Exactly five years after making the leap to professionalism, surpassing in two months the speed with which Seve Ballesteros, his reference, won his first great, Jon Rahm has finally thrown the door. Due to its status as a long-lived sport, golf is filled with projects that have not yet come to fruition, stars whose palmars are relevant, but not transcendent outside of the endogmic consumption of the specialty. If you don’t win a big one, you go unnoticed.
Rahm has run a lot. And, primarily, it has not been crushed by the noise that was even greater. I first fed him when he said his goal was “to beat Nicklaus’s 18 greats.” Then he had the recognition of great masters such as Jack Nicklaus, who had snatched in December 2015 the record of shots under sea in an amateur World Cup, Jos Mara Olazbal, Tiger Woods and everyone who saw that the Barrika golfer had extraordinary talent. .
With a birth problem in his right foot, zambo, as revealed in the book written by David Durn and Alejandro Rodríguez, ‘Jon Rahm: Sealed by the Gods’, Jon has made of all difficulties a cluster of virtues to become the fiercest competitor in the world golf scene right now. “I am first a competitor and then a golfer,” he reveals, alluding to what he read in Rafa Nadal’s biography.
He has always done so, even when an indomitable character In the beginning, it made him accept punishments. It was another lesson in life and that’s how I faced it. Both on the stage in Spain, when he was caddy for children with Down Syndrome, and in the United States when Tim Mickelson, his supporter at the University of Arizona, today his brother Phil’s caddy and the first to congratulate him, put him on the job. go up and down the tiers by an exacerbated gesture during a tournament.
The illness
Jon alluded in his address to karma and the alignment of the stars. In a high sense of responsibility since the pandemic began, the Spaniard had always protected himself from all possible contacts to avoid contagion. His parents did not meet Kepa until three months after he was born, he has not seen his gang in Bilbao for more than a year and has not set foot in Spain. All for not creating new meanders in the course of his career.
Because he is also aware that so far those five Years of professionalism have been privileged. Without injuries. With a spectacular balance of 63 top 10 of 122 played, with 13 victories and five years in which he has not stopped winning in any of them. Even in the Ryder Cup, when in his first experience in 2019, he was touched, the talk with Jos Mara Olazbal and the victory against Tiger Woods changed the face until it became the happiest day of his career. Until the victory at the US Open.
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