The hangover from the Masters win, emotional or otherwise, was short-lived. After two weeks of goofing off—Leno, Letterman, and ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, all while wearing a spiffy new green sports coat—Phil Mickelson turned up at the Tour event in New Orleans and finished tied for second. He just kept riding that momentum all the way to the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. Windblown, with 164 ball-gobbling bunkers and small, terrifying greens, Shinnecock is one of golf’s great tests. The USGA offered a new-school setup with wide fairways and shaved areas around the greens, requiring talent and imagination to play the recovery shots. Mickelson fell in love with the course presentation when, in a new tradition, he went to Shinnecock a couple of weeks before the Open to perfect a game plan with his swing coach, Rick Smith, and short-game specialist, Dave Pelz. Aided by a similar scouting mission to Augusta, Mickelson had won an epic Masters with the most calculating golf of his career. The big question now was whether or not New Phil could stay on script.
Much of his pretournament preparation involved the sixteenth hole, a short (537 yards), tricky par-5 that rewards precision, not pyrotechnics. On his way to a fourth-place finish at the 1995 Open at Shinnecock, the callow, gung ho Mickelson had played the hole double bogey–bogey–bogey–double bogey. In the first round of this Open, Mickelson pulled his drive into the right rough, 247 yards from the hole. Trying to reach the green in two with a violent rip of his 4-wood, he missed in the worst place possible—long and right. Now Mickelson faced a third shot over a gaping bunker to a pin tucked on a downslope just a few paces beyond the sand. After hurrying to a vantage point near the green, an edgy Smith sized up the play: “This is the shot of the tournament,” he said. “This is the most dangerous shot he may face all week.” In years past, Mickelson would have attempted to stuff the ball next to the flag with his trademark high-risk flop shot, inviting bogey or worse. (A flop from a similar spot during the final round in ’95 came up inches short of the green and trickled back into the bunker.) Mickelson went through a series of practice swings as Smith described each: “That was the high flop…. That was a low controlled spinner that he would play to the middle of the green…. That was the flop.” You could imagine an angel on one of Mickelson’s shoulders and the devil on the other. Finally, he settled into the shot. Mickelson took a short, tight backswing and the ball shot out low and hard, landing well past the flag and leaving a twenty-five-footer. He had conceded birdie, but was rewarded with a tap-in par. “He did the right thing,” Smith said with a weary smile. “That was his first big test, and now he’s off and running.”
Indeed, Mickelson followed his opening 68 with a bogeyless 66 to surge into the lead. He was still atop the leaderboard late in the third round, but Retief Goosen reeled him in, birdieing the fifteenth and sixteenth holes while a tired-looking Mickelson staggered home bogey-bogey. Goosen’s rock-solid 69 was largely lost in the howls of protest engulfing Shinnecock Hills. The blue blazers at the USGA may have gotten the pretournament setup right, but they forgot one thing: just add water. Overcast, windless conditions and a Thursday-evening shower made Shinnecock playable for the first two rounds, but on a sunny, windy Saturday, the USGA began to lose the greens. By the time the last group teed off at 2:50 p.m., the crusty, baked putting surfaces “looked like someone took a Bunsen burner to them,” according to Smith. The shrillest criticism was reserved for the seventh hole, a 189-yard par-3 with a Redan green that slopes severely from front to back. On Saturday, only eighteen of the sixty-six competitors would be able to hold the putting surface with their tee shots, and so many players had chips roll back to their feet it looked like a Skee-Ball competition. Mickelson’s double bogey began with an 8-iron that scooted off the back of the green. After a delicate chip, his ten-foot par putt trickled by the hole, wavered, wiggled, just about stopped, started up again, and then meandered twenty feet past. He missed the comebacker. Asked afterward by a reporter if the hole is fair, Mickelson shot back, “What do you think?” This is the beginning of his cold war with the USGA, which will finally bubble over fourteen years later amid another setup screwup at Shinnecock Hills.
Whining about the course is the soundtrack to most U.S. Opens, but when Sunday arrived with a bright blue sky and the strongest winds of the tournament, Shinnecock’s burned-out greens crossed the line from extremely difficult to patently unfair. The bloodbath began with the early starters. Billy Mayfair, a five-time winner on the PGA Tour, shot a 47 on the front nine and finished at 89. Hall of Famer Tom Kite parred the last six holes… to shoot 84. Asked to describe the fried greens, Goosen offered one word: “Dead.” In the early afternoon, the USGA finally decided to intermittently water the putting surfaces. This meant that different players faced different speeds. On the seventh tee, Mickelson watched the maintenance crew water the green for the twosome in front, but not for him and Fred Funk. “Total crap,” Mickelson recalls thinking. He intentionally hit his tee shot into a greenside bunker to leave himself an uphill shot to the flag. Mickelson stuck it to three feet to save a crafty par.
