Caddie Adam Hayes’ steady hand helped Jon Rahm to Masters win: ‘Reading my mind’
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Jon Rahm’s caddie, Adam Hayes, had one last message for his player before he won the Masters.
They were standing in the 18th fairway after a wayward drive and a second shot that came up short, staring at the mammoth greenside bunker that separated them from victory.
“Come on, let’s go get this thing up and down and be a real champion,” Hayes told Rahm. “You don’t want to bogey this last hole.”
“You’re reading my mind,” responded the 28-year-old Spaniard who was leading the Masters by four strokes.
Rahm hit a nearly perfect wedge shot that stopped a yard from the Augusta National goal line.
“He was going to win. He had 3 feet for par,” Hayes said. “I just sat there and looked around, great weather, Easter Sunday.”
The caddie started choking back tears. “Amazing,” he said.
Amazing that Rahm won his second major championship on what would’ve been the late Seve Ballesteros’ 66th birthday, two days shy of the 40th anniversary of Ballesteros’ second Masters victory.
“The Spaniards have had a great run here,” said Hayes, a former college golfer from Rockledge, Fla. “Seve, [Jose Maria Olazabal], Sergio [Garcia], now Jon. He definitely wanted to add himself to that club.”
On his way to membership in that exclusive club, Hayes said Rahm was “probably a little unsettled a lot of the back nine” as the pressure mounted.
To keep his man in the moment, Hayes kept the conversation simple and talked about yardage, the wind and the shots needed to hold that lead.
One 8-iron shot that helped big time required some Seve-like creativity — Rahm’s left-to-right laser from under a tree on the 14th that gave him a short birdie putt and a five-stroke advantage over Brooks Koepka, who started this marathon 30-hole day with a 4-shot lead over Rahm.
“That was a wind-the-Spaniard-up-and-let-him-go shot,” Hayes said. “I gave him the number and he just got in there and saw it. … He hit a beautiful shot and that was very cool.”
On the seventh green Sunday morning, as they resumed the weather-suspended third round, Rahm made birdie and Koepka made bogey to cut the deficit in half.
“It kind of got us back in the ballgame,” Hayes said. “That was huge.”
The caddie said he felt Rahm had gotten more support in this final round than he usually does from American fans, and that he even got more support than the American and four-time major champ, Koepka, now a member of the LIV Golf circuit.
Rahm earned that affection.
More than any golfer in the field, he gave the Masters gallery something to cheer for.
