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There are two stories you can tell about Jon Rahm’s jump to LIV Golf in 2024. The first is that the framework agreement between LIV and the PGA Tour opened up an opportunity for him to make an obscene amount of money with the high likelihood that the two tours would officially merge before too long, and that if the tour would deal with LIV, why couldn’t he? The second story contains the first story but adds a crucial detail: that Rahm thought he was important enough to force that merger with his defection. As in, “If I go, the tour can’t hold out any longer.”
In remarks made to the BBC at the time, Rahm seemed to give fuel to the second version.
“I could be the start of a tipping point in that sense,” Rahm said. “I understood the weight that [my] decision could have and the impact it could have. I understood that perfectly and that’s why it wasn’t an easy decision. … Luckily, in my career, especially last year, I accomplished a lot and I got to be one of the bigger names in golf. There are few active players that could have had a bigger impact than myself in that sense. Not to be patting myself on the back too much, but I understood the position I was in.”
Two years later, of course, things look very different—the PIF is pulling its investment in LIV at year’s end, and the future of the league is in serious jeopardy. Players like Rahm, whose contracts run past 2026, find themselves in limbo as LIV scrambles to find a lifeline via new investors. On Tuesday at the PGA Championship, he first distanced himself from the notion that he believed he’d be a catalyst for the merger.
“I was never like thinking that I was going to be any sort of weight that would tip the scales to make things come together,” he said. “That was never an argument in my mind. When asked if that was the case for people to come together, that would be great. I never made a decision based on that.”
As to whether he looks back with any regret or would change his decision if he had known how the last two years would play out, he was more circumspect.
“Now, I would also say I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, and I’ve never gone back thinking, ‘Oh, had I known this again, I would do X and Y different,’” he explained. “I could do that about 15 different golf shots on the golf course every single day. If I lived my life like that as a golfer, I would be a very pessimistic person … just to speculate on what could have done, what could have been different doesn’t really make much sense.”
“We all go back,” he added. “We all think what could have been and what couldn’t have been. It’s inevitable … if the terms change afterward, like it’s happened with LIV that things changed a little bit, it’s an afterthought, not a problem from the choice.”
Later in the press conference, a reporter asked him to clarify what he had learned from the last two years.
“That is for me to know,” Rahm said with a smile. “And that’s about that.”
Rahm, 31, comes into this year’s PGA Championship on the strength of LIV Golf wins in Hong Kong and Mexico City, and he’s looking to improve on his performance at last year’s PGA at Quail Hollow, when he briefly held a share of the lead on the back nine Sunday before fading to a T-8 finish. He has three major top-10s since moving to LIV and finished T-38 at this year’s Masters. He’s the highest-ranked LIV player in the Official World Golf Ranking at No. 20. It was clear from his remarks that he’s confident in his form.
“I feel like I’m playing better than the ranking I have right now,” he said. “I’m not going to get into the details of what number I would be [in the OWGR] because I don’t want to insult any player who doesn’t play fantastic golf, but I feel like higher than I am right now, that would be fair.”
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Main Image: Richard Heathcote
