Summary
Madrid (AP) — After their Ryder Cup appearances, Jon Rahm and Shane Lowry had a difficult return to the Spanish Open. Rahm briefly argued with a marshal who tried to cheer him up during the first round. On the par-4 8th, after a bad shot that took him into the rough on the left, Rahm complained, “What a day, what a day,” followed by an outburst. The marshal marking his ball told him, “It’s fine,” to which Rahm replied,
“Please don’t tell me it’s okay. Thank you.” The marshal apologized as he walked away, and Rahm continued to complain, “It’s not okay.”
Despite parring that hole, Rahm bogeyed the next, closing out his round with a 1-over-par 72. He eagled the par-5 14th with a bunker shot, but his score included only one birdie and four bogeys.
Rahm played in the same group as Lowry, who had been instrumental in the Ryder Cup by making the decisive putt for Europe in New York last month, where the home crowd pressured the European players from the start. Rahm said in Madrid that the Ryder Cup was the toughest week of his career mentally.
Key details
Lowry, meanwhile, finished his first round at the Villa de Madrid Country Club with a 4-over-par 75, accumulating six bogeys and two birdies.
At the top of the leaderboard, the leaders were England's Marco Penge and France's Frederic Lacroix, who signed rounds of 5-under 66. Rahm is looking to win his fourth Spanish Open title, surpassing Seve Ballesteros as the tournament's most successful golfer since the creation of the European tour in 1972. This is his seventh appearance in Madrid, where he has won in 2018, 2019 and 2022, and last year he was runner-up to Spaniard Ángel Hidalgo in a playoff.
Ballesteros won his last European Tour title at the Spanish Open in 1995. This year, for the first time, the tournament offers an automatic berth to the Masters and British Open for the winner. Among the spectators watching Rahm in the first round was Spanish tennis player Carlos Alcaraz, the current world number one.
