Jon Rahm’s silent miracle putt in 2020 is a stark reminder of sports' lockdown era
At the 2020 BMW Championship, Jon Rahm unfurled one of the greatest putts in golf history, and almost no one saw it in person
It’s one of the great putts in golf history — 66 feet, 30 feet of break, a 1.7% chance of success — and only a couple dozen people saw it happen in person.
Three years ago at the BMW Championship, Jon Rahm stood over a birdie putt at the first playoff hole. He’d just watched Dustin Johnson pour in a 43-foot putt on the final hole of regulation to force a playoff. Rahm started the ball rolling, and 66 feet later … perfection.
What’s fascinating about watching that putt now isn’t just Rahm’s flatstick brilliance. He was already one of the best players in the world at the time, ranked No. 2 to Johnson. It’s what’s happening — or, more accurately, what isn’t happening — in the gallery behind him.
The 2020 BMW Championship was held the week of Aug. 30, which, as you might recall, was well within the blast radius of pandemic-inspired lockdowns. The few fans gathered in the gallery behind Rahm are all wearing masks, even though most are socially distanced and all are, of course, outside.
Remember those days? Remember cutouts and stuffed animals in the stands at baseball games and computer-generated fans in the stands at football games? Remember the NBA bubble, in which every game looked like it was taking place inside a video game? Yeah, we’ve tried to block it all out, too.
Golf came back more quickly than most sports — the first post-lockdown tournament teed off in mid-June — in large part because golf doesn’t require a whole lot of intimate, breathing-the-same-air contact. By the time of the FedExCup playoffs in late August, a few scattered fans — along with tournament workers and media, mostly — began trickling onto the course, and those are the ones visible behind Rahm.
“It’s obviously a very different week,” Rahm said in advance of the 2023 edition of the tournament. “We don't have COVID rules. Everybody is here present, and we don't have those Zoom media calls.”
The strangeness continued through the rest of 2020, as you well recall. The 2020 Masters, at which Rahm finished T7, were a once-in-a-lifetime (let’s hope) anomaly — a Masters in November rather than April. There, Rahm remarked on how odd it is to be able to hear patrons digging into bags of Masters-branded chips 150 yards away.
At the time of his miraculous putt, Rahm still hadn’t won his first major; he has since bagged a U.S. Open (2021) and a Masters (2023). The 2020 BMW Championship ranks as the fourth-best tournament of his career, from a world ranking standpoint, but he notes that there’s something missing from it because of the emptiness. Asked to rank that putt among all his shots, he was honest:
“I think if there were crowds and I made that putt, it probably would be a unanimous No. 1, but because there was nobody there, and there was really no reaction besides mine … it's a bit lackluster because of what you're used to seeing when you make a good putt at a moment like the U.S. Open,” he said. “It wouldn't be No. 1, but it's definitely top three.”
The world outside the ropes has returned to something approaching normal, even if golf as a sport is now undergoing a total upheaval. Back in 2020, “LIV” was just the number of the most recent Super Bowl. Now, the golf world is writhing in chaos … but at least we can watch it in person together.