Amid this tempest, Goosen was unflappable. Struck by lightning when he was seventeen, he still plays as if he doesn’t have a pulse. He led by three strokes with seven holes to play, but Mickelson put together a back-nine surge that was fast becoming his trademark. Goosen bogeyed fourteen, while Mickelson birdied thirteen and fifteen, and suddenly they were tied. At the sixteenth hole, Mickelson played a gorgeous third shot, feeding his pitch off a slope toward the flag. Around New York he had been the people’s choice since finishing second to Tiger Woods in “The People’s Open” at Bethpage in 2002, and Long Island shook as Mickelson’s ball inched to within eight feet of the cup. As he was approaching the green, some grim-faced state troopers cleared a path for Rudy Giuliani to worm his way behind the putting surface. Mickelson rolled in the birdie putt to take his first lead of the day, at four-under par, and amid the roars I asked Giuliani to explain Phil’s appeal in the Empire State. “New Yorkers love a winner,” said Giuliani, panting heavily with his oxford shirt drenched with sweat. “They especially love someone who wins with class. Phil reminds me, and I think he reminds a lot of us, of the Captain, Derek Jeter. There is no higher praise.”
Goosen watched Mickelson’s birdie from the fairway, then coolly stuffed a wedge fifteen feet below the hole and brushed in the putt as if it were a practice-round gimme. Tied again. The crescendo came at seventeen, a 179-yard par-3. Mickelson lost a 6-iron into the left bunker, but was left with what should have been a straightforward bunker shot—uphill and into the wind. Funk later estimated that, absent U.S. Open pressure, Mickelson would get it up-and-down nine times out of ten. But there was one itty-bitty problem: a small rock sitting just behind Phil’s ball. “I tried to go behind the rock and underneath it, and it took all the spin off it,” Mickelson said years later. “It had over-spin on it. It shot past the hole in the one spot I couldn’t go: downhill, downwind. It was not a hard shot. Couldn’t have been easier. But that one thing changed everything. All because of that fricking rock.”
Funk confirms Mickelson’s account: “I saw him a few weeks later and I had read all of the post-round comments and the things he said after that. And not once did he mention the rock. I knew what had happened. The sound of the shot was weird, and the ball came out with no spin. So I asked him about it, and all he said to me was ‘I never should have been in the bunker in the first place.’ ”
Still, Mickelson had only four feet to save his par. But he played too much borrow and missed on the high side, his ball racing four feet by the hole. He yanked the comeback for a crushing double bogey. Goosen followed by getting up-and-down from nearly the identical spot in the front bunker. “It was like a morgue going up eighteen,” Funk says. “We went from this incredible theater with the possibility of a playoff or Phil winning outright to now he is two behind and there’s nothing. That was a screw job on that seventeenth hole. And he never mentioned it to anyone. It was probably one of the worst breaks I ever saw.”
There is plenty more heartbreak to come in the U.S. Open, but Mickelson still stews about Shinnecock. “That is the one I should have won more than any other,” he says. “I played phenomenal that last day. Given the difficulty of the course, I would say that I have not played better in a U.S. Open in my life.”
Mickelson had only one top twenty in his first ten Open Championships, back in 2000, when he finished eleventh, twelve strokes behind Tiger Woods. But a month after Shinnecock, he blew into Royal Troon with entirely different expectations. Mickelson had played the Scottish Open the week before to acclimate, and Dave Pelz made the journey across the pond to help him prepare for Royal Troon, site of the Open Championship. Mickelson’s diligent work on his game in the preceding few years finally allowed him to control the spin and trajectory of his shots, which is crucial on a windy, firm, quirky links course. Troon’s front nine plays downwind and the backside is a brutal slog home straight into the prevailing gale. Mickelson cooked up a game plan that featured a variety of different shots, including a newly acquired sawed-off swing with a fairway wood that, into the wind, never got above head high and rolled for miles. “I was taught growing up to hit the ball low, you scoot the ball back in your stance, which delofts the club and that’s how you do it,” he said. “The problem is you come in steeper and create a lot more spin. And even though the ball is flying low, it’s spinning. That’s what you don’t want. You’re changing ball position, you’re changing angle of attack, you’re changing the golf swing. So now the only difference for me is I keep everything the same, ball position, swing, so forth. I just shorten the backswing a little bit, accelerate through. It doesn’t have enough speed to create the same spin, comes in from a shallower angle of attack, and gets the ball launching lower without the speed, without the spin.”
An opening 73 felt like more of the same ol’, but Mickelson rallied with rounds of 66 and 68, going bogey-free both days to roar into third place, just one stroke off the lead shared by Ernie Els and Todd Hamilton. In the cold, blustery final round, Mickelson chipped in for eagle on the fourth hole and birdied number seven to storm into a tie for the lead. But once Mickelson turned into the wind, he repeatedly found himself fighting to save par; when he failed to get up-and-down on thirteen it was, incredibly, his first bogey in the span of fifty holes. Els and Hamilton pushed deeper into red numbers. A birdie on the sixteenth hole gave Mickelson a glimmer, but he finished one shot out of the Els-Hamilton playoff.
