‘He’s a very, very good player’: Jon Rahm raves about Gareth Bale’s golf game after star-studded 2023 Farmers Insurance Open pro-am

Jon Rahm doesn’t get a star very often.

And why would he? The Spaniard is the star in most rooms now. After all, at 28 years old, Rahm already has a major championship and nine wins on both the PGA Tour and DP World Tour.

Ahead of this week’s Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego — where he won his first Tour event in 2017 and his first major at the US Open in 2021 — Rahm was part of a star-studded pro-am team. group that includes ESPN’s Michael Collins, golf content creator Tisha Alyn, and a football player who has caused Rahm quite a bit of stress over the past decade.

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“He’s the reason why Real Madrid beat my team for about 10 years, one of the reasons,” said Rahm of Gareth Bale, who recently retired from club and international football after a world-class career in which he dominated for the Spanish Titans. Real Madrid, the English Tottenham Hotspur and the national team of Wales. “I said to Gareth: you can’t be so good at professional football and golf at the same time, that just doesn’t seem fair. If you can’t be committed to one thing and have that much talent for golf, it’s not fair at all.”

“He didn’t ask for anything, and he shouldn’t ask, he’s good enough already,” Rahm exulted. “He got two strikes, which I think is already wrong. He should return strokes to the rest of the amateurs because he is a very, very good player.”

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High praise from a man looking to win his third straight PGA Tour start and enter the event this week with a streak of four wins in his last six global starts. Now ranked No. 3 in the world, Rahm has finished no worse than T-8 in his last seven starts and has a knack for high finishes at Torrey Pines. Since his 2017 win, Rahm has finished T-29, T-5, 2, T-7 and T-3 on the California coast course.

“We had a great time, we had a great nine holes,” Rahm continued. “I wish I had a group that was this entertaining every time I play a pro-am because those nine holes went by really fast and there was a lot of laughter.”

Story originally appeared on GolfWeek