Jon Rahm Brown Bagged His Way To A Green Jacket

If you watched the marathon that was the 2023 Masters Tournament on Sunday, you may have noticed that as the camera followed leaders Brooks Koepka and Jon Rahm, who were paired together, from hole to hole, Koepka’s two-shot lead wasn’t the only thing Jon Rahm was nibbling at there on the fairways of Augusta National.

On Friday and Saturday, the wind and rain had been so strong they felled several mighty trees (as well as Tiger Woods), forcing the golfers to finish the third round of play on Sunday morning before starting the final round later Sunday afternoon. This meant that the golfers had to be “up and at ‘em” for an 8:30 a.m. tee-time, ready and able to compete until dusk settled around 7 p.m. that evening.

As the frontrunner, Koepka finished the Sunday morning round looking fairly unbeatable, retaining a two-shot lead over Rahm going into the short break between rounds. When they came out for the final round at 2:30 p.m., however, Koepka started making errors and Rahm began to make his move.

Televised golf coverage generally follows the top of the leader board, which meant that Rahm and Koepka, still paired together, got lots of air time. During the next couple of hours, however, viewers and T.V. announcers, alike, began to notice something a bit different: when the camera fell on Rahm, it was often when he was diving into a sandwich. Not once but several times. Enough that the commentators noted it.

Taking in a little sustenance between holes is not unusual during professional golf matches. Gatorade isn’t a major sports sponsor for nothing, and players always have a bottle of their favorite protein shake or a couple of energy bars stashed in their bags next to a spare pair of gloves and sunblock.

But unlike most of his hard-bodied peers, Rahm, affectionately ribbed by those peers for his “dad bod,” took his nourishment in the old-school way, often favoring a peanut-butter sandwich after nine holes.

Once the commentators had noted it, the camera never passed up the chance to show Rahm mid bite. Once while Rahm and Koepka were waiting to play a hole, the camera produced a study in contrast that was almost tragicomic, with Koepka staring steely-eyed into the middle distance and looking, for all the world, like someone struggling desperately to self-correct, and Rahm munching away contentedly on the remains of whatever he had just popped into his mouth.

Was it classic peanut butter? A legendary Masters egg salad? Or perhaps, with a nod to his idol, mentor and fellow Spaniard Seve Ballesteros, a montadito? Only Rahm’s caddy, who we can assume was on his brown bag as well as his clubs, knew for sure. All over America and the world, viewers were beginning to wonder just what the Spanish golfing great had packed in his brown bag.

But the real question wasn’t what he packed but that he packed.

Here the evidence suggests he prepared his brown bag in the manner of someone who believed he was playing for the win, which meant being out on the grounds from the early morning until darkness settled, which in golf is when the winning happens. The last thing he wanted was to allow a little hanger to come in the way of trying on his first green jacket.

The amusing Rahm story brings to mind an anecdote involving Jim Davis, who coached the Clemson women’s basketball team for many years and won more games than any other Clemson basketball coach, including a pair of ACC Championships. Well-known for valuing players’ personal as well as athletic development, Davis wasn’t happy with the tenor of the conversation he was hearing on the team bus enroute to an ACC Tournament. Clemson had not enjoyed a successful season and the mood on the bus reflected a defeatist attitude.

Davis had a hunch, so he asked the driver to pull over and told everyone on the team to open their travel bags and show what they’d packed for the trip.

No, he wasn’t interested in sneaking a peak at their personal effects. He wanted to see in what manner they packed: whether they packed for the whole tournament or one game, i.e., were they packing to lose or to fight their way to the final? It turned out that some of the better players had, in fact, packed to lose. Davis wanted winners representing Clemson, so he used this as a teaching lesson for his squad and benched those players in favor of those who had packed to win.

That year, the players who had packed to win performed well enough to make it three days…all the way through to the championship final.

Adopting a positive mindset is not superstition—it’s not like packing your “lucky” socks—it actually impacts the way you perform. Achieved through visualization and other techniques, winning really can come down to acting like someone who has packed to be there when the winning happens, which is what Rahm did, finishing at 12-under 276 for the tournament, getting a green jacket and pocketing $3.24 million in prize earnings.

And that, golf and business fans (and foodies), buys you a lot of sandwiches.