Phil just kept coming, making another spirited run at the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits. A third-round 67 (tied for the lowest score of the day) propelled him into a tie for third, four strokes behind Vijay Singh. The Straits played brutally hard on Sunday. Mickelson doubled the par-3 third hole after skulling a bunker shot and followed with bogeys on five and nine. But after steadying himself on the back nine, he arrived at the seventy-second hole needing a birdie to tie for the lead. After a perfect drive, he blocked his approach shot into a greenside bunker, ultimately making a bogey that dropped him into a tie for sixth, two strokes out of the Singh–Justin Leonard–Chris DiMarco playoff. Across 2004’s final three majors, he was, theoretically, only eight total shots from winning them all. Rather than rue the ones that got away, Mickelson was buoyant in the aftermath of the PGA. “Win, lose, or draw, I just love having a chance on Sunday,” he said.
Over the first dozen years of his career, Mickelson had created a solid-gold brand: prolific winner, gracious loser, loving husband, doting father. The people closest to him only added to his appeal, whether it was his dutiful caddie, Bones, who seemed like a brother as much as a looper, or Amy, who could always be found flashing a megawatt smile in the gallery and chatting with random fans or positioning herself between green and tee to steal kisses with Phil. “I would say she is the heir to Barbara Nicklaus’s throne,” says Kimberly (Mrs. Brian) Gay, referencing Jack’s bride, who always set a gold standard for graciousness. “I don’t know how she does it, but Amy is always warm and lovely to everyone she meets. She is always open and accessible, even with all the lights shining on her. And she treats you the same no matter where your husband is on the money list, which isn’t always the case. She’s just always been a ray of sunshine.”
With all of this accumulated goodwill to go along with a thrilling Masters victory and the run of excellence in the ensuing majors, the time had arrived for Mickelson to cash in. His advocate continued to be Coach Loy, who had already managed to land endorsement deals with blue-chip companies like Ford, despite his rough edges; when an associate first mentioned a possible pact with KPMG, the vast Big Four accounting and financial services firm, Loy was baffled. In a line that is oft repeated by his ex-colleagues, Loy responded, “Phil Mickelson is not going to sign with a fucking radio station.”
Mickelson had long enjoyed an endorsement deal to play Titleist golf balls, and throughout 2000—the year he left Yonex—he pushed hard for the release of the prototype Pro V1, in a doomed attempt to keep pace with Tiger Woods, who had begun playing Nike’s solid-core ball that May. When the Pro V1 finally dropped in October 2000, Mickelson proved to be its most hyperbolic honk, claiming the ball was golf’s biggest technological revolution since steel shafts replaced hickory. At the end of 2000, Mickelson extended his relationship with Titleist to include playing its irons and woods in a five-year deal worth a reported $4 million annually. Titleist makes top-notch gear. In fact, it’s so good, the company wants the product to be the star, not an individual endorser. In the late nineties, both Woods and David Duval had been Titleist ambassadors, but as their careers took off they were released from their contracts early to chase megadeals that reshaped the equipment endorsement landscape. Mickelson was looking to renegotiate his deal even before he won the Masters.
Those who consider him Machiavellian often point to the voicemail Mickelson left Mike Galeski, Callaway’s head of PGA Tour relations, in the fall of 2003, in which he lavished praise on Callaway’s new HX Tour ball and ERC Fusion driver. Mickelson had to know his words would create a huge stir within the halls of a putative competitor. Sure enough, Galeski played the voicemail to a room full of Callaway sales reps at a national meeting. When word of that inevitably wafted back to Wally Uihlein, the persnickety CEO of Titleist’s parent company, he threatened both Mickelson and Callaway with legal action, the beginning of the Phil-Titleist divorce. It took a year for the blockbuster deal to be consummated, but in September 2004, Mickelson became the face of Callaway Golf, whose biggest endorser at that moment was Charles Howell III, with one career victory. The timing was problematic for only one reason: Mickelson’s first start after signing the contract would be the Ryder Cup, golf’s most overhyped, overheated event.
After his undefeated debut in ’95, Mickelson had mixed results in subsequent Cups. He went 1-1-2 in the U.S. loss in ’97 and then got skunked in two matches on the opening day in ’99, helping Europe to build a big lead. But Mickelson delivered a crucial point in Saturday afternoon better ball, and then, sent out third in singles, he blitzed Jarmo Sandelin 5 & 3 to help fuel the Americans’ rousing comeback. In 2002, he brought home 2.5 points across four partner matches, but in singles got beat by someone named Phillip Price, a monumental upset that was instrumental in Europe stealing the Cup.
