Winston Churchill, who was a lousy golf player, he said of the sport that it was “a game the object of which is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for this purpose.”
The phrase of this recurring figure in these times of misery and war This goes for Jon Rahm, whose clubs are exquisitely designed, but deliver radically different results. With the most indomitable, the driver, the woods and the long irons, his game is super, the best by far on the PGA Tour. At short distances, on the other hand, the hole shrinks even more than what the British statesman proclaimed in his slogan.
The golfer from Barrika faces The Players from today, the so-called fifth big, in search of the first victory in the last nine months. And he does so after a start to 2022 full of doubts about the putter and the approaches around the green, where he had never been in a hurry. “I know the statistics and I don’t need them to know it’s not going well,” he told reporters at Sawgrass Field on Tuesday.
Located at positions 177 (chip) and 135 (putts) it is understandable that the win locker remains at zero seen from that prism.
“I’ve been working on changing some things and apparently, sometimes things get worse. Statistics are not everything. There are certain things that I have improved a lot. If you’re working on technique, you may be working on certain sensations and certain things that could be improving, but it doesn’t necessarily show in the numbers.”
It’s a powerful contrast to what they reflect the numbers away from the green. Rahm almost took two shots on average per round -eight in a tournament!- to the rest of the competitors, numbers close to the best version of Tiger Woods.
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Eduardo Celles, Rahm’s first trainer, flips the stats. “Jon does not leave them as close to the flag as Morikawa, for example, in the second shots and that perverts the percentages in the putts, the club with which he has obtained the most performance in his career. So there is nothing to praise because it is also It’s true that Bay Hill’s grass, Bermuda grass, is not the best for him. And on shots around the green, which now give low numbers, he’s a master. He’ll win soon, that’s for sure.”
