While Jon Rahm has yet to finish outside the top 10 in a LIV Golf event since signing with the Saudi-backed circuit, the Spaniard’s career will be measured by his results in the majors when it’s all said and done. In 2024, those results have simply not been there for the 29-year-old, who followed up his 2023 Masters victory with top-10s in both the U.S. Open and British Open last summer, plus a 2-0-2 performance in a winning Ryder Cup effort for Team Europe.
This year? An uncompetitive T-45 at Augusta National kicked off his majors season, which he followed up with a missed cut in the PGA Championship at Valhalla. That marked his first missed cut in a major championship since the 2019 PGA Championship at Bethpage Black, which was sandwiched in between top-10s at both the Masters and U.S. Open that year.
Rahm’s year in the majors took a darker turn at last month’s U.S. Open, where he arrived having just withdrawn from LIV Houston during the second round with a foot injury. He showed up to his Pinehurst presser with a flip flop on the injured foot, hoping and praying it would heal up in time to give it a go for Round 1.
It did not, as Rahm announced his withdrawal that Tuesday afternoon. The official cause was a toe injury, which he described as a lesion between his fourth and pinkie toe that had become infected in Houston. Rahm teed it up the very next week at LIV Nashville and then had nearly a month to heal up before last week’s LIV event at Valderrama in his home country.
On Tuesday at Royal Troon, where Rahm will be making his eighth start in an Open Championship, he was asked what happened after meeting with the media at Pinehurst that ultimately led to his WD, and he went into graphic detail.
“I wish I could post a video,” Rahm said. “We went from there to trying to source a podiatrist. Once we found one, we went there. Obviously the X-rays on my foot, we knew there was nothing wrong with my bones. He saw the wound and saw the infection, and he tried to clear it out. It callused over obviously to protect, and we thought we had cleaned it out.
“I don’t want to get too graphic for people that don’t like it, but he basically cut part of that callus out, and the second he put a little bit of pressure, which still hurt a lot, and you could still see some wanting to come out. He’s like, all right, Jon, we have to do it. There’s an abscess in there, and we have to see how much and how deep. I’m like, ‘Oh, boy.’
“Basically he numbed my foot and grabbed the swabs they did the PCR test with basically, stuck the cotton part a little bit in, so it was deeper, turned it around and just jammed it in my foot. Pretty much, when I saw that go in, I said, ‘OK, I’m not playing the [U.S.] Open.’ Took all the infection out. Took another sample to see if I was taking the right antibiotics, and that’s when we made the decision.”
Rahm added that the doctor was an “ex-military guy” who had seen similar injuries before, and he told Rahm that he probably shouldn’t play. The decision was no longer a difficult one after that.
“That’s when we made the decision,” he said. “Had it made it worse, had the infection spread any more, it could have started going up my leg and created a bigger issue. We decided to take the week off as hard as it might have been.
“The next morning I knew I had made the right decision because the pain I was in after that was pretty severe. But it was clean. Then as soon as I could, I went back home and watched the U.S. Open. I think I posted on social media on Thursday morning I had the baby monitor, the coffee, and was ready to watch.”
Rahm is a full go this week at Royal Troon, where he enters off a 10th-place finish at LIV Andalucía, which made him a perfect 9-for-9 in top-10 finishes on LIV this year, excluding his WD in Houston. The two-time major champion has finished inside the top three in two of his last three trips to the Open. He’ll begin his quest for a third major on Thursday at 9:36 a.m. local time (4:36 a.m. ET) alongside Tommy Fleetwood and Robert MacIntyre.
Main Image: ANDY BUCHANAN
