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SANDWICH, England – U.S. Open champion Jon Rahm has revealed his distinctive shorter swing is a direct result of being born with a club foot. Rahm, the favorite for this week’s Open Championship at Royal St George’s, explained how the restriction of movement in his right ankle has necessitated the swing he has now used to win six times on the PGA TOUR. “I have the swing I have, and I’ve gotten more mobile and stronger in some parts of my swing so that might slightly change it, but I have certain unique parts and certain unique, let’s say, physical limitations that let me swing the way I swing, and I don’t deviate from that,” Rahm explained. “I was born with a club foot on my right leg, which means for anybody that’s sensitive about that, my right leg up to the ankle was straight, my foot was 90 degrees turned inside and basically upside down. “So when I was born… they pretty much broke every bone in the ankle and I was casted within 20 minutes of being born from the knee down. I think every week I had to go back to the hospital to get recasted, so from knee down my leg didn’t grow at the same rate.” Rahm also revealed his right leg is a centimeter and a half shorter than his left leg and he’s spent the majority of his golf life adapting his game around his own unique swing rather than searching for something others might term more clinical. “What I mean by limitations is I didn’t take a full swing because my right ankle doesn’t have the mobility or stability to take it. So I learned at a very young age that I’m going to be more efficient at creating power and be consistent from a short swing. If I take a full to parallel, yeah, it might create more speed, but I have no stability,” he added. After claiming his first major championship last month at Torrey Pines, Rahm enters The Open in red hot form – 44 under in his last 12 worldwide rounds. All signs point to the Spaniard having a great chance to become just the seventh player to win both Open’s in the same year. Only Bobby Jones (twice – 1926, 1930), Gene Sarazen (1932), Ben Hogan (1953), Lee Trevino (1971), Tom Watson (1982) and Tiger Woods (2000) have managed the incredible feat. Rahm’s previous best Open Championship finish is a tie for 11th in 2019 but with a seventh-place finish at last week’s Scottish Open he continues to trend towards doing much better. And with the major drought over, the shackles are off. “It would be pretty incredible to win both Opens in one year. It would be amazing. I did have a sense of relief after winning the first major. I felt like for the better part of five years, all I heard is major, major, major just because I was playing good golf, as if it was easy to win a major championship,” Rahm said. “But the fact that you are expected to win one means nothing… I still come with the same level of excitement obviously and willingness to win… It would be pretty incredible to be able to win The Open. Nobody (from Spain) after Seve has been able to do it, so to give Spain that, that would be pretty unique, as well.”
When Georgia coach Chris Haack goes to check on his guys at The RSM Classic he’ll have his work cut out for him. In total, 11 of Haack’s former players make their livings on the PGA TOUR, with Bubba Watson the only former Bulldog not in the field for this week’s RSM. There are no slouches in this bunch, either, with 10 making the FedExCup Playoffs last summer. Nine have won, with Watson (12), Harris English (4), Kevin Kisner (4), Chris Kirk (4), Russell Henley (3), Brendon Todd (3), Brian Harman (2), Hudson Swafford (2) and Keith Mitchell (1) combining for 35 TOUR titles. The next in line? None other than Haack’s future son-in-law Greyson Sigg. The 26-year-old Augusta, Georgia native is a rookie on TOUR after winning twice on the Korn Ferry Tour last season. He says it’s not hard to figure out why the Georgia contingent continues to grow and thrive: At Georgia, unless a player finished in the top 10 in the event prior, they’re in the qualifying mix for the next event. “We had to earn it when we were in school,” Sigg said, “and you got to earn it today. Nothing’s given to you in this game, and that’s how Haacker treated us in school. Some coaches don’t like it, but I think it’s genius. You learn to find yourself and what you like to do at a young age, so when you come out of college, you’re ready to go do a Monday qualifier and (used to) having to shoot 8 under to get through. “I think that’s a big deal,” he continued. “There’s a reason why there’s that many Georgia guys on TOUR.” Beyond that, Haack sees one similarity between a lot of his players – the consistency in their demeanors. They shake off the bad shots quickly, one of the things Haack stresses at Georgia. Sigg listened well. “They don’t get too high and low,” Haack said. “And that’s something we’ve always preached and