SAN DIEGO – Even at 26 years old and with a newborn son at home, Jon Rahm can be wonderfully adolescent at times, like on Tuesday as he faced a pair of oceans, the Pacific and waves of uncomfortable questions.
What did you do during your quarantine?
“I watched a lot of TV. Rick and Morty, Season 5 is coming up, so I was re-watching Season 4,” said Rahm, who was forced to withdraw while leading the Memorial after testing positive for COVID-19.
What are the positives you can take from what was an extremely public and extremely complicated situation?
“I got it all. I had [COVID-19], I got the antibodies, got the vaccination. I feel invincible at this point,” he laughed.
Why did you watch the final round at Muirfield Village?
“To be honest, I was kind of wondering how close they were going to get to 18 under,” he admitted.
It was the best of Rahm on Tuesday at the U.S. Open, where he will be making his first start since having to give up a commanding six-stroke lead and record-tying 18-under total through three rounds at Jack’s Place.
To Rahm’s chagrin, no one even sniffed that 18-under total. Patrick Cantlay won at 13 under.
Still, where some might have taken a woe-is-me approach, Rahm embraced a decidedly more positive outlook. At Torrey Pines, he was honest, light-hearted and, yes, a little juvenile as evidenced by his Rick and Morty binge.
There is no shortage of reasons for Rahm to feel snake bitten. The Spaniard became the first player to test positive while leading a PGA Tour event and just the fourth player to test positive during a competition.
He also didn’t wish to spend any time second-guessing his own choices. Rahm tested positive after being pulled into the circuit’s contact-tracing protocols. Had he been fully vaccinated he would not have been in that pool, which requires daily testing along with no symptoms.
“Truth is I was vaccinated. I just wasn’t out of that 14-day period. I had started the process, and unfortunately, that’s how timing ended up being,” he said.
But even the small print didn’t send Rahm into a spiral. In fact, he spent time on Tuesday defending the Tour’s decision and pointing out that they had no choice.
“To all the people criticizing the PGA Tour, they shouldn’t,” he said, flatly. “The PGA Tour did what they had to do. The CDC [has] rules for a reason.”
The only time Rahm even flirted with the idea of blame was when he was asked about the circumstances of how he was told he’d tested positive. In a dramatic moment that was seen in real-time by a national television audience, Rahm learned his fate from the Tour’s medical director Dr. Tom Hospel moments after completing his round.
“Well, I’m not going to lie. That’s the second time I got put on the spot on national TV on the same golf course on the same hole,” Rahm laughed. “For all those people wondering when I said, ‘Not again,’ that’s exactly what I mean, not again.”
A year earlier, Rahm was informed on Sunday after putting out on the 18th green at Muirfield Village that he was going to be penalized after his ball moved before a chip on the 16th hole. The difference between the two events is that he still won in 2020. This year he never had the chance.
“It could have been handled a little bit better, yeah, but it still doesn’t change the fact of what really happened,” he reasoned. “It was the second time I got put on the spot on the same course is why I was a little bit more hurt.”
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But then there’s a difference between being hurt and having regret. In hindsight, it’s easy to question why he wasn’t fully vaccinated, and after two high-profile heartbreaks at Memorial, it would be just as easy to question why me? That was never in the cards for Rahm.
Instead, he watched Rick and Morty, spent a little time in his indoor golf simulator and tested negative twice for COVID-19, which allowed him to more properly prepare for this week’s championship.
“I just tried to really spend as much time in the present as possible,” Rahm said. “It was really easy when you’re laying in your bed to go back and forth, what could be in the future, what could have been in the past. A lot of meditation and mindful reading and trying to stay in the present …. trying to understand what that experience was for and trying to learn from it.”
Rahm handled what was, for the PGA Tour, rock bottom of the pandemic with an impressive amount of grace and understanding, which are both in short supply on Tour at the moment.