This was an era of parity for the Ryder Cup. The generational talents that had made Europe a superpower in the 1980s—Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer, Sandy Lyle, Ian Woosnam—had all exited stage right. The U.S. was also searching for a new identity without its previous emotional leaders, Paul Azinger and the late Payne Stewart. Woods should have been the American alpha, but he didn’t want the job. He spent the 103 weeks between Ryder Cups trying to intimidate every other top player, and even in the sanctum of the team room Woods was disinclined to reveal anything from the well-guarded fortress of his inner self. Mickelson tried to fill the vacuum. “Tiger held everything close to the vest,” says Stewart Cink, who played on five Ryder Cup teams in the Woods-Mickelson era. “He never understood how Phil got any juice out of showing his hand. But that’s just Phil’s nature, to tell everyone what he’s thinking and feeling, and to explain what’s next and how to prepare for it. In a team environment, you’d definitely choose Phil’s way. He was very much into team-building and he thrived in that environment. He wanted to win, badly, and it was infectious. You could feel it. Tiger wanted to win, too, because he wants to win at everything he does, but his was a much more mechanical and solitary approach. He was like, ‘I’m going to go out there and try to win five points and that’s all I can do.’ He tried to break his job down into its simplest form and not get too wrapped up in the team thing.”
But at the 2004 Ryder Cup, Mickelson’s commitment to his team, to say nothing of his country, was thrown into question when he showed up with a bag full of shiny new Callaway clubs and a new ball that he had never before tested in competition. He claimed Callaway was not forcing him to use the gear, but no one quite believed him. The Ryder Cup preamble is interminable; with the event not beginning until Friday, the army of bored sportswriters needs to gin up plotlines, and Mickelson potentially putting his pocketbook above his flag was red meat for the typists. “I have to disabuse the notion of the contract clause that allegedly existed,” says Larry Dorman, who was then senior vice president of global public relations at Callaway. “There was a lot of speculation about it in the press that week, but I read every word of Phil Mickelson’s contract and there was no obligation to play any Callaway equipment at that Ryder Cup.”
Mickelson’s preparations grew more chaotic when, two days before the competition was to begin, U.S. captain Hal Sutton informed him he would be playing with Tiger Woods in alternate shot. The blockbuster pairing was two decades in the making, but Mickelson was pissed at the late notice. Back then, teammates had to play the exact same model of golf ball throughout the round. (Now they can switch out balls on each tee.) One problem: Woods played a rock that spins a ton, while Mickelson favored a low-spin model. In deference to the king, Phil volunteered to play Tiger’s ball. He spent that Wednesday on his own testing Woods’s Nike and took some shrapnel in the press for going rogue and separating himself from his teammates.
Of course, Mickelson used his own—albeit still somewhat foreign—Callaway ball in the better-ball format, when he and Woods were sent out in the Ryder Cup’s very first match against European stalwarts Padraig Harrington and Colin Montgomerie. The superstar pairing had Detroit fans in a tizzy around the first tee. Captain Sutton added to the high noon atmosphere by showing up in a cowboy hat. But it was Harrington and Montgomerie who came out shooting, birdieing the first four holes with precise iron shots and a couple of long putts. Mickelson/Woods looked tight and had an abject absence of chemistry. They went down meekly, 2 & 1, setting the tone for a disastrous session during which the U.S. eked out only half a point across four matches. “It would be foolish to say the Ryder Cup was over after one match,” says Paul McGinley, a member of Team Europe, “but you can’t overstate the importance of us beating Tiger and Phil. It took the crowd right out of it and just applied that much more pressure to the other [American] guys, while sending a huge charge through our team. You could feel the whole atmosphere change.”
Ol’ Hal doubled down by sending Woods/Mickelson out that afternoon in alternate shot. Harrington and Montgomerie had put ten birdies on the board and, in Sutton’s mind, they would have beaten any U.S. duo. After the fact, he even tried to couch his motives as altruistic: “I said, you know what, let’s just suppose that they play great. I never left a Ryder Cup match, where I played with someone that I went to war with, I didn’t leave there a better friend with him. Win or lose, I was a better friend with him. Because we had tried to accomplish something together. And I said, if they leave better friends, golf is the winner.” Playing the inexperienced team of Lee Westwood and Darren Clarke, the Americans took an early lead but had frittered it away by the time they reached the eighteenth hole. Mickelson had the tee. Given the controversy over his equipment change, his complicated relationship with Woods, and a scoreboard that at that moment was bleeding European blue, it was one of the most pressure-packed swings of his career. Alas, he uncorked a block slice that sailed miles left. Woods’s withering look of disdain became instantly iconic. They lost the hole and the match. By nightfall, the U.S. trailed 6.5–1.5, en route to a historically lopsided 18.5–9.5 loss.
