Jon Rahm, 4th in FedEX Cup, PGA Tour Overall Ranking In the absence of the Tour Championship, he faces the opportunity to win the biggest prize of his life: 15 million dollars, the check that the golfer who wins in East Lake (Atlanta) will receive next Sunday. Due to the compensated handicap system, to favor the leader, Jon will come out four strokes behind Patrick Cantlay, the first classified, with 72 holes to play. Among the 30 finalists there is also Sergio Garca, who will do so with ten strokes behind.
The storms, which will disappear on Thursday, when the tournament starts, he hardly gives a chance. “Hopefully it stops and we can go out and hit some balls, throw a few putts, move something,” wished the Barrika golfer whose main reflections at the press conference were these.
On whether the fields on the PGA Tour should be more different as McIlroy said.
“I really haven’t given it much thought. It’s true that both Liberty National (The Northern Trust setting) and Caves Valley (BMW) were set up very similarly, I think. Much due to the fact that it is the time of year when there is not much drought in those areas. It can rain a lot. And both fields had a similar type of grass. I don’t know, I like variety, to be honest. I think when you try to face the best players in the world, you have to have variety in golf. If I had to choose, I would like to go to different fields, extremely different each time. “
About what would he plan to do with $ 15 million if he won
“Save it and invest it responsibly, unlike any other 27-year-old. I’ve said it before, we get asked all the time. I’ve been very fortunate that at my young age I’ve made more money than I ever thought I would. I could win. I’ve never done this for money, but obviously it’s an amazing bonus and I can even afford a great life for my family and their future already. Don’t expect anything fancy. I live in a nice house, we have some nice cars, but nothing out of the ordinary. “
About the worst thing I heard from him on a golf course
“I have heard many things. Many things in Spanish I don’t want to translate for someone to learn something bad. Bad things about my mother, bad things about my wife. No one has said anything about my son yet, but I imagine he would make it to the Ryder Cup. But I have to say, that’s 1 percent of all the audience out there. Everyone else is great. They create a great atmosphere. There will be regular people who either have had too many drinks or are being influenced by their friends or are just trying to be funny, and they are going to say things that are not pleasant to hear. “
“But this is not suffered only by us. Any athlete has to deal with that. In team sports, every time you have an away game, you have a whole stadium full of people yelling things at you. So I’m sure other sports have heard much worse than I have on the golf course so far. “
About Sergio Garca and the Ryder Cup
“I had a great time with Sergio on Sunday in the last round of the BMW. We are good friends and it was fun playing with him, especially knowing that he had to play well to get into the Tour Championship. And I think it was noticeable in that last shot from the bunker. “
“What if he will be in Ryder? I hope he continues to play well this week. I don’t know if he can get in straight or not. I don’t know how many points he is. But he is Sergio Garcia, the guy with the most points in the European Ryder team. So I suppose it could be one of the captain’s chosen, right? “
What I learned from the only Ryder who ever played
“It is difficult to put into words. I can say that the atmosphere at the Ryder Cup has helped me to be better prepared for the majors. You always think of a certain player in their majors or at certain times, but the Ryder Cup is unlike any other competition. Every hit counts. And when you play for an entire country, or continent in our case, it is a very different sense, right? And having so many people around you wanting you to win and you wanting to do it for them, helped me better prepare to really focus on what I have to do. But God, it’s very different. The feeling on the first tee is not even similar to what I felt in a regular tournament or even a major one. It is very unique. Still, I can’t remember what my first hit on the Ryder was (laughs). “
On the importance of beating Tiger at the Ryder
“That week I had a lot of tension because I was not playing my best golf And on my first Ryder Sunday, Tiger Woods comes and touches me. I was nervous because you don’t know what can happen if the first matches are lost. You already know that the trend changed and that it happened like 1999 in Brookline or what happened in Medinah, in our favor. So it was a lot of mental strength to just focus and almost forget I was playing Tiger and just play my game and try to beat a player, not thinking about who he was and what he did. That game has helped me in the sense that when I’m playing golf at the big boys and it’s easy to start thinking about different things, you have to focus on what you have to do, which is the most important thing. I think Bobby Jones or Ben Hogan or one of those great players of all time said that the most important shot in golf is the next shot and the most important thing is the next shot you hit, period. For example, he helped me at Torrey Pines this year.
Your clubfoot and what has conditioned your swing
“I realized that there are some things my body can do and certain things That my body can’t do So I have the golf swing that I have because of clubfoot. It is not something that I provoked because I was too young to know what was going on. It was Eduardo Celles, my first coach, who realized that I was always going to be a better golfer with a three-quarter swing. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew that when he made the full swing he was off balance and I couldn’t hit him directly and three-quarters could hit him well. “
“Maybe that force on a shorter swing range it was a product of my ability in other sports. I played shovel until I was 14 years old, where the movement is similar when the shovel is carried at hip level. Not that it was an advantage, but those guidelines helped me know what to do and what not to do. Then with Dave Phillips I have been able to exercise appropriately to work on certain muscle groups and certain parts of my body so that I can balance better, stronger and more efficiently. So, I think it all starts with the support of my teacher in Spain, Eduardo, who realized that I needed to have a three-quarter swing, but he won’t say it’s an advantage, it’s just that I learned something. “
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