour stop in 2015 and finished a heady fifth even after starting off with nerves jangling such that he said, “I honestly thought I was going to pass out right on the tee.” He twice won the Ben Hogan Award as the best college player but told a reporter that the run-up to the first awards night had left him a wreck.
Well, eventually — but not really all that eventually — Jon Rahm walked off No. 18 here Sunday as the new No. 1 player in the world after prevailing at the tourna
ment Jack Nicklaus founded and on the biting course Nicklaus dreamed up. At 9under par, he won the Memorial by three strokes over Ryan Palmer and became the 24th man — and the second Spanish man, after only the luminous Seve Ballesteros — to please the rankings computer enough to reach its summit, surpassing Rory McIlroy. All this mattered deeply even as Rahm walked in front of no galleries as a 25-year-old who bested a stout field in this strange time when the news Sunday included Nicklaus announcing on CBS that he and wife Barbara had tested positive for the novel coronavirus in March, their symptoms ranging from mild (Jack) to none (Barbara). Then...
Rahm had grown his four-shot lead to eight before winning sort of shakily on a Sunday afternoon complicated with a 49-minute weather delay as a storm cooled a hot day. By the end, he had won on a Muirfield Village course that spent the weekend growing firm, thus ornery.
The 23-year-old Collin Morikawa, having won the first leg of the Tour doubleheader here a week earlier, said, “Yeah, just a completely different course,” telling of rougher rough, quicker greens and meaner pin locations. Tiger Woods saw more difficulty than he had seen in a good while and said, “It’s been a while since we had conditions this quick, but this is how Jack loves it.” Phil Mickelson saw a “firm, fast, difficult test.” Bo Hoag, the Columbus, Ohio, native and grandson of a founding member here, surmised, “Geez, I’d probably say just from an average day, it’s probably seven shots harder — seven or eight shots harder, I’d say.” Matthew Fitzpatrick’s 68 vaulted him from 18th to third and seemed like a symphony amid the croaking scores.
Amid that, Rahm birdied Nos. 5 and 7, the two par-5s of the front, to build himself enough cushion for when his misadventures to the rough, water and bunker at Nos. 10, 11 and 14 let the course reveal its prudishness. His lead shrank from eight to three before he steeled. He won as both a very young man and a toptier mainstay who has frequented the top five for 80 weeks in recent years.
From those callow days, he had hopscotched all the way through that 64 at Congressional that opened his pro career in 2016, a win at 22 at Torrey Pines in 2017, six wins in Europe, two more wins in the United States, four top-10 finishes in 14 majors, Masters finishes of fourth and ninth, and a runaway ratification of how Tim Mickelson, Phil’s brother, took the advice of Ricardo Relinque of the Spanish Golf Federation and welcomed Rahm when the younger Mickelson coached Arizona State.
“Jon Rahm is a remarkable talent, and you’re seeing it,” Phil Mickelson said. “You’re seeing it in his play week in and week out from a game that has no weaknesses, drives it long, drives it straight, good iron play, good wedge play, great putter. He just doesn’t have a weakness, and he also has great course management, thinks himself around the golf course, and he knows himself. He knows that to relax sometimes he has to let some of his anger out. He can’t hold that in. It might upset some people, but he knows that it allows him to be at his best.”
All of the above has come true in the kind of whoosh that indicates great talent, and not so long since Rahm answered one of those goofy athlete questionnaires colleges do by saying he liked ham on pizza, Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel,” Rafael Nadal and Shakira, and that he had gotten to be around Jose Angel Iribar of Athletic Bilbao fame. Asked to describe himself in three words, Rahm went with “competitive, positive and lazy.” Already he had traveled far, with the idea of traveling very far — all the way to Nicklaus-ville and the top.