So much ill will lingered that a dozen years later, Mickelson didn’t miss the opportunity to have another go at Sutton. At a Ryder Cup press conference at Hazeltine, Mickelson relived the surprise of being told at the last minute he would be playing with Woods in alternate shot, saying, “I grabbed a couple dozen of his balls, I went off to the side, and tried to learn his golf ball in a four- or five-hour session on one of the other holes, trying to find out how far the ball goes. It forced me to stop my preparation for the tournament, to stop chipping and putting and sharpening my game in an effort to crash-course learn a whole different golf ball that we were going to be playing. And in the history of my career, I have never ball-tested two days prior to a major [event]. I’ve never done it. Had we known a month in advance, we might have been able to make it work. I think we probably would have made it work. But we didn’t know until two days prior. Now, I’m not trying to knock anybody here, because I actually loved how decisive Captain Sutton was. I feel like that’s a sign of great leadership. But that’s an example, starting with the captain, that put us in a position to fail and we failed monumentally, absolutely. To say, well, you just need to play better, that is so misinformed, because you play how you prepare. I’ve had to be accountable for that decision twelve years ago. Even a month ago, I hear there’s an analyst on the Golf Channel that accuses me of being a non–team player for having to go out and work on an isolated hole away from the team, away from my preparation.” Sutton let it be known how wounded he was by these remarks, and Mickelson apologized the next day, admitting his belated criticism was “in bad taste.”
Sutton found the U.S.’s uninspired, fractious effort so disenchanting he walked away from the game at age forty-six. “I was bitter,” he said years later, adding, “I took the blame for everybody. Nobody played good that week. It’s tough on a captain when people don’t play well. It’s hard to beat anybody. If I still need to shoulder the blame for Phil’s poor play, then I’ll do that.”
If 2004 was supposed to be the moment that Team USA became Mickelson’s squad, it was an unmitigated disaster. Something curdled that week for the U.S. side, touching off a series of embarrassing losses. All the frustration would finally lead to a rebellion led by Mickelson a decade after Oakland Hills.
After a long off-season to experiment and dial in his new equipment, Mickelson got off to a rip-roaring start in 2005. In back-to-back wins at Phoenix and Pebble Beach, he dropped a 60 on TPC Scottsdale and then torched venerable Spyglass Hill for a bogeyless 62. As always, Woods loomed. His 2003 and ’04 campaigns had been fallow by his incomparable standards, as he divorced himself from swing guru Butch Harmon and toiled to absorb the teachings of Hank Haney. (He was also distracted by his October 2004 wedding to Elin Nordegren, a onetime bikini model; in the unofficial competition to romance blond babes, Tiger and Phil were now all square.) When Woods won his 2005 season debut at Torrey Pines, it seemed inevitable that he and Mickelson would tangle soon, and it happened in early March, at Doral. Phil opened 64-66 to sprint to the lead. On Saturday, Tiger dropped a 63 to close within two strokes of Mickelson, who had shot another 66. Ever since the 2001 Masters, the golf world had been craving another showdown between the game’s leading men. Mickelson had clearly closed the gap since then, but how much?
On Sunday, Woods announced his intentions by birdieing four of the first ten holes to tie for the lead. The Miami crowd was in a frenzy. “It was electric,” Woods said. “It was definitely bipartisan out there. You could hear Phil fans, you could hear Tiger fans. They were yelling at the top of their lungs. When we got to the tee boxes, my ears were ringing.” At the par-5 twelfth hole, Woods mashed a 291-yard 3-wood and then gutted the twenty-five-foot eagle putt, loosing a vintage uppercut in celebration. It felt like a knockout punch, but Mickelson staggered off the ropes to birdie the next two holes and reclaim a share of the lead. “What a day,” Woods said. “If you’re not nervous on a day like this, you’re not alive.”
Still tied on the seventeenth green, Woods buried a twenty-footer for birdie to wrest back the lead. At eighteen, Mickelson’s last-gasp birdie chip burned the edge of the cup. He had tied the tournament record at 23 under, but was vanquished by one stroke in a titanic battle that elevated both players. “After what he did in 2004, Phil’s name was always the first one we looked for on the leaderboard,” says Haney. “Whatever was going on with them personally, Tiger had the utmost respect for Phil’s game. He felt he was a great closer because he knew he wasn’t afraid. Tiger had more respect for Phil’s short game than any other part of any other player’s game. And he always marveled at Phil’s mental strength. Tiger used to say, ‘I can’t believe how he hits one off the map and then stiffs the next one.’ Most players, Tiger included, hit a couple of foul balls and then they start worrying, Where the fuck is the next one going? Phil had an amazingly short memory, which might be his greatest trait. All that said, Tiger wasn’t really worried about Phil. He knew in his heart he was better, but he liked to send messages. Doral was a message.”
Perhaps chastened by Woods’s power advantage at the Blue Monster, Mickelson spent the rest of 2005 chasing distance, enabled by the Callaway engineers who, unlike the buttoned-down Poindexters at Titleist, were happy to indulge Phil’s mad scientist bent. (Still to come was the one-of-a-kind “Phrankenwood,” which had a driver shaft and loft, but a head the size of a 3-wood.) Mickelson’s play in the majors suffered accordingly, as he was a nonfactor at the first three of the year. Meanwhile, Woods won his fourth Masters—as defending champ, Mickelson had to slip the green jacket on him—and second Open Championship to reassert his hegemony.
