At the beginning of the final round on Sunday, Rahm was two strokes behind Brooks Koepka. However, as Koepka struggled throughout the round, Rahm was able to close the gap and win his 2nd major championship.
At the Masters Tournament, it was still early for a disaster to occur — the 1st hole of the 1st round — but in the morning on Thursday; it appeared as though the internal speedometer of Jon Rahm had been removed.
Rahm, who was used to precisely readjusting his putts, found that his speed was off, and as a result, his ball slid long and escaped right. As a result, he recorded a double bogey.
“Huh,” As Rahm walked up to the next hole at Augusta National Golf Club, he thought to himself, “I missed, I missed, I missed, I make,” which is a paraphrase of a quote from Seve Ballesteros, the finest Spanish golf player of all time and itself a victim of a misadventure at his master’s putting competition.
Ballesteros was the victim of a trying to put misadventure during the tournament. In addition to this, Rahm took into consideration the fact that, in contrast to Ballesteros, he still had 71 holes left to play.
He most obviously was guilty of that.
On Sunday, the Masters Tournament was won by Rahm, a towering Spaniard who was dominant on the PGA Tour in the early months of 2023, despite days of oppressive heat, falling temperatures, green-saturating rains, and tree-toppling gusts; he was able to take his second major championship of his career.
Moreover, he was able to overcome the calamity that occurred on No. 1 on Thursday. When he started the final round, he was two strokes behind the leader, Brooks Koepka, who had already won four major championships. His victory came under a sky the colour of an eggshell blue.
In the end, Rahm won the competition by a margin of four strokes and finished 12 strokes under par.
His victory was enough to keep the premier aspirations of LIV Golf at bay, at least for the remainder of this month. LIV Golf is a 2nd-year league that was funded by sovereign funds of Saudi Arabia, which then watched the sport of male executive golf split into resentful factions.
Koepka has frequently been among the headliners on the rebel circuit, and he recently took first place at a LIV occasion in Florida. If they had continued their winning streak at Augusta National, they would have become the first golfers to win a major championship while competing in the LIV.
The next opportunity for the league will come in the middle of May at the P.G.A. Championship, which will be held at Oak Hill Country Club, which is located close to Rochester, New York.
The 88-golfer field at Augusta National contained 18 golfers from the LIV, but Rahm gradually eliminated that threat. Despite a good showing by the league led by Koepka, Phil Mickelson’s stunning Sunday effort, and Patrick Reed’s outstanding performance, the tournament concluded with Rahm, a PGA Tour regular, in position to choose the dishes for next year’s banquet of Masters Champions.
It seems likely that Reed and Mickelson, who have won a combined total of four Masters Tournaments, will be present as well.
Koepka would not win the tournament, despite the fact that he finished the first 3 rounds including at least a sharing of the lead, demonstrating a steadiness that, until it vanished, was even more amazing given the disruptions caused by the weather and the schedule.
After driving the ball past the green, hitting a chip that flew way past the pin, and making a par putt that went just past the target, Koepka got a bogey on the 6th hole on Sunday, which resulted in him also losing the lead.
Both players had made Eagle on the par-5 8th hole during the competition, making it a spot where either player could make up ground and take the lead. Nevertheless, Koepka’s tee shot on the Sunday afternoon round forced him to punch across the fairway because it landed in a patch of pine straw.
The 3rd shot that Rahm took found its way onto the green, putting him in a position to make an easy birdie putt that extended his lead to two shots.
