Without having rushed the month of February yet, although for Jon Rahm who will rest next week to return at the Arnold Palmer (March 2 to 5), the golfer from Barrika has already added three victories, in the most prolific season of his career on the PGA Tour.
Jon Rahm, results
The title of the Genesis, in Riviera, was added to that of The Sentry, the tournament of champions in Hawaii, and the American Express in La Jolla, in a start to the year that the PGA Tour had not witnessed since 1975 when on February 9 , Johnny Miller had won the tournaments in Phoenix, Tucson and the Bob Hope Classic.
He would still win a tournament later in October. More amazing is the sequence in the last 10 events around the world that he has played. Since September 11, he has won five tournaments (the Acciona Open in Spain and the Dubai Championship), he has garnered 10 ‘top ten’ and the worst place of all is eighth.
Of the 158 professional tournaments he has played since turning pro, he has won 19 (twenty if you add the Zurich New Orleans tag team in 2019) and has 86 top-10 tournaments. Tiger Woods, the indisputable reference of this time, did not achieve that record so early, not even in 2000, the year in which he won 10 tournaments, a course in which, like Rahm, he had three titles after having participated in five tournaments.
Nor in the prolific 2006, with nine victories. He attended Arizona State University and won 11 varsity tournaments, second only to Phil Mickelson who earned 16 titles. In 2015 he participated as an amateur at the Phoenix Open, finishing fifth.
On April 1, he took first place in the World Amateur Golf Ranking and held it for 25 weeks, then regained the position to hold it for another 35 weeks. He thus qualified for the U.S. Open and the Open Championship the following year: in the first of the two tournaments he finished twenty-third, then turned professional, at the same time losing the right to play in the Open.
The Quicken Loans National was his first professional event and he finished third. The Canadian Open instead saw him finish second. At the end of the season he obtained a card for the 2017 PGA Tour. Rahm found his first success in the Farmers Insurance Open thanks to an eagle on the last hole, managing to enter the major tournaments on the world scene.
At the Mexico Championship, an event in the World Golf Championships series, he finished third, two shots behind the winner Dustin Johnson, while in the second event, the Dell Technologies Match Play, he lost the final against Johnson himself.
He later won the Irish Open and the final tournament of the European Tour season, the DP World Tour Championship, Dubai, by six strokes, also winning the rookie of the year award.