A reinvigorated Tiger was not the only pall on Phil’s seemingly perfect life; his gambling issues were becoming an open secret on Tour. Steve Flesch was paired with Mickelson on a Sunday at the Hyundai Team Matches around the turn of the century. “Every hole, he was checking like a beeper or something,” says Flesch with a laugh. “He could not have cared any less about what we were doing on the golf course. He was definitely more concerned about who was winning the football games and who was covering the spread.” Tom Lehman had a similar experience with Mickelson at the 2000 Presidents Cup, when he was paired with Mickelson for a Saturday afternoon better ball versus Mike Weir and Steve Elkington. “Phil is hitting it everywhere—he’s barely finished a hole through the first eight holes,” says Lehman. “He keeps saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll show up eventually.’ On the ninth hole he buries it in the front bunker and is out of the hole again. He walks way back into the trees and is sitting on a stump with his back to everybody and his head down. I think he’s giving himself a pep talk, so I go over there to try to make him feel better and he’s got his phone out and he’s checking the football scores.”
In February 2001, Mickelson’s gambling spilled into public view when he made headlines for cashing a $560,000 Super Bowl ticket, as months earlier he plunked down $20,000 on the Baltimore Ravens at 28-1. (As the Ravens wreaked havoc throughout the regular season, Mickelson let friends and family buy into the bet, spreading the wealth.) Mickelson was so invested in the Ravens’ run that when the AFC Championship game fell on Saturday of the Tournament of Champions in Kapalua, Mickelson surreptitiously listened to the game during his round with an earpiece and a radio hidden in his clothes. Later in 2001, when the Tour visited Firestone, Mickelson was lounging in the locker room watching a Woods–Jim Furyk playoff. On the first extra hole, Furyk left himself in a greenside bunker and Mickelson barked out that he would bet $20 on Furyk holing the shot, at 25-1. Mike Weir took the wager and then had to pay Mickelson $500 when Furyk did, in fact, jar it. When Golf World reported what had happened, Mickelson earned a talking-to by PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem for potentially violating Section VI-B in the PGA Tour Player Handbook, which states, “A player shall not have any financial interest, either direct or indirect, in the performance or the winnings of another player.”
Mickelson’s need for action carried over into actual Tour events. “When I was in the tower,” says former CBS announcer Gary McCord, “every time Phil got to my hole, Bones would look up at me and I would flash the odds. If Phil had a fifteen-footer, I’d flash three fingers, which meant the odds were three-to-one. If he was sixty feet, I’d give him two-to-one on a two-putt. Bones would go down and whisper in his ear and Phil would look up at me and shake his head yes or no. I can’t tell you how many wadded-up twenties I threw out of the tower, until the Tour found about it and I got word through CBS I was no longer allowed to gamble with Phil while up in the tower.”
There was enough chatter about Mickelson’s betting that his manager began to fret about his public image. “Steve Loy was really on Gary [McCord] and me because we affectionately called him Lefty on the [CBS telecasts],” says Peter Kostis. “He thought that Lefty was a derogatory reference to gambling and other things. He didn’t want us to call him Lefty anymore.” Ironically, this became the centerpiece of a wager when Kostis and McCord took on Mickelson in a friendly eighteen-hole match. “If we lost, we wouldn’t call him Lefty on the air ever again,” says Kostis. “But if we won, we could keep calling him Lefty. So in our match we had this great Mongolian reversal on the last hole where Phil hit it in the shit and Gary and I made birdie. We went from down eight hundred dollars to up, I don’t know, eight hundred dollars or so. And Phil is so angry that he lost that he just keeps walking once we get to the cart area. And he goes to his car and doesn’t pay. Doesn’t do anything. And as he’s getting in his car, Gary and I are going, ‘Hey, Lefty, don’t be so upset, Lefty. Come on, Lefty. You haven’t even paid us yet, Lefty.’ So we used Lefty about forty-seven times in three minutes. That was fun.” And yet the nickname vanished from the airwaves. “Scottsdale’s a very small town,” Kostis says with a sigh. “We didn’t want to rock the boat too much. So we didn’t refer to him as Lefty anymore, regardless of the bet.”
Continued whispers that Mickelson was dropping a lot of coin in Vegas sports books compelled Golf World to launch an investigation. Veteran scribe Ron Sirak haunted Las Vegas alongside a local reporter who was well-connected in the gambling industry. “We found Phil had a lot of big losses, but casinos only keep track of losses, not winnings,” says Sirak. “He may have won big the next day—we didn’t know that. We talked to the casino guys who handle the whales. When they lose big [using a line of credit], the casino gives them forty-five days to pay off the losses. Most people would wait until the forty-fourth day. Phil paid on day one.” Golf World never published an article about Mickelson’s gambling. “That was my recommendation,” Sirak says. “The only story I had was a rich guy who liked to gamble, and we already knew that. I saw no indication that Phil owed anybody money or had done anything that would make people uncomfortable.”
