Through two rounds at Torrey Pines, that mystery has been solved, and what it spells could be the special something that has been just out of the Spaniard’s grasp.
A generational bomber , Rahm was so lost off the tee he would have been better served exchanging his yardage book and caddie for a compass and sherpa.
He got too aggressive on a 20-footer for birdie at the 12, leaving an unwanted six-foot follow-up, but that, too, found the cup.
Yet he followed each of those bogeys with birdies on the following holes—highlighted by 190-yard bunker shot to 10 feet at the par-4 sixth—and kept the ugly shots from looking ugly on the card.
“What happened a couple weeks ago is something I can’t control, unfortunately, but what I can do is control what I do every time,” Rahm said.
And yet, after his devastating WD at the Memorial, and the public fallout that ensued, Rahm does seem to be playing with a refreshed outlook.
He is not unfriendly to his competitors and is one of the more well-mannered players to the thousands of people in professional golf’s ecosystem that make this circus run.
Players and officials and volunteers have not been shy in letting him know they’re glad to see him here, and Rahm routinely replies with sincere gratitude.
“Am I ever going to escape that question?” Rahm said when a reporter asked about keeping his emotions in check.
Perhaps because the perspective he’s discovered was a perspective delivered in cruel fashion, and we’re not referring to the lost millions or vaccination questions from Memorial.
“Whatever happens on the golf course was absolutely secondary in my mind,” Rahm said of his Memorial WD.
Those results fail to show that, in most of them, Rahm was never really in Sunday contention, many of those finishes of the backdoor variety.
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