Jon Rahm: The next big thing in golf, but not this week

Jon Rahm is the best playing 22-year old on the planet but he won’t tame Royal Birkdale, this week.

Jon Rahm is perhaps golf’s next mega superstar. You know the type, with 3 airplanes, 10 cars, and a house on every continent.

Rahm embarks on this week’s Open Championship fresh off a performance in the Irish Open that was almost circa Tiger 2000-ish. How about 65-67-67-65 for 24 under par for the tournament? If you can average 66 per round, I promise you will win a whole lot of golf tournaments.

Rahm dosen’t average 66 per round but nevertheless is having a great year. He has one other win on his 2017 résumé in addition to last week’s Irish Open. Back in January he won the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines. Rahm also has 7 top-10 finishes in 15 tournaments played.

Jon Rahm is a trendy pick going into The Open Championship this week at Royal Birkdale despite actually not playing very well in the Majors this season. He missed a cut and may as well have in the U.S. Open and Masters earlier this year after heading into both among the pre-tournament favorites. He won’t win at Royal Birkdale either.

That being said, he certainly has the game to win by 10.

Jon Rahm can and will win a lot of majors before he is done playing. He is really long off the tee, putts great, appears to be course proof, and is a proven winner as he has done so at every level. He played collegiate golf at Arizona State where he won 11 times as a Sun Devil.

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Royal Birkdale has some of the great all time players among its list of previous Champions. Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, and Lee Trevino all won a Claret Jug there. The previous two times Royal Birkdale has hosted the Open Championship Mark O’Meara and Padraig Harrington emerged as the Champion Golfer of the Year. O’Meara and Harrington are both winners of multiple Majors themselves.

There are two common denominators among the names that are some of the previous Champions at Royal Birkdale. They are multiple Major Championship winners who all had at least one in their pocket before winning there, and none of them could necessarily be defined as a “Bomber.

Jon Rahm is 22 years old and perhaps the only weakness in his game is that on occasion his temper takes over. Royal Birkdale will inevitably deal everyone some bad bounces. The course just seems to demand experience to ultimately manage those bad bounces for 4 days.

Royal Birkdale historically has not been able to be overpowered like, for example, St. Andrews has been. Players considered to be Bomber – Nicklaus, John Daly, and Tiger – have at times been able to overpower some of the courses in the Open Championship rota using their pure length off the tee as their advantage. That hasn’t traditionally worked at Royal Birkdale.

Jon Rahm has some of golf’s greatest players in his DNA as a player.

Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 majors is safe for generations now that Tiger is on the shelf. I actually see some of both their games in Rahm. DJ, Rory, Jason Day, and Jordan Spieth are all Major Champions of this generation that have all cleared another hurdle Rahm has yet to encounter. They have all had meltdowns on Sunday at a major and figured out how to survive and move on. You can now add Brooks Koepka to that list.

Rahm has a lot of well deserved hype surrounding him. The buzz has picked up since his win in Ireland last week in anticipation of next week’s Open Championship. Jon Rahm will be a huge name in golf for many years.

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Rahm certainly can win at Royal Birkdale but I personally don’t believe he will, this year. It’s OK if he dosen’t. Neither did Jack or Tiger.

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