Can Rahm end his and Spain’s drought at ‘world’s best course’ in LIV Golf Singapore?
While Spain is used to the odd drought its golfers are not, yet their men at least are in the midst of a barren spell stretching back almost a year.
The country that gave the game Seve Ballesteros and Jose Maria Olazabal has not had a winner on any of the three main circuits since May last year, when Pablo Larrazabal claimed the KLM Open in the Netherlands by beating compatriot Adrian Otaegui in a play-off.
In the interim Sergio Garcia has lost three play-offs across two seasons of the LIV Golf League, while Spanish golf’s current kingpin Jon Rahm is enduring the longest winless streak of his professional career.
Rahm’s case is curious, primarily because he has proved such a prolific winner since exploding onto the scene as a 21-year-old fresh out of college in the summer of 2016.
The Basque bulldozer has racked up 20 professional titles, including two majors, in just under eight years, never going more than 11 months without a victory – even during a reduced playing schedule enforced by the pandemic.
But since his Masters triumph in April last year Rahm has not returned to the winners’ circle and has been deposed as world No1 by Scottie Scheffler, in part because of form but also as a result of the Spaniard joining LIV Golf, which is yet to be granted ranking points.
The other curious aspect to all this is that it is not as if Rahm has been playing badly.
Three weeks after the Masters he was runner-up in Mexico, later last summer he shared second at the Open, and he rounded off the year with top-five finishes at two big events, the PGA Tour’s BMW Championship and the DP World Tour Championship.
The 29-year-old has carried that form into his LIV Golf career and is the only player on the Saudi-backed circuit to have finished in the top 10 of all six tournaments this season, placing him second in the individual standings.
It goes without saying that Rahm will hope to break his duck when the LIV Golf bandwagon rolls up to Sentosa Golf Club in Singapore this weekend.
This is the last event of the first half of the league but, more significantly, also his final event before the next major, the US PGA Championship, at Valhalla in two weeks’ time.
Rahm is yet to win in south-east Asia – in fact, he is yet to win outside of Spain, Ireland, the US, Mexico, Dubai and the Bahamas – but was tied for third when Brendan Steele won in Adelaide last week.
The Serapong course at Sentosa was named the best on the planet at last year’s World Golf Awards, so it might be expected to be a venue where the cream rises to the top. This ought to suit the man from Barrica.
If he can’t get over the line then perhaps it will fall to another to end the Spanish drought. Garcia finished tied with eventual winner Talor Gooch in Singapore last year and has been runner-up twice more this season already.