The simple — and effective (!) — way Jon Rahm fixed a putting funk

Jon Rahm says he wasn’t putting poorly. Then again, he wasn’t making as many as he would like, either. 

Over his past three tournaments ahead of this week’s Players Championship, Rahm finished 57th in Strokes Gained: Putting at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, 66th at the Genesis Invitational, and 68th at last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. And yes, he was well aware of his flatstick funk. 

“No, I know the stats, don’t worry,” he said on Tuesday. “I don’t need to know that it’s not going well.”

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What’s a world No. 1 to do? It is just a slide — in his event before the Waste Management, Rahm was 14th in Strokes Gained: Putting at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines, where he also won last year’s U.S. Open (behind lengthy putts on his final two holes, in fact). But then again, you don’t want these things to snowball. 

So he called, in his words, a timeout. For his putter. At the final round of the Genesis, and last week at Bay Hill, he played without his Odyssey White Hot OG Rossie S, the mallet that won him the Open. During Thursday’s first round at the Players, it was back in the bag, and the one-week-plus benching appeared to have worked.   

“I haven’t been hitting bad putts,” Rahm said Thursday. “It’s been a month of seeing putts go by the edge of the hole that were good, and that’s what it was. Sometimes — I’m usually the last person to ever blame the putter. But I felt like I needed to because that was kind of out of sorts.”

His numbers Thursday? Rahm was 11th in SG: Putting, and he 113 feet, 6 inches of putts. 

“You know, went back to it today, and I feel like I almost — sometimes when you’re working on something and something is not working properly, I feel like I myself at least can put too much attention to it and I can be thinking too much on what’s going on with the putter, and I feel like this weekend completely reversed it,” he said.

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“I said, it’s all good, let’s relax, and let’s try to get the speed of the greens. There’s nothing wrong technically. I tried to just get the speed of the greens, and it worked out beautifully. Almost kind of got me out of being too technical and more into putting as an art.”

Then there are his other recent issues up close. Over his past three events, his play near the green has mirrored his efforts on it — he was 57th in SG: Around the Green at Phoenix, 68th at the Genesis, and 64th at the Arnold Palmer. 

Thursday, he was 112th. But confident. No clubs will have to sit in the corner.  

“I had one bad month,” he said. “Why is everybody panicking? I’m also first in greens in regulation and second off the tee, so when I’m on the green that often if I’m not making a lot of putts, it’s going to show that it’s not that good. When I’m only missing two greens a round, if I miss one up-and-down, it shows that it’s bad. It’s not really bad.

“I’ve been working on some things, and sometimes, like I said in the press conference, I see improvements, the numbers might not say there’s improvement, but I see it. It’s kind of what happened. Today was a bit the opposite. Today I could tell my iron game wasn’t quite there, and when the short game needed to be there, it was.”

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