Jon Rahm (-3) was walking today with Adam Hayes down the fairway of the 8th hole and made a confession: “It’s been a long time since I’ve hit the ball with such freedom, without so many swing thoughts.” His card, 69 strokes in the first round of his life at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic, is notable, but his satisfaction goes far beyond the number. “Look, you always want to make fewer strokes, but I’m happy mainly because I felt more comfortable, because I’ve started to see results from what we’re working on in the swing and sometimes you don’t know when you’re going to assimilate them,” he explained after finishing the round.
Does this reflection mean Jon is very happy with how he played? Not exactly. It’s not that far. What it means is that he has seen things that show him his work is heading in the right direction, that he’s correcting some aspects he didn’t like at all from last year and that he feels by maintaining this line he will do much better. In short, he feels closer to his most powerful version than he has been in the last year and a half.
Rahm explains it very graphically with school grades. “It’s true that I won two tournaments last year, that I had good weeks of golf, like at Valderrama, for example, or in Chicago with the very tough course, Houston just before messing up my foot the week before the US Open, but I never really got totally comfortable with the swing. If we were to grade it, from zero to ten, last year I never reached an 8. The last time I played for an 8 was at the Ryder Cup in Italy,” he notes. To find the 10, you have to go even further back. “I would say the week of the Genesis Championship in 2023, almost two years ago now… Because the week of the Masters, with the bad weather, was strange. Well, the Sunday at Augusta was also a 10,” he admits.
For different reasons, the driver shaft among other things, Jon explains that he started making some compensations in his swing that more or less worked, allowing him to compete, although at the same time in moments of maximum pressure some errors would come. Today he felt that what they are working on with Dave Phillips to return the swing to its best place, where Rahm feels more comfortable, he is starting to see it and feels that in this way he is a little closer to the 10.
The golfer from Barrika himself has cited some examples of shots that left him very satisfied today: drive and 5-wood from the bunker on the 3rd hole, second shot from the sand on the 10th, tee shot on the 11th or second shot on the 12th from the rough… Not bad at all for the first competitive round since the fourth day of the Estrella Damm Andalucía Masters in Sotogrande last October. The shot of the day was the second on the 10th, very close to the second on the 3rd. “I had 162 metres to the flag with the wind in favour. I was very lucky with the drive, which stayed well and advanced a lot. The ball was like in a hole, but the contact was clean. The most difficult thing was the trajectory, I couldn’t lift it much and had to take it out to the left opening, a shot that luckily I do well. It was a perfect 8-iron. I just focused on making good contact and it really came out well.”
Jon has placed in the top 20 of the tournament and is the best Spaniard. He is four strokes behind the leaders Ricardo Gouveia, David Micheluzzi, and the surprising left-handed amateur David Ford. He is more than involved in the tournament and has shown, at half throttle, that he can make a very low round on this course, especially on the par 5s. Except on the 18th, he has gone for the green in two on all of them and putted for eagle on the 3rd and 10th. His partial was four under and it felt like he didn’t fully exploit it. Don’t rule out seeing him reach his level 10 on Sunday… It would certainly be a magnificent sign.
