When Jon Rahm talks, the golf world understands how much he is missed

On days like Tuesday, with some of golf’s brightest stars meeting with the media during pre-Masters interviews, golf aficionados realize just how much Jon Rahm is missed.

Since his joining LIV Golf for the 2024 season, he has largely become an afterthought to those with their primary focus on the PGA Tour. Given the Saudi-backed league’s almost invisible television status in the United States, he almost disappeared.

More than for his stellar performances in the LIV competition that focuses more on the team concept, he has made plenty of headlines for his legal dispute with the DP World Tour.

But he returns into the sport’s consciousness during each of golf’s four major championships each year, and each time gives reason to appreciate his vast skills.

Although he said Tuesday he had fallen into a couple of bad habits with his golf swing, he still belongs among the game’s best players despite the limited world ranking points. The betting odds — he’s among the favorites — emphasize that point.

And the thoughtful answers from the 2023 Masters champ generally drip with detail provide insight that go beyond the obvious.

To wit: Asked about the challenge of the second shot on Augusta National’s third hole, he mentioned wind direction, hole location and firmness of the green ... and then he elaborated.

“If the greens aren’t very firm — which that hasn’t been the case the last three, four years when they redid that green, it’s been firm every year — you can be quite aggressive,” he began and started to roll. “You can hit it up there and be confident that with any wedge shot you can stop it on the green.

“Now you have pins like front right, front middle, front left, where there’s a gap where if you’re in between, you’re not far enough to create some spin or you’re not close enough to be comfortable bumping it on the green, where you’re going to have to be very, very passive. So, it becomes a very, very difficult shot.

“Any back pin, my recommendation, hit it way up there and then use the contours of the green to get it close. But those short ones, you’ll see a lot of different options.

“If you have the length, you can go right at it at the green and try to hit it on the up-slope, so you have the option of bumping it or hitting a high soft shot. If not to the right pin, what I’ve done in the past is almost hit it to the scoreboard, as far left as possible, so even if you leave yourself 60 yards, you have a little bit of extra room and up the hill to stop it.

“But each one plays it however they feel like. If you’re a good enough wedge player and you have confidence in your wedge game, you can lay up and leave yourself a 110 to 130 shot, which I don’t think is the easiest with the ever-swirling winds of Augusta National, but I have done it to the short left pin a couple times in the past just because I didn’t think I could get it close enough to the green to be comfortable.

“It’s a hole that everybody assumes we birdie, yet it still plays over par because of how intricate it is.”

Translation: Golf is more than a hit, find it and hit it again. There’s a lot of thinking going on.

Rahm talked about the challenges that are often overlooked at Nos. 13 and 15 — the par-5s on the back nine that most assume are almost automatic birdies for players at the game’s top level.

Later, he launched into an explanation of the difficulty in Amen Corner, Nos. 11-13 when the Masters is often decided.

“That could be a very long answer,” he said — and away he went for several hundred words.

Condensed version: “Be on land, hopefully on the green and if not, try to get up and down” on the par-3 12th hole.

The long par-4 11th calls for “driver as hard as possible, aim for the right edge of the back bunker and hope to hit the middle third of the green. ... Most of the time, it’s a 6-, 5-, 4-iron and you’re just hoping to hit the green.”

Increased distance makes the par-5 13th more challenging, and “what most people don’t know with the added number is, even if you hit a draw down to the left, if you don’t hit it far enough, those tree branches are still in your way. So, you can’t really go for it as you hit a big draw into not the widest green.”

There’s more ... his Champions Dinner experiences, his tale on the Ryder Cup at Valderrama he heard there, how “quite unique to see a full room of grown men, in essence, acting like kids again because of the love they have for this game and the stories of Seve. So for me, that’s about as special as a dinner can get.”

So, on days like Tuesday and Jon Rahm is talking, the golf world understands how much he is missed.

This story was originally published April 8, 2026 at 7:02 AM with the headline "When Jon Rahm talks, the golf world understands how much he is missed."