One of the biggest events on the PGA Tour calendar kicks off this Thursday in Dublin, Ohio. This is the Memorial Tournament, a tournament created in 1976 by Jack Nicklaus in which Jon Rahm inscribed his name on the trophy two years ago, the first Spaniard to achieve it in its 45-year history with which he reached number one in the world, and where he was about to revalidate it in 2021 if he had not been infected by COVID when he led with an iron fist.
Jon Rahm, situation
The Memorial Tournament is one of five tournaments to which the PGA Tour grants “invitation” status, and consequently has a reduced field of just 120 players (unlike most full-field open tournaments with a field of 156 players).
The other four tournaments with invitation status are the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the RBC Heritage, the Charles Schwab Challenge held last week and the Tiger Woods Foundation tournament, the Genesis Open. He attended Arizona State University and won 11 university tournaments, second only to Phil Mickelson who earned 16 titles.
In 2015 he participated as an amateur in the Phoenix Open, finishing fifth [4]. On April 1, he became first in the World Amateur Golf Ranking and stayed there for 25 weeks, then regained the position to hold it for another 35 weeks.
He thus qualified for the U.S. Open and the Open Championship of the following year: in the first of the two tournaments he finished twenty-third, then turned professional, simultaneously losing the right to play in the Open.
Quicken Loans National was his first professional event and he finished it third. The Canadian Open, on the other hand, saw him finish second. At the end of the season he obtained a card for the PGA Tour 2017. Rahm found his first success in the Farmers Insurance Open thanks to an eagle on the last hole, managing to enter the major tournaments on the world scene.
At the Mexico Championship, an event of the World Golf Championships series, he finished third, two shots from the winner Dustin Johnson, while in the second event, the Dell Technologies Match Play, he lost the final against Johnson himself.
He later won the Irish Open by six strokes and the final tournament of the European Tour season, the DP World Tour Championship, Dubai, also winning the rookie of the year award.
Source: Tennis World USA