Jon Rahm has the DP World Tour Championship set in his sights as he prepares to make his debut in the European Tour’s season-ending event.
“Nobody since Seve (Ballesteros) from Spain has won it (the Race to Dubai)!” This stat excited young Jon Rahm as he’s set to compete in his inaugural DP World Tour Championship. Although the Spaniard sits in fourth in the Race to Dubai Rankings and can’t catch Tommy Fleetwood and the frontrunners, he’s still a huge talent for fans to look out for and expect to be finishing towards the summit of the leaderboard.
Rahm’s rapid rise to one of the top players in the game has taken people from both sides of the Atlantic by surprise. He clinched a debut title at Torrey Pines on the PGA Tour and then followed a third-place finish at the WGC-Mexico Championship with a runner-up at the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play.
Those performances made him a serious contender in the Race to Dubai and he cemented his place with a runaway victory at the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open hosted by the Rory Foundation.
Fun times ahead at the #HeroChallenge in Dubai. Fun way to start the week on the @EuropeanTour @F_Molinari @TommyFleetwood1 @AlexNorenGolf pic.twitter.com/cwaZEiKapp
— Jon Rahm Rodriguez (@JonRahmpga) November 4, 2017
With emulating Seve high on his agenda, Rahm has recently sought the help of another Spanish legend – Jose Maria Olazábal – to iron out some small kinks in his short game.
“Statistically, playing from ten to 30 yards out on the PGA Tour I have not been up to the same standard as the rest of my game. I was just asking Ollie (Olazábal) what he does. I hit a couple shots and he gave me a couple tips and also told me a couple things Seve used to do. I have a few things to work on.
“Seve is the reason why I’m sitting here today. If it wasn’t for the ‘97 Ryder Cup in Spain, my father would have never started to play golf. If he had never started, I would have never picked it up.
“Nobody in my family took up the game until Seve put golf on the map in Spain with that Ryder Cup.”