Amid the low roar about Mickelson’s gambling, even more insidious rumors were also being spread in Tour circles.
“Ah yes, the Black Baby,” says John Garrity, the veteran Sports Illustrated writer. “That was an urban legend that refused to die.”
“Oh gawd, the Black Baby—that story had more legs than a spider,” says longtime Golfweek senior writer Jeff Rude. “That rumor boomeranged on me over a period of at least five years. Different people came up to me and said, ‘I heard a story about Phil and a Black Baby. Is it true?’ Well, I never heard it substantiated.”
The Black Baby was a rumored love child Mickelson had purportedly sired during a dalliance at Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial Tournament, in Columbus, Ohio. The tale was oddly specific: the mother supposedly worked at the local First Tee chapter. This being golf, she was said to be Black, which made the whole affair that much more taboo. “It wasn’t hard to figure out who the woman was,” says Farrell Evans, then a young reporter at Sports Illustrated. “There aren’t a lot of Black people in golf. Phil would not have been remiss getting with her. She was fine.” Evans, who happens to be Black, picked up the phone and called the woman in question: “I told her what I heard. She said, ‘Yes, I know Phil, we met once at the Memorial. But I’ve never slept with him and there is no baby.’ ”
And yet the rumor was so persistent the Mickelsons eventually hired a private investigator to ferret out its origins. Their sleuth couldn’t offer a definitive answer, but the collected evidence pointed strongly to a journeyman who was said to be jealous of Phil’s success. (Golf Digest reported his 2004 income at $40 million, 85 percent of it through endorsements.) The Black Baby chatter sucked in the mainstream golf press. “After months of cajoling me, my editor at Golf World said, ‘You gotta ask Phil about the Black Baby,’ ” says John Hawkins. “It was at Palm Springs, after his round. We’re walking and talking, we get to the parking lot and he’s throwing shit in the car. I don’t know how I got the question out. I said something like ‘There have been rumors about you and your personal life and stuff that might jeopardize your marriage and…’ Phil wheels around and gets in my face and says, ‘If you ever write anything like that I will sue you and your fucking magazine and then I’ll own your magazine and the first thing I’ll do after I sign the papers is fire your fucking ass.’ ”
This explosion hints at how much stress the rumors were causing. Amy, as always, had a lighter touch. At a Tour stop in 2006, Evans encountered her sitting alone near the clubhouse. “We were just chitchatting,” he says, “and the feeling was right, so I just said, ‘Do you know Phil has a Black love child?’ She laughed and laughed and finally said, ‘I’ve heard a lot of good ones, but not that one.’ I said, ‘If it means anything to you, I talked to the alleged baby mama and she refuted the story.’ ”
Another persistent rumor had Amy enjoying a fling with Michael Jordan, who had become a regular presence at the Ryder Cup as a fan/groupie/motivational speaker. It had so much traction in the nether regions of the internet that for a long time if you typed Amy Mickelson into the Google search box, the first words that auto-filled were Michael Jordan. It became such a thing that Deadspin.com wrote a long story under the headline “How Did That False Amy Mickelson–Michael Jordan Rumor Start Anyway?” Amy, in her indefatigable way, started greeting her favorite reporters by asking, “Have you heard about me and Michael?!” The rumors were so inexhaustible that in 2012 the Mickelsons finally sued the internet service provider Vidéotron S.E.N.C. in Quebec Superior Court, seeking the identity of a troll who, according to the complaint, posted “several highly defamatory statements posted by one or more individuals on the Internet, in particular on a Yahoo! Website, under the pseudonyms of ‘Fogroller’ and ‘Longitude.’… The postings suggest that plaintiff has an illegitimate child, that his wife has affairs and other similar vexatious statements that are absolutely untrue and, simply put, vicious.” Says Mickelson’s lawyer Glenn Cohen, “The really sad thing is it turned out to be a sixteen-year-old autistic kid in Toronto. We talked to his parents and they took away his computer. We did that several more times, where people were lying about Phil and Amy on the internet and we put a stop to it.” He recalled one occasion of Phil being impersonated “on Twitter or one of other stupid [social media] things.” Cohen claims it took $75,000 worth of sleuthing until they found their man. “It turned out to be a high school golfer in Dallas,” says Cohen. “This one had a funny ending: the father had the audacity to write to me saying him and his son were going to be at the Masters and they wanted to meet Phil and get their picture taken with him. I said, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ If I was there I would have knocked the kid’s face off.”
Why were the Mickelsons the targets of such whisper campaigns? “Maybe because they seemed too perfect,” says Evans. “Or maybe they weren’t perfect after all. I guess you have to give them credit because despite all the shit swirling around them they just kept living their lives.”
