You didn’t need a leaderboard to know what was about to happen, but a glimpse on Sunday afternoon in Paris removed all doubt.
The men’s Olympic golf tournament was over. Paris had anointed a Gold Medal winner. His name?
Jon Rahm.
“Yeah, when I got to 10 and 11, I looked at the board and I was at 14 and Jon had got to 20,” Rory McIlroy said. “So I was like …”
He paused.
“I didn’t think I had a chance.”
Rahm was four shots clear of the field at the time, playing the style of solar-eclipse golf we’ve seen cast darkness over contenders of all kinds of golf tournaments, including two major championships and a handful of Ryder Cups. You know this kind of Jon Rahm golf: Where the hole seems massive and golf’s challenges seem easy and he seems inevitable.
We all knew it was coming, which was why it was so shocking when … it didn’t. Rahm lost, collapsed really, blowing his lead with back-to-back bogeys in the moment the rest of the field started charging. In about five seconds he’d dropped from the solo lead into a battle for the Bronze. By the time it was over, he’d choked the fight for third, too, tumbling with an ugly double bogey to a soul-battering T5 finish.
Since passing judgment is part of being a sports fan, and since Sundays at big events provide us with an unusually clarifying sense of closure, Rahm’s collapse practically begs for takery. Perhaps, as more than a few have suggested, big Jon has lost a step since his wallet-fattening departure for LIV Golf. Perhaps, as many more have suggested, he’s lost a step because of his wallet-fattening departure and the strange format, schedule and life it birthed. And perhaps, as just a few more have posited, he’d better like the way his wallet looks, because his game is gone for good.
The funny thing about these judgments, though, is that they come close to the point while still totally missing it.
Yes, Rahm lost a golf tournament, the latest in a string of disappointing finishes in golf’s biggest events. Yes, he’d lost in the season after leaving for LIV, and yes, the league’s strange schedule of 54-hole, limited-field tournaments could have played a role in his ominously collapsing between holes 55 and 72. But Rahm was devastated on Sunday in Paris — clearly heartbroken — and history didn’t have a lick to do with it.
Why? Because Rahm was devastated in a place much purer than LIV millions or culture wars, shell-shocked in the deepest, furthest recesses of his competitive self. A hurt that extended from the kid who first picked up a golf club into the adult who called representing his country “the ultimate prize” in a way that made you think he actually meant it.
In other words, at this Olympic golf tournament with zero dollars, no sponsors and different brand of glory on the line, Rahm wasn’t interesting for the ways the money had changed him, he was interesting for the ways it hadn’t.
“I don’t remember the last time I played a tournament and I felt this,” he said Sunday evening. “I don’t know what the word is because, you know, I not only feel like I let myself down, but, to just not get it done for the whole country of Spain, it’s a lot more painful than I would like it to be.”
Rahm’s voice ached, softening from its typical tenor like the morning after a long night of drinking. Except this was the worst kind of hangover. He’d arrived in Paris expecting a champagne headache, and by Sunday evening he’d found a cheap tequila sledgehammer lodged in his cranium.
Like near every other golfer in the field, Rahm entered this week unsure of its seriousness. The Olympics are the world’s oldest sporting competition, but the Olympic golf tournament is barely a newborn — Sunday was only golf’s third-ever iteration in the modern Games, and the first that wasn’t outwardly affected by the spread of an unusual disease. In a sport built upon its traditions, the Olympics are noticeably without one.
In the money-crazed ‘sh*tshow’ (McIlroy’s words) of modern professional golf, a lack of heritage makes Olympic golf vulnerable. For some of the best golfers in the world, Olympic glory and nationalist pride aren’t worth a week of unpaid labor. Others feel they’d be better served spending the Olympics at the driving range … or on a beach.
The best way to change that perception arrived Sunday, when five of the best golfers on the planet battled for long hours in the Paris sun for a winner’s check of what, in Scheffler’s case, turned out to be $38,000 (c/o the U.S. Olympic Committee). The golf was brilliant and the competition was fierce and the excitement was palpable even among those who couldn’t be bothered to know the difference between a pitching wedge and a pitchfork.
The formula was simple enough: the best golfers in the world competing at an interesting venue for a cause bigger than themselves. As it happens, this is the formula that makes the Olympics truly great — a formula noticeably absent of $25 million in prize money.
“Two of the most meaningful weeks in my career [are] two events where we make no money,” Rahm said. “I’ve said that a million times, and I’ll say it again because the Ryder Cup and this one are up there.”
Some day, perhaps, we will tell the story of Scottie Scheffler, the best player on the planet, who fired a final-round 62 to claim his first-ever Gold Medal and give the Olympic golf competition an Eiffel-sized jolt. We will tell the story of a mad dash to the podium, a suddenly ferocious battle for silver and bronze, and the national anthem tears that briefly overtook the sports monoculture.
When we do, we would be smart not to forget the player whose collapse set the events of Sunday in Paris into motion, the one who gave away the Gold and missed the podium all together. Jon Rahm is not the hero of this Olympic story. He might not be a hero at all. But he is the guy who articulated why golf belongs in the Olympics, and the reason has nothing to do with finishing first, second or third.
“I’ve gotten the question, where this tournament would rank in my opinion or what I would think it would feel like to win,” Rahm said. “I think by losing today, I’m getting a much deeper appreciation of what this tournament means to me than if I had won any medal. I’m getting a taste of how much it really mattered.”
It did matter, by the way. Enough to stop Rahm’s inevitability. Enough to make Scheffler a national hero. Enough to matter more than all the money in the world.
There’s nothing in golf that does that. Well, now there is.
