Phil Mickelson’s second major championship victory elevated him to superduperstardom. The spoils were extravagant—his very own Gulfstream V, a hilltop mansion in tony Rancho Santa Fe, California—but so was the scrutiny. In January 2006, GQ named Mickelson number eight on its list of the ten most hated athletes in the world, alongside douche canoes like Barry Bonds and Terrell Owens. The corresponding write-up used fraud, preening, and insincere to describe Mickelson. This was, and remains, a common critique. “I remember when I came on Tour, guys told me he’s a phony or a fake or whatever,” says Hunter Mahan. Tour veteran Bo Van Pelt tells an illustrative story about the time he was paired with Mickelson at the 2004 Colonial. A fan following them kept yelling, “Phil! I went to ASU! Go Sun Devils!” Mickelson smiled at the guy, waved to him, gave him the patented thumbs-up… and this only further encouraged the yahoo. “He shouted the same thing for five straight holes,” says Van Pelt. “Finally, he gives one more ‘Phil, I went to ASU!’ and Phil mutters under his breath, ‘Yeah, you and fifty thousand other fucking people out here.’ ” It was an understandable reaction—who wouldn’t be annoyed? But Van Pelt remembers being impressed by Mickelson’s ventriloquism: “Even as he said that, he was still smiling and waving. The fans had no idea.”
One Aussie PGA Tour veteran recalls a long-ago BellSouth Classic when weather delays forced a thirty-six-hole Sunday. In the locker room that morning, all the players were grumpy because such a slog was suboptimal preparation for the ensuing Masters week. Mickelson was particularly agitated, tossing around f-bombs. At the end of the long day, the locker room was crowded with players drying off and packing up. Mickelson alighted the TV screen and waxed poetic about how much he enjoyed the challenge, saying that it had been a refreshing throwback to the old days of the Tour. The assembled players burst out laughing.
Among Mickelson’s colleagues there is much eye rolling about his marathon autograph sessions at tournaments. The underlying feeling is that it is just a shameless brand-building exercise. This is not wrong. By the time Mickelson won the 2005 PGA Championship, he had hired a former San Diego newspaperman named T. R. Reinman to serve as a press liaison and to help shepherd him during tournament weeks. “I remember one time after a round, he had been signing autographs for forty-five minutes or so and the crowd was getting bigger, not smaller,” says Reinman. “It started to rain, so I went out there to run interference. I tried to say something about him coming inside and Phil cut me off: ‘Hey, I’m working here.’ ”
Brandel Chamblee recalls a Crosby Clambake in the mid-1990s when he and Mickelson arrived in their cars at Poppy Hills just after dawn for an early tee time. A little kid was waiting in the otherwise empty parking lot to ask Mickelson for his autograph. “Phil just kept walking and said, ‘I’ll get you afterward,’ and this little boy was crestfallen,” says Chamblee. “He wasn’t gonna wait around for six hours to ask again and they both knew it. Of course, I signed for the kid—it took five seconds. I’m not saying this to denigrate Phil, just to illustrate that it was strategic when he decided to start signing all those autographs. Because early in his career he didn’t sign a lot. I’m ninety-nine percent sure it was strategic because Tiger hated signing and pretty much refused to do it. Phil saw there was a void and decided he would be the superstar who signs for everyone. And that elevated the narrative surrounding Phil.”
Of course, the fans don’t care why Mickelson gives so much of himself, they’re just thrilled and grateful that he does, especially since so many Tour players blow by them with a thousand-yard stare. (Chamblee calls professional golfers “likely the biggest prima donnas in all of sports.”) Phil likes to tell the story of early in his career observing Arnold Palmer interact with people and that he has always tried to emulate that generosity of spirit. “He’s not phony, he’s just kind of goofy,” Mahan concludes. “I’ve never seen any kind of fake side to him. And I’ve never seen him be rude to any person.”
Mickelson is famously generous with folks in the service industry, dispensing Benjis as if they’re business cards. Years ago, when Golf Digest asked various players how much cash they were carrying, Mickelson’s number was $8,100: sixty-five Ben Franklins, eighty Andrew Jacksons. “I want to take care of people,” Mickelson said, not acknowledging that a fat stack of greenbacks might also be useful for paying off gambling debts. “If someone does something for you, you should take care of them.” Some players also see this as contrived, with one major champion saying, “It feels like he’s trying to buy goodwill.” Again, regardless of the motive, isn’t taking care of people preferable to stiffing them? (As a young pro, Tiger Woods routinely left nothing for the locker room attendants, so his pal Mark O’Meara would tip them $100 on his behalf… and then have to get paid back later.) If the worst critique people can come up with is that a person is trying too hard to be nice, they must be doing something right. “When I came out on Tour in the eighties,” says Mike Donald, “we were supposed to leave a ten-dollar tip for the locker room guys. In 1991, when I was on the policy board, it was suggested we go up to twenty dollars, and there was upheaval in the room. Some guys wouldn’t use the locker room at all because they didn’t want to pay the money!” Fast-forward to a Honda Classic in the mid-nineties on a Sunday afternoon, when Donald is alone in the locker room with Mickelson, who has just completed the final round, having finished in the middle of the pack. “I saw him hand the locker room guy a wad of cash, thank him, and then he left,” Donald says. “I wandered over and asked, ‘How’d we do?’ It was eight hundred dollars. I thought that was so classy. From that point on, I tried to be more generous with my tipping and be more appreciative of people. I think other guys did, too, because of Phil. He changed the culture a little bit, and the only beneficiaries were the guys cleaning the shoes.”
