ON A WEDNESDAY morning in February, the group across the twelfth tee at TPC Scottsdale swelled. Jon Rahm was standing behind his ball, able to hit to the lengthy par 3, however a commotion within the background grabbed his consideration.
On the fringe of the tee field, one among Rahm’s enjoying companions within the WM Phoenix Open pro-am, NFL celebrity Aaron Rodgers, was speaking to a gaggle of spectators. This was again when Rodgers’ standing for the upcoming season — Will he play with the Packers? Will he play in any respect? — was the subject of the second, and the galleries had been hounding Rodgers about his plans. Come to Denver! Come be a Bronco! Come on, Aaron, why do not you simply give it a shot? (Good, however possibly just a bit too on-the-nose.)
Rodgers dealt with all of it with principally good humor, usually signing autographs on his means from the inexperienced to the tee, or whereas ready to hit. However now, standing with a gaggle of followers who mentioned they’d come all the best way from Oshkosh (and so would he please signal their shirts?), Rodgers hushed them and implored them to take a look at the person with the membership in his hand.
“Come on, let’s be quiet,” Rodgers mentioned, pointing at Rahm. “That’s the best player in the world right there.” The followers dutifully fell silent and, as Rahm stepped in, Rodgers could not resist. “I mean, just look at that incredible back,” he whisper-yelled, gesturing at Rahm’s broad shoulders, as everybody — together with Rahm — broke up laughing.
After a second to gather himself, Rahm addressed the ball once more. He shuffled his ft. He introduced his membership up barely to his neck, then spun his hips and his again — that unbelievable again — by affect within the superbly transient and violent movement that’s unmistakably his golf swing.
The ball soared excessive and true and, in that second, Rodgers was a stand-in for nearly everybody in golf over the previous yr, everybody who has been stopping and standing and observing Rahm’s transformation from an on-the-rise star with an oddly abbreviated swing to a dominant drive who might be essentially the most gifted participant on the planet. The sort of participant who enters this week’s Masters because the betting favourite.
The ball landed softly simply past the pin. Rahm peeked again at Rodgers and his minions. Rodgers shook his head and smiled.
“Let’s clap for that,” Rodgers known as out as he applauded. “That man right there is special.”
A FEW WEEKS later, after we met up in Orlando, Florida, Rahm informed me that he usually writes in a diary. The content material of his entries ranges from reminiscences to reflections to extra random ideas — often in Spanish although principally in English — and the one rule Rahm has for himself is that he should all the time write in longhand.
“It doesn’t count if I do it on the computer,” he mentioned flatly. He waved his fingers. “There’s something meditational about it, right? Where I’m doing it and it’s just me with my own thoughts and figuring it out. And if I do it on the computer, it’s not quite the same thing.”
Over the previous 12 months, Rahm has had loads of materials, each blessings and battles. A yr in the past right now, his first baby, a son named Kepa, was born simply days earlier than the Masters. He gained his first main championship on the U.S. Open in San Diego and spent his first prolonged interval because the No. 1 participant on the planet. Match top-10s appeared to return like water from a faucet, and Rahm enters this week within the high 5 on tour in strokes gained off the tee, from tee-to-green and whole.
“I think Jon Rahm is the guy for the next 10 years,” veteran PGA Tour professional Pat Perez, who performs with Rahm usually at their membership in Arizona, mentioned lately on a Golf Journal podcast. “I don’t think anyone is going to beat Jon Rahm consistently for a decade.”
As highly effective as his golf has been, although, it was additionally months earlier than Rahm’s mother and father might really meet their grandchild as a result of, as occurred for therefore many, COVID restrictions saved Rahm separated from his family in Spain. There have been family members who died in the course of the pandemic and the isolation he felt and the staggeringly public intestine punch of what occurred on the Memorial in early June, when Rahm blistered the course for a third-round 64 on Saturday to take a no-one’s-catching-me 6-shot lead … solely to study he must withdraw earlier than Sunday’s ultimate spherical as a result of he had examined optimistic for COVID.
No trophy. No $1.7 million in prize cash. No handshake with match host Jack Nicklaus. When officers approached him with the information, Rahm bodily buckled and dropped down, his fingers over his face. He appeared crushed.
“It was almost like being in a movie,” Rahm’s caddie, Adam Hayes, mentioned.
All of those moments discovered their means into Rahm’s head and, in some type, his diary. And the method of writing has been vital to Rahm’s work on higher understanding his personal anxieties and psychological well being. At a distinct level in his life, the uncooked emotion of dropping out on a near-certain tour win due to a check end result — Rahm did not even really feel sick — may need despatched him reeling. However in that second, Rahm centered himself. Stayed composed. Held on to the mindset that writing, amongst different issues, has helped him to take care of.
