The duel between the top two in the world ranking has ended with a Spanish victory. Jon Rahm has won his fifth victory on the PGA Tour this Sunday after a spectacular head-to-head with the American Dustin Johnson resolved with a dream putt by the Spaniard. But beyond these headlines, the BMW Championship will leave a valuable lesson for the rest of golfers: Jon Rahm can never be given up for dead, even after a discreet start.
This week Rahm has left one more proof, the umpteenth, that being a player of enormous quality and talent is not incompatible with being a born fighter. What’s more, both qualities complement each other and make its owner a superlative golfer. That is Jon Rahm, a jewel not only for golf, but also for all Spanish sport.
Rahm started the day from seventh place thanks to his magnificent reaction in the third round. However, his chances of victory were remote: he had to win the game again on the demanding greens of Olympia Fields and, at the same time, trust that none of his reputed rivals would break it.
The first premise was more than fulfilled by the Spaniard, who shot the best card of the tournament, a sensational 64 in which bogeys did not appear. The second was only half fulfilled, as Dustin Johnson defended his options with nails, teeth and his infinite quality. This last trait led him to force the play off with a putt on the 18th hole of fifteen meters.
This fact explains a lot of things: in the last two rounds Jon Rahm only made one bogey, and that was due to a penalty as a result of a mistake. That level of play on a course like this is at the level of three or four golfers in the world.
Can anything more spectacular than a play-off between Rahm and Johnson be seen in golf today? World number one and two looking each other in the eye, challenging each other. No. Neither of the two shrank back, as a castizo would say, and the other responded to every good shot of one of them.
Everything seemed to be heading towards a second playoff hole, but Rahm still had an ace up his sleeve: a putt of about twenty meters that seemed impossible. Impossible, to tell the truth, for any golfer outside this duel of giants Rahm vs Johnson, because for these two everything seems affordable.
Rahm drew a subtle stroke with a perfect fall that entered the center of the hole. A crazy shot that preceded the effusive celebration of the Spanish golfer, as volcanic in the exhibition of his positive emotions as when he was a ‘blumero’ more in the National Center. It was not for less.
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The third round changed everything
His discreet start, a 75 on Thursday, not only did not demoralize the Spaniard, but spurred him on. The beast woke up in the third, in which he gave a push to his options with a 66 that was, at that moment, the best round of the week.
That third round was excellent for the Spaniard, who climbed to seventh place with +2 to the total, placing himself close to the lead, although he contained an episode that weighed him down slightly: his bogey on the 5th was due to a penalty for lifting the ball on the green without having marked it. “I never thought something like this would happen to me in my professional career, I would be thinking about something else,” he lamented sincerely at the end of the day.
It should be recalled that this was Jon Rahm’s fifth win on the PGA Tour after those obtained in the 2017 Farmers Insurance Open, in the 2018 CareerBuilder Challenge, in the 2019 Zurich Classic and, finally, in The Memorial Tournament a month and a half ago.
Rahm is less than a tenth behind Dustin Johnson in the world ranking, so in his next tournament the Barrika native could regain the world number one… with the permission of his powerful rival.
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