On Masters Sunday in 2004, Mackay hung around Augusta National deep into the night, waiting for his boss to finish his dinner with the club membership. Finally, he saw some stirring in the player parking lot. “It’s pitch-black dark out there,” says Mackay, “and there’s two or three other people around Phil, so I walk over there to help out with packing the bags. As I walk up, I see these guys are hugging Phil. And they’re not just hugging him, it’s like an emotional hug. And as I get closer, I realize that I have no clue who these guys are. Well, it turns out, these are the guys who work in the lower locker room at Augusta National who Phil’s been tipping all these years and taking such good care of. And now that Phil’s won the Masters, he’s going to the champions locker room. And these guys are losing him forever, and they are just devastated.” When one of the longtime waiters in the Augusta National clubhouse was up for a promotion, Mickelson provided him a letter of recommendation.
The Callaway Performance Center in Carlsbad, California, is a quick drive from his home, and when Mickelson rolls in he often has bags full of In-N-Out for the staff. “He doesn’t get any publicity for that,” says Larry Dorman, the former Callaway executive. “Phil Mickelson does not have to care whatsoever about the guy operating the robot at the test center, but he still makes the effort. That’s not a phony to me.”
John Hawkins recalls an occasion at Colonial when Mickelson lit him up for a full thirty seconds in front of a large group of fans about something he had typed in Golf World. “I felt about four inches tall,” Hawkins says. “A couple minutes later he circles back and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got an exclusive for you.’ It wasn’t a big deal, just a new ball Callaway was debuting, but he was throwing me a bone. He went from an asshole to my best friend in two minutes. The best players are always the meanest dogs in the lot. Tiger set the standard.” (Indeed, Woods once counseled Sean O’Hair, a gifted but soft Tour player, “You need more prick juice.”) Continues Hawkins, “Phil could be a motherfucker, too. But he was smart enough and composed enough to be able to morph back into the guy he’s supposed to be. Yes, he’s a phony, but he’s a sincere phony.”
No wonder Steve Elling, the former golf writer at the Orlando Sentinel, calls Mickelson “Captain Mindfuck.”
Reinman’s presence in the press room every week was a manifestation of Mickelson’s sophistication; no other player had their very own flack just to deal with reporters. (Woods later stole the idea.) A schmoozer and a raconteur, Reinman would dispense little nuggets to scribes, gently offer potential story lines, and always promise to do his very best to deliver an exclusive interview with Mickelson. Even though these pretty much never materialized, Reinman’s human touch was a stark contrast to Woods’s agent, Mark Steinberg, who seemed to derive so much pleasure big-timing reporters he earned the nickname Dr. No. If other players, including Woods, resented the mostly adoring press Mickelson received, a lot of that had to do with the agreeable people around Phil. Bones eventually became more comfortable in his own skin and began giving thoughtful interviews, a vivid contrast to Woods’s surly caddie, Steve Williams, who once tossed a photographer’s camera in a pond. Amy Mickelson was always chatty and helpful to reporters, whereas Elin Woods was a cipher who never, ever acknowledged the press’s existence. Rick Smith exuded warmth and gregariousness; Hank Haney had a lot to say, but was always mindful that his predecessor, Butch Harmon, had been canned partly because Woods resented his high profile in the media. When Mickelson played poorly he was not above stomping away like a petulant child, ignoring the hardworking reporters who were just trying to do their job. But no one made a big deal of it because he had so many proxies to tell his story. Woods accepted the responsibilities of stardom and spoke to the press after 99.99 percent of his rounds, good or bad. Yet any transgressions in his dealings with the media were widely commented upon.
Mickelson always has his antenna up around reporters. At a Bob Hope Classic, Jerry Foltz was serving as the on-course commentator for Mickelson’s group on the Golf Channel telecast. “He wanders over and wants to ask me a question about another player,” says Foltz. “Phil asks, ‘Is that mic off?’ I said yes. Then he says, ‘Unplug it.’ That’s how savvy he is.” Writer John Feinstein was interviewing Mickelson at a clubhouse table in front of a large picture window at the Memorial years ago on a sultry Ohio afternoon. “A lot of women were dressed fairly scantily,” says Feinstein. “Every once in a while he would crane his neck and watch one walk by. One particularly attractive woman in shorts and a halter top strolled by and Phil watched her go and blurted out, ‘She’s pretty hot.’ Then he says, ‘That’s off the record, right?’ Yes, Phil, all leering is off the record.”