tried to get them to do, but he was already pretty good at it.” Sigg’s fiancée Katie Haack said what you see is what you get with the affable and laid back Sigg, whom fellow Georgia product Sepp Straka describes as one of the funniest people he knows. Not that he’s totally immune from nerves. “The only time I’ve ever seen him rattled was when he proposed,” Katie said with a laugh. In fact, there were two other times, said Georgia Associate Head Coach Jim Douglas. “The two times he was here that he got to a tournament and the ball was not drawing,” Douglas said. “Talk about freaking someone out; he’d never seen the ball go straight.” Douglas laughed. “He was literally freaked out. But he woke up the next day and it was back to his normal draw.” Keith Mitchell jokes that Sigg rolls out of bed “hitting a 5-yard draw” and that his “natural game is perfect.” Douglas disagrees. He said Sigg’s shot shape is more like a 2- or 3-yard draw. Either way, it was that consistency and ball-striking prowess that caught Haack’s eye. He said Sigg’s demeanor reminds him of other former UGA standouts, but the ball-striking and stature remind him most of Harman. Both are on the small side, but are nevertheless ball-striking machines with a beautiful natural draw. Both are plenty long, and routinely hit 16 or 17 greens in regulation per round. Both could sometimes get too aggressive with the flat stick when they were juniors and had to become better lag putters through college and into their professional careers. “One of the things I liked about him was he had a really good solid, repeatable swing,” Haack said of Sigg. “His swing never changed. It was always very compact. He wasn’t very tall, but he could really pound it out there pretty good, and he always hit the same shot. I remember thinking I liked that, but I also remember seeing him many times thinking that boy is going to have to learn how to putt to get to the next level.” Douglas says Sigg’s speed on the greens got better over the years. Putting contests on the Georgia practice green with his teammates Straka and Mookie Demoss paid dividends, and Sigg never tinkered with the short, compact motion that he developed at Augusta Country Club, right next door to Augusta National. Sigg’s dad, David, got him started in the game, taking him and his older brother, William, who went on to play at Presbyterian College, with him when he’d go play with their grandfather. Eventually Greyson graduated from playing in bunkers to hitting shots himself, and was as young as 5 when he began to wow spectators on the range. When he was 7, his dad asked Tommy Bradley, then the head pro at Augusta Country Club, if he should consider lengthening that action. But Sigg didn’t change much; his swing today is mostly unchanged. “I asked the head pro if Greyson should maybe try to take it a little bit further because it was almost Jon Rahm like short,” David said. “Tommy said, ‘Don’t touch it! Don’t do nothing! Leave him alone!’” Greyson was 10 when he started working with Augusta CC’s Gary Cressend, who still coaches him today. “His swing was always short,” David said, “but he could always pop it back then. He’s just always been an unbelievable ball striker for his age.” While his motion was honed at his home club, Sigg’s desire to play professionally was honed across the fence at Augusta National, where his mom, Karen, works as an executive assistant to the chairman. Every spring break week, his family would get Masters tickets, and Greyson and William watched the world’s best compete for a Green Jacket. Greyson liked Tiger best, but in 2004, with Phil Mickelson on his way to his first title, the lefty handed him a ball on back-to-back days, both times on the walk between the sixth green and seventh tee. Seventeen years later, Sigg would play with Mickelson in the final round of the 2021 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. Now a PGA TOUR member, he is hoping to join his future father-in-law’s pack of Georgia alums with a TOUR win and earn a spot in his big hometown event. It’s part of the reason the hyper-competitive rookie doesn’t get too caught up in the texts congratulating him on his fine play. (He’s made four of six cuts and is 86th in the FedExCup.) The stage is bigger, but his goal is the same as it was on the Korn Ferry Tour: Win. “This is what I want to do,” Sigg said, “and so happy to finally be here on TOUR and look forward to staying here for many years, but I haven’t been playing great. Making a lot of cuts and everyone keeps texting me great playing when I finish 30th, but I’m not exactly pleased with it and know what I need to do to get better. I’m looking to finish off the fall with a bang and get a nice finish here.”
It’s been 19 months since Tiger won the Masters. But most people remember everything from that week. Still, there are some things you don’t know about his victory.
