John Rahm wins his first Masters

Augusta, Georgia — It was early for disaster at the Masters—the first hole of the first round—but on Thursday morning, John Rahm’s internal speedometer seemed to have disappeared. Accustomed to perfectly calibrating his shots, Ram found his speed off, his ball slipping long and dodged properly, before scoring a double bogey.

“Okay,” Ram thought as he headed for the next tee at Augusta National Golf Club, “I miss, miss, miss, miss,” paraphrased Seve Ballesteros, the greatest Spanish golfer of all time, himself a victim of a masters misadventure. . Ram considered something else, too: unlike Ballesteros, he had 71 holes to recover.

He certainly did.

Ram, the towering Spaniard who dominated the PGA Tour in the early months of 2023, won the Masters on Sunday, overcoming days of sweltering humidity, freezing temperatures, green-drenched rain and tree-downing winds, as well as Thursday’s mayhem for first place. . , to claim his second career championship. His win, under an eggshell blue sky, came after he started the final round trailing four-time winner Brooks Koepka, by two strokes.

Ram eventually won by four strokes, 12-under-par in the championship.

His win kept him at bay, at least for the month, from the main ambitions of LIV Golf, the second-year tournament funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund that then saw men’s professional golf break into tense factions. Koepka has been a standout on the rebel circuit winning the LIV event in Florida last week. Then by winning the Augusta National, it would have been the first time a golfer had captured a major as a LIV player. The league’s next opportunity will come in mid-May, at the PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club, near Rochester, New York.

But the Rams methodically put down the 2023 league challenge at Augusta National, where the 88-player course featured 18 golfers. Although the league put in a solid showing behind Koepka, Phil Mickelson’s sensational performance on Sunday and Patrick Reed’s solid outing, the tournament came to an end with Rahm, a PGA Tour powerhouse, poised to be named to next year’s Masters Champions dinner.

Mickelson and Reed, who hold four Masters titles between them, are supposed to be there, too. Koepka, even after finishing the first three rounds with at least a share of the lead, would not show consistency—until it disappeared—this was all the more important given the meteorological and scheduling turmoil.

When Koepka made a bogey at the sixth hole on Sunday, after driving across the green, a chip that went past the pin well and a par putt that pulled off the hole wide, he also surrendered the lead.

The Par-5 8th hole was a place where either man could gain ground: both made eagles there during the tournament. On Sunday afternoon, though, Koepka’s shot came to rest on a piece of pine straw, resulting in a punch in the fairway. Ram landed his third shot on the green, laying it out for a pop-up birdie that increased his advantage to two strokes.

But there were drawings atop the leaderboard playing elsewhere among the pines. When Koepka and Rahm both took the bogey in ninth place, a group of ambitious contenders flew much closer than they had hours before. Ram stood at 10-under, Koepka at eight-under, tied with Jordan Spieth, who started the round at less than one. Five other players – Mickelson, Reid, Russell Henley, Cameron Young and Patrick Cantlay – were six-under or seven-years-old.

The gap between Ram and Koepka remained at two sessions until the 12th hole, that fine botanical landmark at the heart of Amen Corner. The hole, 155 yards par-3, is Augusta National’s shortest test. Koepka raised his tee high, then ducked into the grass just behind the green, though he avoided the bunker. His second shot did not quite reach the green, and his third shot went to the right and beyond the pin. He made a ghost hit.

That put Mickelson, 52, already on his seven-under-par Tour, in second place alone.

Koepka birdied the 13th hole to pull it even with Mickelson, but Ram maintained a three-stroke advantage with a birdie, his first since No. 8.

It didn’t last—because Ram’s lead swelled to five strokes on the next hole. The Ram’s second shot, near the tree line, landed on the green and then rolled into something approaching a semicircle until it stopped near the cup, returning a putt for birdie. Koepka’s second shot also reached the green, but it rolled wide of the pin. Missing a long birdie effort, and a much shorter one to back, Koepka caught bogey, his fifth of the round.

He nearly made a putt for an eagle in the 15th before settling for a birdie there.

Ram drives four putts with three holes to play. Koepka cut it to three with a majestic birdie after his tee shot cleared the water in the 16th, but his return odds were still waning fast. It didn’t help that, on his second putt on the 17th hole, his ball went from a shady patch of East Georgia clay to a spot where some spectators were sitting. He bogeyed the hole near the end of the third round; He sent another card as the tournament came to a close, again pushing Ram’s advantage to four strokes.

Ram, who picked up his only major victory at the 2021 US Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego, was sure to get a green jacket and, a few months from now, has a Masters trophy engraved with the autographs of every man he beat.

Once his counterpart at the end of the tournament on the 18th green surrounded by a thick, noisy turf, he gleefully raised his arms skyward, clenched his fists, and then briefly covered his face with his hands. He snatched his ball from the cup and tipped his hat.

Even by the standards of a star who first reached No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking in 2020, Ram has played particularly well in recent months. In November, he won the DP World Championship by two strokes. In January, he won the PGA Tour twice, both with scores of 27 under par, and took the Genesis Invitational title in February.

He stumbled in March, tied for 39th at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Withdrawing from the Players Championship due to stomach disease. Show modest tournament play in World Golf Championship matches. But he was, he insisted, an unruffled “week-to-week guy”, content to play one event to the next without being mentally affected by the booms or busts.

“In every tournament I go to, my plan is to win, and my mentality never deviates from that,” he said last week.

As of Sunday night, he had yet to finish fourth at the Augusta National. But for this year’s tournament, his seventh Masters tournament appearance, he arrived with a stockpile of course knowledge that he said would be hard to put to full use.

“I feel like it’s very difficult to apply everything you learn from every run here at Augusta National,” he said.

He added, “Obviously, the more you play, the more comfortable you feel with a little bit of a lag here, I would say. It can be very tricky to understand some of the pauses and some of the speeds on the courts. You know, a little bit of learning and things like that, but At the end of the day, it’s a golf course where you have to get out here and play good golf, right? It’s plain and simple. There’s no trick to it. The best player wins, and that’s what you have to do.”