Jon Rahm lands first blow for PGA in golf’s war of the tours

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Every Masters ends with CBS’s Jim Nantz attempting to make grown men cry in Butler Cabin. Sometimes it’s more sport than the four days of golf you’ve just watched.

This year, the tear-jerking interview with the winner had a different feel.

On Sunday, 28-year-old Spaniard Jon Rahm won his first Masters. Like so many past champions in Augusta, he did so not through inspirational play, but with mental strength.

Brooks Koepka came into the day leading by four shots. At the Waste Management Open or the Charles Schwab Challenge, four shots on the final day is a lock. At Augusta National, it’s playing chicken with fate.

Koepka flinched repeatedly throughout Sunday, while Rahm pressed forward. By the end, it wasn’t close.

“I just kind of played average,” Koepka said, having played much worse than averagely. “I didn’t get any breaks either.”

Rahm didn’t need breaks because he hit fairways. He won by four strokes. It’s his second victory in a major, putting him in the company of his countryman and hero, Seve Ballesteros.

Afterward, Nantz was keen to follow that narrative vein and pushed Rahm toward it.

“History is one of the big reasons why I play,” Rahm said.

Nantz nodded along like they were hitting rehearsed lines.

“It’s wonderful to see your love of history, because history’s very important around here.”

Translation: PGA Tour 1, LIV Golf 0.

Any other year, the green jacket is Rahm’s alone. Not this year.

The split between the PGA and LIV happened last summer, but this week the cracks were on full display.

It’s subtle stuff. Golfers aren’t wrestlers, sadly. No one was out there throwing hard words around. Rather the opposite. But there was no love either.

What typifies the Masters is the gushing. It is a safe space for the old-school manly-man types to go all My Little Pony over each other. It’s a spot for Republicans to access their feelings and get in a full year’s worth of hugs.

Golfers who don’t like each other all that much pretend in Augusta. For the sake of Bobby Jones, I guess.

There was plenty of that this year, but there was a hard line drawn down the middle of the locker room.

Defectors were not welcome. They didn’t feature in any of the broadcasts until the weekend. That included Koepka, despite the fact that he was way out in front. When LIV members were mentioned, it was done in an airy, past-tense manner, as if they’d gone off to sea and never come home.

A representative moment occurred early into the thick of Sunday’s final round. LIV’s prize spokesmodel, Phil Mickelson, was paired with PGA hype man, Jordan Spieth. Both are famously garrulous on the course.

Cameras caught them walking in tandem, but definitely not together, down the fairway on the second hole. The shot lingered on them for a long time. Though they were side by side walking at the same pace, neither man looked at the other. Nobody, including their respective caddies, spoke.

“Not a lot of chatter between those two,” said a commentator. He assumed the audience would understand what he meant.

LIV came into the Masters at a disadvantage. One thing about breakaway tours – they have trouble finding opportunities to play. LIV has held only three tournaments this year. None of them goes more than 54 holes. That disadvantage showed in Koepka’s final round.

The presumption was that PGA players would lap their under-practised rivals. That didn’t work out.

Koepka was well in front on the first two days. Maybe too far in front.

But the real revelation was Mickelson. He’s been a whisper of the player he was not so long ago since joining LIV.

He hung on for the first couple of days, got his feet under him in the third round and ran amok in the fourth. Mickelson was nearly perfect on Sunday, golfing the lowest round (65) by a fiftysomething player in Masters history. If he’d had a half-dozen more holes runway, Mickelson might’ve won it.

He didn’t look very happy while he was doing it. Wearing moisture-wicking funeral attire and sunglasses in the rain, Mickelson seemed to be avoiding the crowd. They were avoiding him back.

It wasn’t until the very end that he heard a few lusty cheers. He flashed a smile after finishing up on 18 on Sunday and it occurred to you that it was the first time you’d seen him smile all week.

At the other extreme of the misery spectrum, there was Tiger Woods. With Mickelson gone, Woods stands alone as the sport’s lovable uncle. He’s got everything – the wistful attitude, the bad dad jokes and, less helpfully, the pronounced limp. When Woods swings off his reconstructed right leg, it looks like he’s standing on a flight of stairs. He made the cut, which was a bad idea. That meant he had to play a miserable Saturday in a chilly rain.

Watching him stagger through the final holes was difficult. Woods pulled out of the tournament ahead of Sunday’s round. He will doubtless play again, but his days of being regularly competitive are over. He’s an exhibition golfer now.

Without Woods, the PGA side of things lacks gravitas. They have no answer for Mickelson if he’s going to play this well in majors. Someone – Rahm? Rory McIlroy? One of the many interchangeable Camerons and Patricks? – is going to need to stand up.

I wouldn’t hold my breath. Golf’s been trying to replace Woods for a decade, and it hasn’t managed the trick.

This is where LIV has an advantage. It doesn’t need a Woods to matter. They just need to spoil it for all the future Woodses of the PGA world.

A sport that used to be perfectly solitary has now taken a team cast. Every major event from here on will be judged, first and foremost, as a referendum on who is winning golf’s global war.

This is a much harder test for the PGA. It needs to win every major to prove that it remains where it thinks it belongs.

LIV only has to win once. On Sunday, it came close enough that it was nearly as big a story as the winner.