– Sergio García and Jon Rahm are playing this week at the LIV Golf in Miami. The tournament takes place from Friday to Sunday. Next week is the Masters Tournament. That is, they will play the first Major of the year having played another tournament the previous week.
– Sergio and Rahm have won the Masters. The golfer from Borriol did it in 2017 and the one from Barrika in 2023. In both cases, they did not play the week before. They rested.
– García has played the Masters Tournament no less than 25 times. In other words, every year since 1999 except for the unfortunate year 2020, which he missed due to Covid. Of those 25 appearances, he rested the week before on 19 occasions and played only six times.
– If we exclude the years 2023 and 2024, when he was already in LIV and contractually obliged to play the week before, out of 23 participations, he only played the week before four times. That is, when the decision was solely up to him, he chose to play less than twenty percent of the time. His preferences are clear.
– Rahm has played the Masters eight times, of which he played the week before only twice. One was in 2017, his first participation, and the other in 2024, when he was already in LIV and could not choose not to play. Obviously, after the experience of the first year, when he himself admitted that he ended the week physically and mentally exhausted, he decided not to play before the Masters again… Until he joined LIV.
– Jon’s two worst results in Augusta have been when playing the week before. In 2017 he finished in 27th place and in 2024 he ended up 45th. Meanwhile, of the six times he rested, he has one victory (2023), four more top 10s, and his worst result was also a 27th in 2022, matching what he did in 2017.
– Of the six times Sergio played the week before the Masters, he missed the cut three times, a fifty percent rate. Meanwhile, when he rested, the percentage of missed cuts is 36.84%, seven out of 19.
– Beyond his victory in 2017, the other three top 10s Sergio has achieved in the Masters (2002, 2004, and 2013) were when resting the week before. His best result when playing before was a 17th in 2015. In his two years with LIV, he has missed the cut.
– All these are objective data leading to the conclusion that both Sergio and Jon would prefer not to play the week before the Masters, at least they demonstrated this when they could freely decide their schedule. Additionally, they reflect that both have performed better when arriving in Augusta without playing the week before.
– It is, therefore, the ‘cursed’ variable they must resolve. Since they have no choice but to play the LIV in Miami, we will see if they have been able to find a way to prevent it from becoming an obstacle to their final performance in Augusta. The good thing is that both already have the experience of what happened in previous years and knew it would happen again now, so they will surely have drawn their conclusions and made the necessary adjustments. Next week we will see if they have managed to clear that ‘cursed’ variable.
