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Jon Rahm wins a lot of golf tournaments. Not as many as most folks believe a top-three player in the world should win (because nobody in Tiger Woods’ wake does that), but far more than you might presume. He added another one on Sunday at the Mexico Open at Vidanta to raise his PGA Tour winning percentage to 5.7% and his career worldwide mark to an astonishing 10%.
That latter is nearly unheard of in the post-Tiger-in-his-prime era. Rory McIlroy has flirted with it at times. Same with Dustin Johnson. But when you enter into double-digit percentages and win at least one of every 10 times you tee it up, that’s a modern bar extraordinarily difficult to clear.
Yet because of how consistently elite he’s been, we expect Rahm to clear it by a wider margin than he already has. Strangely, even though he has been statistically the best golfer on the planet since Jan. 1, 2021 (and it’s really not even that close), he only has two PGA Tour wins in that timespan. Of the 10 best golfers in those last 16 months, only Justin Thomas (one win) and Daniel Berger (one win) have fewer victories than Rahm. In that sense, 2021 and 2022 have been a bit of a letdown in terms of collecting championships and cashing in tremendous performances. This is golf, though, where you can play the best four rounds of your life but are still unable to control that the guy you’re playing with was somehow better.
There is a scenario in which an avalanche of victories is coming for Rahm this summer. It almost always feels like that’s the case — like he’s on the precipice of a “this is legitimately terrifying, and he has to be be a 4-1 favorite in every tournament” wave — because that’s how the No. 1 player in the world from tee to green should make you feel. At some point in Rahm’s career that run will materialize, and it will seem like he’s never going to lose again. Perhaps, after narrow misses in January, Sunday’s victory is the…
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Source : cbssports
