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Jon Rahm got off to a good start in his bid to defend his Mexican Open championship at the Vedanta Championship on Thursday, firing a four-under 67 opening round, putting him near the top of the leaderboard as the afternoon wave prepares to unfold. go ahead.
The win this week will be the twelfth of his career on the PGA Tour and the fifth of 2023, and it will be only the second time that Ram has been able to defend a title. (Ram’s first successful title defense was at the 2019 Spanish Open).
When it comes to Ram’s career win tally, Ram admitted Wednesday that he already believes he has 12 wins on his resume.
“Technically, I shot the lowest score in [2021] Tour Championship, which I still consider a win,” he said.
Ram was alluding to the fact that the current FedEx Cup Playoffs format results in the tournament’s top two seeds getting a head start on the field in terms of scoring, so even though both Rahm and Kevin Na posted the lowest scores at East Lake that year (four – 266 strikeouts total), they were second and third, respectively, to Patrick Cantlay, who was the top seed and earned a tournament start at 10-under-par. (Ram started six-under being the fourth seed, and Na started second-under being the sixteenth seed.) Cantlay edged out Ram for the FedEx Cup title by one shot.
Given Rahm’s liberal definition of victories, it’s hard not to wonder if he also counts the 2021 Memorial Tournament, where he was forced to WD after testing positive for Covid after leading the tournament by six shots through 54 holes.
But no matter where he stands with his personal win tally, it’s clear that Ram is currently playing some of the best golf of his career. So good, in fact, that Ram said he was forced to re-evaluate his goals for the year — in February!
“One of my goals earlier in the year, I mentioned it several times, was to win multiple times again on the PGA Tour and I won my first two events,” he said. “after [the Genesis Invitational] I kind of had to — I needed a reset because I was about to accomplish everything I had set my mind to.
He continued, “I love being able to — if you have to reset or update your goals, that’s great because that means you’ve exceeded your expectations.” “So I had a day with my mental coach where we talked about things and re-evaluated and refocused on what we wanted to achieve in the year. Yeah, I had to do that, again, it’s a great thing to do.”
Prior to this year’s Hot Streak, Ram’s best PGA Tour season was in 2019-2020, when he claimed two titles on the tour. With four titles currently under his belt and months left to play this season, the Ram is already halfway to the rarefied air of an eight-win season that only a handful of historical greats have accomplished, most recently Tiger Woods in 2006.
The next record Ram is looking to match is the last player to have five wins on the PGA Tour. That was Justin Thomas, back in 2017.