One thing which can be said about Jon Rahm is that there are no shutters into his inner-being. Firstly, there was the all-so-visible reaction – even behind-closed-doors – of his fist punching the air after holing an audacious putt to beat world number one Dustin Johnson at the first hole of sudden-death to lift the BMW Championship; then, there was the almost mystical insight into his own thoughts.
In calling up the ghosts of a fictionalised deed, Rahm was as honest as the day was long: “For those who have seen the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance, that 18th putt, you can kind of see the light of how the putt is supposed to go. It is somewhat like that. That’s how I feel. I kind of visualise the ball rolling like that. So, if you had to ask me, yes, the putt was 60 feet (actually 66) but I was trying to hit a sport maybe 30 feet away at most, 30, 40 feet away.”
Indeed, that sliding, sloping putt brought Rahm back to his formative golfing days. As he described it, “I don’t have like a set method that you can just teach. I’m a feel player. I grew up on golf courses with a lot of slope, so putts with slope is something I enjoy, I like and I’m comfortable reading and putting. It fell right in my alley.”
There was nothing fictitious about Rahm’s real life drama, or the look on poor old Johnson’s face at the audacity of it all. What it did was provide some semblance of normality to these abnormal times, and also give a scene-setter for the Tour Championship at East Lake later this week where the little matter of $15 million to whoever comes out on top represents an obscene payday to the victor.
Who knows? But, maybe, Johnson will have the last laugh in the final act. For, despite having to play second fiddle to Rahm at Olympia Fields, Johnson carries an immediate advantage into the Tour Championship where he starts out on 10-under-par before a ball is struck in anger, with Rahm two strokes adrift from the get-go.
As we saw last year, when Rory McIlroy started five strokes back and ultimately went on to scoop the jackpot, such staggered starting positions offer no guarantee and that it will still be a case of the clubs doing the talking come tournament time.
In McIlroy’s case, his defence of the title (starting seven shots behind DJ this time) will of course depend on his home situation, with wife Erica due to give birth to the couple’s baby daughter. As the Northern Irishman put it of whether he would even make it to Atlanta, “I’m going to play in many more Tour Championships and it’s only going to be the birth of your first child once. That trumps anything else.”
The leading 30 players on the FedEx Cup points standing following the BMW Championship punched their tickets to the megabucks shindig in Atlanta, and - for sure – the heavy punching of Rahm and Johnson down the stretch at Olympia Fields, even if playing in different pairings before finally going mano a mano for the sudden death, only served to whet the appetite for more.
If so much of this truncated season has focused on the bulking up of Bryson DeChambeau and the debate about driving distance, this latest episode of high drama highlighted the role of the putter in it all. As Johnson himself described it, "I played an unbelievable putt [on the 72nd hole], got in the playoff and then Jon made an even more ridiculous putt on top of me."
The old adage of, “drive for show, putt for dough” seems quite apposite in the highly-charged circumstances, although Johnson did at least manage to remain as world number one and also to stay atop the FedEx Cup standings.
For Rahm, the 25-year-old Spaniard, the 66-feet winning putt brought with it a fifth win on the PGA Tour and the 12th win of his professional career. It was also his second win since the PGA Tour’s resumption following the shutdown due to Covid-19, adding the BMW to the Memorial tournament he won in July.
Johnson, too, has won twice since the PGA Tour's rebooting – at the Travelers and again at the Northern Trust – and, while the prospect of a DJ and Jon Show at Atlanta is very much on the cards, McIlroy's endeavours of a year ago, in quite different times, nonetheless provides encouragement for every player lining up at East Lake that anything is liable to happen when the drama is real life.
And then there were 30
FedEx Cup starting scores for the Tour Championship at East Lake
1 Dustin Johnson -10
2 Jon Rahm -8
3 Justin Thomas -7
4 Webb Simpson -6
5 Collin Morikawa -5
6-10 Daniel Berger, Harris English, Bryson DeChambeau, Sungjae Im, Hideki Matsuyama -4
11-15 Brendon Todd, Rory McIlroy, Patrick Reed, Xander Schauffele, Sebastian Munoz -3
16-20 Lanto Griffin, Scottie Scheffler, Joaquin Niemann, Tyrell Hatton,Tony Finau -2
21-25 Kevin Kisner, Abraham Ancer, Ryan Palmer, Kevin Na, Marc Leishman -1
26-30 Cameron Smith, Viktor Hovland, Mackenzie Hughes, Cameron Champ, Billy Horschel Even
