Jon Rahm has an ego that doesn’t even fit in all of Bilbao, his critics claim, the same ones who proclaim him a traitor or hypocrite, but it is that ego, precisely, that absolute desire to stand out above everyone else that has made him the standard bearer. , the flag, of the calculated madness of Saudi Arabia in its megalomaniacal plan to become the world sports empire. And all that is worth more, for him and to measure his importance in the stock market of world sport, at the pinnacle of it, than the economic weight of the 500 million euros that he will receive for his defection from the old PGA Tour.
Only one player in his prime has been offered such an amount. Woods was offered more. But he is no longer a player. He is a symbol. Rahm is unique.
No Spanish athlete could go so far, so high, the one and only around which the world revolves. Not even Rafa Nadal, with an unrivaled track record and universal fame, but always one more in the holy trinity of tennis with Federer and Djokovic, not even Fernando Alonso from his best years or Pau Gasol.
This is not about fame, popularity, or dragging the fans along. It’s about the new world sports order. To sit at the table of the Saudi crown prince, Mohamed Bin Salmán, and request part of his charity, Cristiano Ronaldo or the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, and even the president of the IOC and owner of the five rings of the Games, line up. Olympians, Thomas Bach. A Spanish athlete already sits at that table.
No one doubts that if Rahm has crossed the border to the LIV Circuit, the PGA will be left without any arsenal to defend its territory and will be forced to finally come to an agreement with the Saudi bosses, owners of the universe, and their sporting monarchs. The golfer from Barrika (Bizkaia) has acquired such importance in the global geopolitical strategy of sport.
Rahm, 29 years old, two majors, a Masters and a United States Open, several more victories on the circuit and in the Ryder Cup, and a charisma that not even Rory McIlroy, the other alpha male in world golf, can match, is a rarity in Spanish sport. He has arrived to put an end to the romantic halo that always surrounded the founding father of Spanish golf, Seve Ballesteros, the greatest genius in the history of Spanish sport, a character whose weight in the evolution of his sport, in its revolution, no one, not even Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus came to match, a unique, arrogant and humble being, with more of an artist’s soul than the navel of an aspiring to dominate the world, more prone to getting into battles that were lost beforehand than to calculatingly getting on the bandwagon of sure winner. . His heir, José María Olazabal, was happy when he played without advertising on his cap or his niki as if the weight of the stickers and advertisements were unbearable. Rahm was always something else, a leader of generation Z, those who are not afraid of losing but not winning, who left his home as a kid and without knowing English to become great at the University of Phoenix, and there, perhaps, he discovered, stubborn and convinced, that he was born to conquer.
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