“You know, even Kelley,” he mentioned, referring to his spouse, “she would tell me a lot of times she could tell something was going on with me, and I could feel something was up — I just didn’t know what it was. And by writing, it’s something that kind of reorganizes my thoughts, makes all the feelings flow evenly. So the process of dealing with emotions got a lot better, a lot easier, just by writing it down.”
Some folks use diaries for reminiscing, for reliving the enjoyment (or ache) they skilled as soon as their reminiscences begin to fade. For Rahm, although, the secret is extra in how the journal permits him to be current. To be conscious. The moments when he struggles along with his anxieties essentially the most, he has realized, come when he tries to mission into the long run. When he thinks about expectations or potentialities, about what may occur or might occur or ought to occur.
So with the journal, it’s easy: He writes. He processes. He strikes on. “When I write, it’s almost like it really sets in my brain,” he mentioned. “I don’t ever go back and read it.”
NOW, IT SHOULD be mentioned: The notion {that a} married 27-year-old who lately turned a father would expertise some private progress and inner maturation isn’t particularly uncommon. These are the issues that transfer many people, that immediate and prod us to strive to determine learn how to be really glad. These are the issues that make us need extra from ourselves.
In Rahm’s case, although, that progress comes juxtaposed in opposition to a lingering public narrative that appears, at finest, superficial. Ever since Rahm arrived on the PGA Tour in 2016, there was an uncomfortable (if not unreasonable) deal with his matches of emotion or frustration on the course. A membership slam. An expletive (or three). A shout or arm-wave or eye roll.
He’s hardly the one participant to have matches on the course, however it typically feels as if his are seen in a different way — as defining or confirming of one thing, versus the out-of-character rush of blood that different gamers are sometimes afforded. And the commentary round Rahm — whether or not from broadcasters or pundits and even gamers — has usually been equally informal or plagued by tropes, like not-so-coded references to Rahm’s “fiery” Spanish heritage or the “perspective” he is solely simply found now that he has a toddler. The expectation, it appears, is that Rahm’s mood is only a given.
(As only one instance: It hasn’t escaped these near Rahm that when he’s enjoying a spherical the place TV cameras are following each swing, the cameraman behind Rahm will often linger so lengthy after Rahm hits a poor shot — clearly instructed to remain there in case that is the blow-up second everyone seems to be so certain will come — that the cameraman cannot then recover from to Rahm’s enjoying companion earlier than that participant is able to hit.)
To be clear, Rahm would not dispute that he is had his share of petulant moments on the course. There are many conditions he needs he’d dealt with in a different way. The lesser-told story, although, is the rationale behind these feelings and Rahm’s work to higher perceive what they imply.
“Even though I say a lot of stupid stuff on the course, and I complain, it’s just a way of letting out nervous energy,” he informed me, sitting up in his chair. He was as animated as I noticed him. “When I’m saying, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe that putt broke that way,’ I probably fully know that I pushed it, OK? Just so you know.” He laughed. “I’m fully aware. I’m just deflecting.”
The follow-up was apparent: Deflecting what? And the reply, as it’s for all of us, is complicated however largely comes all the way down to some mixture of emotions associated to continuously being judged, the internal machinations of ever-rising exterior expectations and a wholesome dollop of pure competitiveness. (“I miss a shot, it matters to me,” he mentioned. “I care.”)
He shrugged. “I think what people misunderstand is the level of vulnerability for professional athletes,” he mentioned. “Some mistakes might be made, and then you’re going to be judged by those mistakes and then that’s piled onto the stress that person might have in their mind. … It’s not easy, right?
The journal, he said, has helped. So has mediation and a few other techniques that Rahm has worked on with his longtime mental coach, Joseba Del Carmen. Recently, he has talked about managing stress with Michael Phelps, the former Olympic swimmer and a friend who has more publicly confronted his own mental health concerns.
Many of those conversations, Rahm said, have centered around the changes one feels in terms of anxiety after becoming a parent. Rahm recalled for me a day when he was playing with Kepa and got a phone call with some bad news that made him a bit angry. After he hung up, he turned back to his baby and, within minutes, Kepa’s mood had changed. “I might see it going straight to him,” Rahm said. “Swiftly, he is crying and he would not know why.”
That experience stunned Rahm, and he tried to unpack it with Phelps and others, tried to figure out what being a parent means to his own emotion. And here, too, the oft-repeated public narrative about Rahm seems to have largely glossed over what is his reality.
