Immediately, the question in this world becomes, “But wait, how many more majors can he win?” Instead of staying in the moment, the moment gets projected onto the future canvas of this sport.
He wins at a 10% clip, which, depending on what window of time you want to look at for different players, is among the very best numbers in the post-Tiger Woods era.
Among the top 150 golfers in the world right now, Rahm has the second-best career tee-to-green number , but Rahm is able to cash in his seamlessness across statistical silos in the form of wins in ways other golfers are simply unable to do.
I don’t think there’s a golf course where he can’t have success on.
Three-time major winner Padraig Harrington talked about this at the PGA Championship at Kiawah last month, and it is something I have thought about a lot since then.
But as I said, you’ve seen a few things that you know in your game that you probably never wanted to see, so you kind of lose that little bit of, I suppose, innocence.
It will be intriguing to see how Rahm, who is just 26 years old and has played just 122 OWGR events over the course of his career, absorbs these ideas over the years.
“He won’t remember any of this because he’s only 10 weeks old, but I do,” said Rahm.
Yet all the advanced metrics suggest that Rahm is the most likely player in the world to not sit on just one major over the next 15 or 20 years of his career.
To put this in perspective, Rahm has played over 100 fewer events than Jordan Spieth and has three fewer wins .
That could be written off as just rhetoric athletes spew, in hindsight, to try and explain how they accomplished what they accomplished.
So as he and the Pacific Ocean atmosphere came to fisticuffs over those last two holes, as he screamed like Novak Djokovic after winning a tiebreaker over Rafa Nadal deep in a grand slam event, his present inevitability felt like a future inevitability.