OAKMONT, Pa. — Say this for Jon Rahm: Unlike many, many others on Thursday and Friday at Oakmont Country Club, he took a second to express himself after a miserable round. After an opening round of 69 left him as one of the very few players under par, the demons of Oakmont came calling on Friday, and their price was a punishing five-over-par 75 that sent Rahm plummeting down the leaderboard. With a four-over total, he’ll still make the cut, and he’s not out of the running, but there’s a definite sense that the initiative he seized in Round 1 was gone.
And, to put it mildly, he was not pleased as he tried to explain the contrast between Thursday and Friday. In a low, almost inaudible voice, standing by the clubhouse, he gave it his best shot.
“I didn’t make a putt, that was the main difference,” he said. “I didn’t play bad. I played quite good golf. Didn’t see anything go in beside a seven-footer on 7. That’s it. That’s a very hard thing to deal with to try to shoot a score out here.”
That was one of two thoughts he expressed after a Spanish on-camera interview with Movistar, and the other was even more terse, following a very doomed question about “perspective.”
“Honestly, I’m too annoyed and too mad right now to think about any perspective,” he said. “Very frustrated. Very few rounds of golf I played in my life where I think I hit good putts and they didn’t sniff the hole, so it’s frustrating.”
With the stats at our hands and safely behind a computer screen far away from the player himself, we can take some issue with that statement. As of the mid-afternoon, Rahm was 132nd out of 138 players in the field in strokes gained/putting, so that part of his perception was true—he couldn’t get anything to drop and sometimes wasn’t even coming close. But he also struggled mightily off the tee, coming in at 123rd, and that particular weakness was evident right from the first hole, when Rahm flew his drive into the right bunker and couldn’t save par.
On his next two bogeys, at 8 and 9, he similarly drove into the right rough, and his double bogey on 11 began with a drive into the native area. Rahm’s final bogey, on 18, similarly included an errant drive into the left rough. Time and again, trouble off the tee led to dropped shots.
Of course, the putting didn’t help. As Sam Burns proved with his phenomenal round of 65, on a course like Oakmont, sometimes you have to save your own bacon with the flatstick. Rahm couldn’t do it, and in combination with his few wayward drives, it buried him in a round where his approach game was shockingly good (ranking third at the day’s midpoint).
Following the PGA Championship, when Rahm found himself in the mix Sunday before a late stumble, it felt like he was ready to threaten at majors consistently again. Thursday did nothing to disabuse that notion, but Oakmont’s punishment was swift and severe on Friday, and how he’s going to have to do something spectacular to fight back to red numbers. It’s possible, in theory, but there’s no more daunting or inadvisable task then having to force your way to a slew of birdies on a course as unforgiving as Oakmont.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
