Jon Rahm's Olympic dreams came to a sad end on Sunday in Paris.
Emmanuel Dunand, Getty Images
You didn't need a leaderboard to know what was about to happen, but a glimpse of Sunday afternoon in Paris removed all doubt.
The men's Olympic golf tournament is over. Paris had anointed the winner of the gold medal. In his name?
Jon Rahm.
“Yeah, when I got to 10 and 11, I looked at the board and I was 14 and Jon was 20,” Rory McIlroy said. “So I was…”
He was silent for a while.
“I didn't think I had a chance.”
Rahm was four shots ahead of the field at that point, playing a style of golf that has seen the sun cast a shadow over competitors at all kinds of golf tournaments, including two majors and a handful of Ryder Cups. You know this Jon Rahm type of golf: When the hole seems big and the challenges of golf seem easy and seem inevitable.
We all knew it was coming, that's why it was so shocking when… he didn't. Rahm lost, really fell, blowing his lead with back-to-back bogeys as the rest of the field began to charge. In about five minutes he was out of the lead alone and into the battle for Bronze. By the time, he had narrowed the battle for the third time, too, rolling a double bogey to the bottom of T5 to beat the soul.
Since judging is part of being a sports fan, and since Sundays in major events give us an unusually specific sense of closure, Rahm's downfall is literal. he pleaded for you to take. Perhaps, as many have suggested, the great Jon has lost a step since leaving LIV Golf. Perhaps, as many have suggested, you have lost a step because of his wallet-fattening travels and the strange format, schedule and life that ensued. And maybe, as a few others have put it, he'd like the way his wallet looks, because his game is off.
The funny thing about these judgments, however, is that they come close to the point while still missing the point entirely.
Yes, Rahm lost the golf tournament, the latest in a string of disappointments at golf's major events. Yes, he lost the season after leaving LIV, and yes, the league's weird schedule of 54-hole, limited-field tournaments could have contributed to his fall between 55 and 72 holes. But Rahm was frustrated. Sunday in Paris – clearly a broken heart – and history was not to be licked.
Why? Because Rahm was destroyed in a far more refined place than LIV millions or culture wars, shaking deep, deep in his competitive personality. An extreme injury from a kid who first took a golf club to an old man who called representing his country “the biggest prize” in a way that made you think he meant it.
In other words, in this Olympic golf tournament with zero dollars, no sponsors and a different kind of glory on the line, Rahm wasn't comfortable with how money changed him, he was interested in how it did. I hadn't.
“I can't remember the last time I played in a tournament and felt like this,” he said on Sunday evening. “I don't know what the word is because, you know, I don't just feel inferior, but, to not do it in the whole country of Spain, it's more painful than I would like to do it. you are.”
Rahm's voice was raw, soft like the morning after a long night of drinking. Outside this it was the worst kind of hangover. He had come to Paris expecting a champagne headache, and on Sunday evening he got a cheap tequila hammer lodged in his cranium.
Like all golfers on the field, Rahm entered this week uncertain of its significance. The Olympics is the world's oldest sporting event, but the Olympic golf tournament is no newborn – on Sunday it was the third golf tournament in the modern Games, and the first to be unaffected by the spread of a rare disease. In a sport built on its own traditions, the Olympics have none.
In the money-crazed 'sh*tshow' (McIlroy's words) of modern professional golf, the lack of legacy makes Olympic golf vulnerable. For some of the world's best golfers, Olympic glory and national pride aren't worth a week of unpaid work. Others feel that they would be better served by spending the Olympics on a driving range … or at the beach.
The best way to change that perception came Sunday, when five of the world's best golfers battled it out for long hours in the Paris sun for the winner of what, in Scheffler's case, turned out to be $38,000 (c/o the US Olympics. Committee). The golf was brilliant and the competition was fierce and the excitement was palpable even among those who couldn't be bothered to know the difference between a pitching wedge and a pitchfork.
The formula was simple enough: the world's best golfers compete on a field of interest for a cause bigger than themselves. As it turns out, this is the formula that makes the Olympics truly great – a formula that seems to be missing from the $25 million prize money.
“Two weeks are important for my work [are] two events where we don't make money,” said Rahm. “I've said that a million times, and I'll say it again because the Ryder Cup is right up there.”
Inside Scottie Scheffler's Olympic charge and the most electrifying finish of the year
Sean Zak
One day, maybe, we'll tell the story of Scottie Scheffler, the world's best player, who shot a final round of 62 to earn his first ever Gold medal and give the Olympic golf tournament the size of the Eiffel. We'll tell the story of the mad dash to the podium, the brutal battle for the silver and bronze medals, and the tears in the national anthem that briefly overtook the monoculture of sports.
If we do, we would be wise not to forget the player whose failure rocked Sunday's events in Paris, the one who took out the Gold and missed the entire field altogether. Jon Rahm is not the hero of this Olympic story. He may not be a hero at all. But he is something the guy who showed why golf is part of the Olympics, and the reason has nothing to do with finishing first, second or third.
“I got the question, where this tournament could be placed in my opinion or what I can imagine it would be like to win,” Rahm said. “I think that by losing today, I get to go deeper into what this tournament means to me than just getting a medal. I can feel how important it was.”
It was important, by the way. It's enough to stop Rahm's inevitability. It was enough to make Scheffler a national hero. Enough is more important than all the money in the world.
Nothing in golf does that. Well, now there is.
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