The generally accepted line that has been repeated around golf is that becoming a father has reduced Rahm’s outbursts on the course because he now sees what’s really important — the “perspective” we so often hear about — and thus isn’t bothered by things as much while playing.
In truth, Rahm has learned that which all parents come to realize: that we are ciphers to our children and have to be hyperaware of the impact our moods intrinsically have on them.
Having Kepa (with another child on the way) hasn’t automatically made Rahm care less about what he does on the course because it’s suddenly less significant. Rather, it’s just made him more focused on finding other outlets for his negative emotions because he is determined, more than anything, to shield his child from them.
If that means they show up while he’s playing, he has decided, so be it.
“In the event you withhold it, it is going to come out someday,” he said. He sighed. “And it is occurred to me the place it comes out on the golf course for no freaking motive.”
AT ONE POINT, I asked Rahm if he has ever thought about what advice he’d give to the younger version of himself, the version who was 22 and new on tour and much more prone to emotional swings that no one, Rahm included, really understood.
Rahm snorted.
“I don’t know — I in all probability would not have listened,” he said. “I went from being a university participant to high 10 on the planet in 9 months (and) that’s an ascension that I dreamed of, however I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared for what that entailed.”
He stopped. Then he said, “I really feel like with me, there was a earlier than and after in my case.”
It would be easy to peg the turning point in that construct as when Rahm won his first major championship last year — he readily admits he felt incredible pressure to win one right up until the moment it finally happened — but Rahm knows that it really isn’t just any one thing. It is more layered than that, more nuanced. The U.S. Open. Kelley. Kepa. COVID. His family. Writing. Feeling. All of it has allowed what Hayes, the caddie, so eloquently described as the “costume life” that Rahm and all public personalities are required to create to more closely mirror the world in which he lives.
That is what Rahm wants. And the openness and comfort with himself and who he is has been on display more and more often.
A few weeks after winning at Torrey Pines last summer, a seemingly innocuous question at a news conference before the Open Championship led to Rahm talking publicly for the first time about how he was born with a club foot, which meant his right foot was inverted almost 90 degrees and upside down.
Doctors had to break his ankle and turn the foot, casting it over and over to keep it in place. The pain, both mental and physical, was intense. Rahm’s parents took him to the emergency room constantly so the cast could be changed as Rahm grew, and even now, Rahm’s right leg is nearly an inch shorter than his left. If he doesn’t wear specially made orthotics in his shoes, walking can be unbearable. “If I had been to play barefoot,” he told me, “the quantity of ache I might be in is mind-blowing. … I am going to simply be fully crooked.”
In the news conference, Rahm explained that the condition was a big part of why his backswing is so much shorter than most players’ — “If I take it full to parallel, yeah, it would create extra pace, however I’ve no stability. My ankle simply cannot take it” — and that revelation led to a few days of interest and stories before most people went back to just watching The Open.
In Utah, though, Rahm’s words lingered. A 14-year-old boy from there named Phoenix Small, who had been born with two club feet but developed a love for golf, heard about Rahm’s comments. Phoenix’s hospital, Shriners Children’s, helped make a connection. Last fall, Rahm and Phoenix connected on a video call for a little while, and on that pro-am day back in February at TPC Scottsdale, two people who were born with club feet and have shorter-than-average golf swings finally met in person.
Rahm, who had been chatting and joking with Rodgers and the other amateurs in his group all morning, broke off as he approached the 15th green. Phoenix and his parents were there, and Rahm hugged Phoenix and led him through the tunnel up to the famous 16th hole, the stadium-style par 3.
There were plenty of memorable moments for Phoenix — “your first PGA Tour birdie!” Rahm told him after he made a short putt for Rahm on the 17th green — but the real connection came as they walked.
They talked about the treatments they had been through. About Phoenix’s love of music. About golf. About all the people who were watching them. “By the best way we stroll, you would not be capable of inform, proper?” Rahm said to me. He shook his head. “He is the primary individual I ever talked to about what we had been born with.”
Of all that Rahm has experienced over the past year, it was one of his most memorable moments, and before they went their separate ways, Rahm leaned in closer to Phoenix and shared with him a saying he had learned growing up in Spain.
Lo que mal empieza, bien acaba. It was an expression Rahm thought would have meaning to Phoenix because it had meaning to him. It still does.
Lo que mal empieza, bien acaba. “We’d begin the unsuitable means,” Rahm told Phoenix, “however we’ll end the proper means.”
