PGA Championship 2026: Joining LIV cost Jon Rahm’s legacy. He can start earning it back on Sunday

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — It was the type of lip-out that has detonated Mt. Rahm in the past—hard and mean from short, the ball spinning out with the casual cruelty of a door slammed in your face after you’ve already reached for the handle. The kind that, in the past, has sent the Spaniard glaring into the cup as if the hole itself had shifted on him mid-stroke. Instead, Jon Rahm took a breath. He tapped in, shook hands with Andrew Putnam, and walked through the crowd, across the practice green, into scoring, his pace deliberate but unhurried. Someone who understands that how you absorb punishment is its own form of scoring.

At a PGA Championship that has played like a U.S. Open, that’s the only thing keeping players upright. And with 18 holes remaining, Rahm is in contention to claim a much-anticipated third major title.

“It’s an extremely difficult golf course. Today is probably the easiest setup of the three, but still with the wind the way it’s going and the greens right now, you have to play really good golf to give yourself a chance out there,” Rahm said after a third-round 67 that leaves him a four under for the championship. “So not surprised the scores are a little bit harder to accomplish in the afternoon, especially the later tee times.

“As far as me is concerned, that was a fantastic round of golf and thrilled to be in a good position for tomorrow.”

It’s tempting to say Rahm has kept his cool this week, though that framing requires a small asterisk: he did accidentally catch a volunteer in the face with a divot after an angry swipe at the rough, a reminder that the embers are never fully out. But Aronimink has stress-tested everyone in its path, and against that standard, Rahm has been a model of relative composure, absorbing bad breaks, grinding through the difficult stretches and refusing to let one sour moment bleed into the next. The underlying numbers reflect it. He’s second in the field tee-to-green and first around the greens, a combination that suggests a player in command of his instrument even when the music gets difficult.

The putter hasn’t been a weapon; more a reliable foot soldier than a difference-maker. But it hasn’t cost him, either, which at this PGA qualifies as victory.

“They’re hard. The best way I can describe it is you’re going to be … you’re going to see very few major championship golf courses where, if you’re in the middle of the green, you’re going to have as hard a time to two-putt as you can on some of the holes out here, especially with the pin locations,” Rahm said. “Usually being in the middle is a safe haven. This week you need to think about where you’re going to leave the ball because the middle isn’t always the best option with how sloped those greens are. I think a little bit is where I leave myself, what putts I’m leaving myself, for those statistics to change. I didn’t feel like I putted badly on the first day. They just didn’t go in.”

Putting aside, he has looked like the Rahm of the past. Which, frankly, hasn’t been present for some time.

Rahm at majors was once a fixed coordinate on the leaderboard. Eight career top-fives before his departure to LIV, anchored by wins at the 2021 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines and the 2023 Masters. Since crossing over, he has approximately zero such finishes. Save for a brief Sunday charge in the PGA at Quail Hollow last year, he has been a non-factor every time the golf world convenes for something that actually counts. Playing in a league that has spent its existence batting away accusations of being a glorified exhibition, Rahm’s major no-shows have served as one of the prosecution’s most compelling talking points surrounding the competitive attrition that sets in when a player trades the pro golf grind for whatever LIV is supposed to be.

The cruelty of it all is what Rahm was before. After slipping on the green jacket at Augusta, he appeared to be on an all-time trajectory. Two majors and 20 wins before his 29th birthday, the first European to hold both the Masters and U.S. Open titles, a player whose gifts had finally caught up with their own promise. He carried, too, the particular weight of being cast as the spiritual heir to Seve Ballesteros, a designation that arrives with expectations no job description could fully prepare you for. For a player of that heft to dissolve into irrelevance at the only events that measure legacy, while running up scores against fields that couldn’t hold tour cards, teetered between disappointment and waste.

Of course, the majors have only been part of the damage. In the non-Phil Mickelson division, no one has been a bigger self-inflicted casualty of golf’s civil war. Rahm was never beloved on the PGA Tour but he was universally respected, and respect, in the long economy of a career, is the more durable currency. He has, to put it mildly, burned through his tender. He denied interest in LIV repeatedly and on the record, then took the money anyway, a reversal that had less to do with principle than with the number of zeroes.

More recently he picked a gratuitous fight with the DP World Tour despite the circuit making concessions to preserve his Ryder Cup eligibility, a quarrel that served no strategic purpose and revealed something smaller than his talent. For a player who billed himself as a student of the game—someone who understood its history and what endures—the self-sabotage was especially hard to reconcile. Arguably, it explains the hollowness of the past three years. He knew what mattered. He chose otherwise. And the record across 10 major starts since then reads like a verdict.

Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that as LIV’s collapse came into focus, something in Rahm has shifted. He has appeared visibly deflated when the subject arises in press conferences, acknowledging at various points that he feels essentially bound by the contract he signed. Less an employee than a man serving out a sentence. Even this week, when asked whether he would do it all again, Rahm did not offer anything resembling a ringing endorsement.

But the resignation—or the hope that he might have an out if the league folds—may also have loosened something. Freed from the weight of his game being read as a verdict on his choices, he has looked like himself again this week. When asked this week whether a strong finish might benefit LIV as the circuit scrambles for emergency funding, Rahm’s answer was blunt: “I’m thinking more about myself.”

“I’m not going to take on anything outside what I can control when it comes to competing tomorrow,” Rahm continued. “If I do get it done and I sit here again tomorrow, then you can ask me the same question, and I’ll give you an answer. But what it would mean for Spain as well in the grand slam tally and being the last leg of the grand slam for us as well, there’s a lot of things that would mean a lot, but too much of it is out of my control.”

A victory wouldn’t necessarily rehabilitate his public standing overnight. That ledger has too many entries to be settled in a single week. But it would be a start. Sports fans are front-runners, after all. It would be a marker on the map back toward the player golf once believed he could become, and maybe, on some level, the player he still believes he is.

“As hard as it is to play, the challenge can also be kind of fun if you do well,” Rahm said Saturday. “That’s probably the reason why the leaderboard is so bunched up and it’s going to be such a good Sunday tomorrow.”

He’s right about both. Through three rounds, Aronimink has functioned less as a venue than an interrogator, a course that doesn’t merely expose your game but demands to know what you’ll do when it turns on you. Eighteen holes remain. For the first time in a long time, Rahm looks like he has the answers.