LIV’s best golfers are barreling toward a Masters collision

JOHANNESBURG — While something raucous is certainly building at the Club at Steyn City, here at LIV South Africa, it feels like one LIV duel won’t get decided for another 23 days, and on a different continent. LIV will place 11 golfers in the Masters field three weeks from now, but the amount you’d place a wager on winning? It might just be two … but possibly two of the top three. 

Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau — by far the two biggest assets on the globe-trotting circuit — have been circling each other these last three weeks in different corners of the world. They’re going to keep doing so the next two days in Johannesburg, too, and one might even lift the trophy. (DeChambeau leads by two. Rahm trails by three.) But regardless of what happens in South Africa, both are obviously tracking toward some of the best golf of their lives, just days before the first major of the year.

During a Masters-related chat Tuesday morning, Rahm admitted that the form he feels right now mimics where he was in late 2021 into 2022, or late 2022 into 2023 — the two peaks that stood out to him across his career. Not so shockingly, that’s when he won his majors. 

“I would say on ’23, my iron game was probably just as sharp,” Rahm said. “Putting was possibly a little bit better. I don’t know what the stats say. I’m just going based on what I feel. And driving was good. I feel like I’ve driven it better so far this year. 

“I’m feeling really, really good. That’s what I can say. I don’t know how to quantify it because it doesn’t always correlate to wins.”

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He’s certainly lived up to that. Rahm’s season started with a second-place finish in Riyadh, continued with another second in Australia, and then felt like a real breakthrough when he finally won in Hong Kong. He squeezed enough out of his game last week in Singapore to finish solo fifth. Atop that leaderboard was DeChambeau.

DeChambeau’s spurt of form has been much more recent. He contended with Rahm (also in a losing effort to Anthony Kim) in Australia before a T24 in Hong Kong. Then he won in Singapore with what he called his “major championship golf.” 

A few days later, he’s now halfway to a wire-to-wire victory, two clear of the field. And what’s different about DeChambeau, when compared to Rahm, is that his nirvana of form is much more narrow. Rather than pinpoint specific years or months of a season, he cites a very specific third and final round from August 2023. 

“I feel like I’m getting closer to when I shot 58 at Greenbrier,” DeChambeau said Saturday after his way-too easy 65, which featured a double bogey. “That’s what I’ve been striving to get back to. I lost it a little bit. I’ve been working with Dana [Dahlquist] and Sportsbox [AI] to figure out what exactly I did back in ’23 at Greenbrier. I feel like I’m getting close to that again.”

That 58 not only followed a 61 from its previous day, but it saw him beat the LIV field average by nearly nine strokes. He finished 23 under in a 54-hole tournament and won by six. 

“It was the greatest swing performance of my entire career,” he continued. “I just remember being able to step up on the tee and not even think about anything and it would do exactly what I was seeing. It was like a video game to me for a while. I didn’t really know exactly what I was doing, but I had just fallen into this pattern.”

DeChambeau gets starry-eyed when thinking about that round, like that 58 was some crush of his infatuation. “You get to that place and it’s almost like nothing else matters,” he said Friday. But it was one of the first memorable moments of his partnership with current caddie Greg Bodine. 

Bodine has been able to learn and speak the DeChambeau language so well that the two now feel inseparable as a competitive duo. They may not have gotten DeChambeau all the way to the feeling of that West Virginia 58 since, but they have won the U.S. Open, contended at the PGA Championship and were good enough to earn a front-row seat to Sunday’s final round with Rory McIlroy last Masters. DeChambeau said earlier this week he’s been carrying learnings ever since that tournament about how he needs to strike it. He said he’s in the fine-tuning stage of Masters prep, a bit surprised it all came together last week. But then he shot 63-65 already this week. There may not be much more tuning left to do.