Jon Rahm, one of the top favorites to win the Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucía Masters, expressed himself in a press conference a few hours before starting his participation in the tournament:
“In 2017 I arrived at Valderrama very tired in my first year as a professional, plus I approached the tournament as if I were in the United States and I started hitting drives like crazy. It was a bad strategy in a week when I wasn’t playing well.”
“Now it’s clear to me that the most important thing is the shot from the tee. It all depends on where you put it from the tee because you don’t have to make distance, but place it well. But it’s not all about strategy, because then you have to execute it. If you play well you will have options whether you are aggressive or not”.
“I have to take the course with more patience. Ian Poulter gave me some good advice and that’s that four rounds under par at Valderrama is a top 10. It suits me that my last tournament was Pebble Beach because it’s similar, you don’t play a lot with the drive.”
“The difficulty at Valderrama is from tee to green. There are several holes where I still don’t have a clear shot, such as 16, 12 or 13. They are holes that give you several options and I don’t have a shot where I’m totally comfortable.”
“The greens are still not as hard as they can be. Compared to Augusta, they are much smaller and less undulating, but in how the ball rolls they are similar. They are spectacular.
“The only player who has had a very long streak of missed cuts is Tiger Woods, but he played fewer tournaments. If you play a lot, you’re going to miss cuts from time to time.”
“As a golfer I grew up thinking I couldn’t be an Olympian and now that it’s possible, hopefully I can go. I have been fortunate enough to be world champion and European champion representing Spain and I would love to be Olympic champion representing my country.”
“You have to play very well to beat Sergio here, it’s a course he likes and for his type of game it’s almost perfect. I would love to play the last match on Sunday with Sergio and give him a fight. Sergio is a great champion and I imagine he will win here again.”
“We players are getting stronger and stronger and fitness is an advantage, as we are seeing with Brooks Koepka or Dustin Johnson. Thank God, instead of fighting distance with more distance, as they do in the United States, we have courses like this, short courses where the drive doesn’t come into play. Here you can only play it on the 4th, 7th, 11th, 17th, and on the 9th and 13th, hurrying. Six holes and you’re playing it in two.”
“It’s the big controversy we have in golf today: changing the ball, the drive, the technology, etc. when it would be better to make the courses shorter and narrower.”
“As much as Brooks Koepka says it’s easy to win a major, it’s not, I just try to play well and if I have a choice I’d like to win a major as soon as possible, but it might come in 10 years. A golf career can be defined by more things than the majors; there is so much more to life and golf.”
“Some friends of my father’s were at the 1997 Ryder Cup. When he came back, they encouraged him to play and we signed up for the school in Celles. That’s how it all started, if it wasn’t for that Ryder Cup, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
“In 2007 I came to watch a Volvo Masters and I got my shirt signed by Stenson, Casey. The first shot I saw was one of Thomas Bjorn’s bunker shot on the 7th, I also saw Ian Poulter. These are four players with whom I have shared a Ryder Cup and if they had told me then I would not have believed it”.
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