Jon Rahm sounds a dejected note, trapped in LIV's golden cage

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Fifty years after the first of an increasingly anemic half-dozen Rocky movies was filmed a few miles from Aronimink, Philadelphia welcomed another pugilistic figure whose legacy has been cheapened by a rush to easy money and lazy, repetitive entertainment. On some topics, Jon Rahm is as readily conversant as he used to be – about the architecture of this old Donald Ross course, for example, or when comparing the record of his Spanish compatriots in the PGA Championship to the other majors.

But there’s a constant wariness about him now, as though circling the ring anticipating jabs he knows with grim certainty are coming. Two weeks after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund announced that it was withdrawing financing for LIV Golf, the former world No. 1 still doesn’t quite know what to say about the mess he’s in.

But it was apparent Tuesday that he does know what he can’t say. Contracts being what they are, you understand. Reminded that he’d once suggested his jump to LIV would hasten a deal with the PGA Tour to reunify the game, Rahm was asked whether he’d do anything differently since that deal didn’t happen and the game didn’t reunite.

“I was never like thinking that I was going to be any sort of weight that would tip the scales to make things come together. That was never an argument in my mind,” he said, apparently forgetting that four months after joining LIV he told the BBC that he felt he’d be the “tipping point” in the war between the tours. “I never made a decision based on that,” he added today.