Nothing changes the narrative like winning. The 2005 PGA Championship, at venerable Baltusrol, in New Jersey, was Mickelson’s last shot that season at everlasting glory. The story of his breakthrough victory at the 2004 Masters had been his newfound restraint, as he employed exclusively a high, soft cut off the tee, which cost him distance but effectively kept him out of trouble. With his souped-up new Callaway gear, he had returned to a hot draw that brought the big miss back into play. Mickelson is such a know-it-all that the other players had tagged him with two sardonic nicknames: Genius and FIGJAM (Fuck I’m Good Just Ask Me). But he clearly outsmarted himself by abandoning the cut shot that won him the Masters. During a practice round at Baltusrol—a traditional U.S. Open venue that for this PGA featured skinny fairways and tangly rough—Mickelson had the Eureka! moment to go back to hitting nothing but cuts off the tee, even on dogleg rights that would normally favor a draw for a left-hander. The strategy was validated by an opening 67 that tied him for the lead and fired up the Jersey boys. Mickelson had first emerged as the tristate sweetheart at the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage. Baltusrol is a quick ride in a town car from Gotham, and during this PGA, the New York Times anointed Mickelson “New York’s pro.” At Baltusrol he played shamelessly to the Jersey faithful, summoning the same kind of love he got at Bethpage. On the sixth hole of his first round, Mickelson’s drive clipped a tree, forcing him to play his second shot down the adjacent seventeenth fairway. That left him a wedge into the green that he hit directly over the heads of the swollen gallery. After sticking the shot to five feet, Mickelson pulled a Hale Irwin and knuckle-bumped his way to the green, drawing deafening roars. “I love the feel that the people here provide,” he said afterward. “It’s just an amazing feeling from a player’s point of view to have that kind of support.” Mickelson surged to a three-stroke lead on Friday with a 65 that featured seven birdies and an eagle. This sent the throng into such hysterics that Steve Elkington described it as “probably the loudest I’ve ever heard at a golf tournament.”
Of course, even a throttled-back Mickelson can’t help but produce drama. If Woods had a three-stroke lead midway through a major, it was time to call the engraver. On Saturday at Baltusrol, it took Mickelson all of six holes to fritter away his lead as he made three bogeys. By day’s end, Davis Love III, suddenly resurgent at age forty-one, had caught him at six under after a third straight 68. One shot back was Thomas Bjørn, a Hamlet in spikes who was emerging as the brooding prince of Danish golf; during the third round he shot a stunning 63. Two back of Mickelson and Love were Vijay Singh, the defending champ, and Elkington, forty-two, the oft-injured 1995 PGA Championship winner who still had the prettiest swing in golf.
On Sunday, Mickelson looked as though he was going to end all the suspense early. The first seven holes are the meat of the Baltusrol layout, and they played especially stout because the final round brought by far the toughest conditions of the week—a stiff breeze and firmer, faster greens. After opening with four pars and a birdie, Mickelson had a three-stroke lead as the other would-be contenders fell away. But Mickelson can make a thirty-yard-wide fairway seem like a tightrope. Beginning on number six, he bogeyed four out of five holes, once again letting everyone else back in the ball game. Mickelson regained the lead with a fifteen-foot birdie putt on the thirteenth hole. With par-5s looming at seventeen and eighteen, the 87th PGA Championship was speeding toward a thrilling finish, but a lightning storm suspended play until the next morning, forcing Mickelson to sleep on a lead for the fourth straight night.
When play restarted on Monday, all the contenders shrank from the moment. All but Phil. Standing on the eighteenth tee, he was tied with Bjørn and Elkington, and he split the fairway with what Bones called “the single best full swing I’ve ever seen him make at the ball.” The drive settled near a plaque commemorating Jack Nicklaus’s famous 1-iron to twenty-two feet that clinched the 1967 U.S. Open. Ever the showman, Mickelson tapped the plaque for good luck. But Mickelson’s approach, a full-blooded 3-wood from 247 yards, wasn’t quite as artful, finishing in thick rough four paces short and right of the green. One more up-and-down in a career full of them and the Wanamaker Trophy would be his. Sizing up his chip, Phil was struck by déjà vu. “We had some pretty thick rough in our backyard, and that’s exactly what I was thinking on eighteen, that this is no different from what I’ve done in my backyard since I was a kid,” he said. He made an aggressive, fearless swing, and an instantly famous chip cozied to two feet. Happiness is a tap-in to win the PGA Championship.
Mickelson’s victory validated his green jacket; at that moment there were 113 players with one career major championship victory, but a second win put Mickelson in the august company of Hall of Famers like Greg Norman, Johnny Miller, Bernhard Langer, and Ben Crenshaw. He was halfway to his stated goal of winning the career Grand Slam.
During the brutal years when Mickelson wore the dread title Best Player Never to Have Won a Major, he kept insisting his goal was not to win just one major championship, but a bunch of them. He was well on his way now.