Mickelson can be nakedly transactional in his dealings with the press. When Karen Crouse was new to the golf beat for the New York Times, in 2012, she asked Mickelson a pointed question about Augusta National’s all-male membership practices early in Masters week. Mickelson offered a carefully worded response that didn’t really answer the question. The next day, in the press room, Crouse was passed a note with an 858 area code. She rang Mickelson. Says Crouse, “He said, ‘Well, Karen, I just want you to know this is obviously a very delicate, hot-button issue, and how you use my quotes will determine what kind of relationship we have moving forward.’ ” Crouse wrote a nuanced story, and a few days later Mickelson was brought into the press room as he surged into contention at the Masters. He flashed Crouse a thumbs-up, signaling his approval of her story. They embarked on such a cozy working relationship that Mickelson wound up Zooming in as a guest speaker to a sportswriting class that Crouse was teaching at Arizona State. “He was so good,” she says, “and my students thought I walked on water for the rest of the semester.”
Deep into the writing of this book, I received a phone call from one of Mickelson’s lawyers—he has a bunch of them—with whom I hadn’t had any contact in at least a decade. Glenn Cohen woke me up at seven a.m. on a Saturday, saying he had spoken to Mickelson and they wanted to make me a paid consultant in an attempt to wrest control of Phil’s media rights from the PGA Tour. Cohen referenced a story I wrote on the topic way back in 2015. “It’s a brilliant piece of work,” he said, unctuousness oozing out of the phone. “It’s so good it could have been written by a graduate of Harvard Law.” The job offer felt like a bribe to me and I declined it, citing the glaringly obvious conflict of interest that I was working on an f-ing book about his client. “Well, you wouldn’t be getting paid by him, you’d be getting paid by me,” Cohen said. No dice. Naturally, we segued into a conversation about this book. “Phil is scared to death about it,” he said, but added, “I swear to Christ that’s not why I called.” A series of questions about the content of the book inevitably ensued, with Mickelson’s fixer admitting he was on a “fishing expedition.” Cohen would repeat the job offer at least a half dozen more times in the ensuing months, despite my demurrals; his numerous phone calls often came at odd hours, like 12:34 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The ham-handedness evoked Deep Throat’s summary of the bungled Watergate cover-up: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
Then there was the occasion when Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated was speaking with Mickelson as he signed autographs. They encountered what in Tour parlance is known as a “rope-hoper”: a young woman on the rope line who is overly flirtatious with the players. Mickelson deflected her advances by saying, “Have you met Rick Reilly, America’s greatest sportswriter?” Reilly began chatting with the toothsome lass as Mickelson slipped away. Moments later, Reilly’s cell phone rang. “Hey, it’s Pimp Daddy,” said Mickelson. “You owe me one.”
Perhaps as a thank-you for all the In-N-Out burgers, the Callaway technicians cooked up a new toy for Mickelson in the spring of 2006: a heel-weighted driver with a longer shaft that helped him hit towering draws and gave him what he claimed was an extra twenty-five yards off the tee. Rick Smith immediately dubbed it “the bomb driver.” But Mickelson still wanted to employ his regular driver for the more reliable butter cuts so, for the Tour stop in Atlanta the week before the Masters, Mickelson dropped one of his wedges and kept both drivers in the bag. All he did was finish 28 under par to win by thirteen strokes in the most dominant performance of his career, averaging 309.1 yards per drive and hitting 80.4 percent of fairways along the way. (He had been averaging 297.2 yards and 57.5 percent coming in.) For the first time since Tiger Woods was an undergrad, he was not the clear-cut Masters favorite.
The intrigue surrounding Mickelson’s twin drivers stoked the larger story of how the revamped Augusta National would play. Following the 2005 tournament, the course underwent another round of retrofitting, being stretched by 145 yards to 7,445 in its continuing evolution from a wide-open shotmaker’s delight to a longer, tighter, more penal test that demands precision as much as power. Mickelson opened with a 70, three shots back of Vijay Singh’s lead. During the second round, a swirling breeze gave Augusta National more teeth; Chad Campbell’s 67 propelled him to a three-stroke lead. Mickelson was four back after a 72, during which he hit nine fairways and birdied all the par-5s.
He had ground it out over the first two rounds without his biggest fan, Amy. She had been by his side during the early part of Masters week, but on Wednesday flew from Augusta to San Diego to watch eldest daughter Amanda’s school play. Dressed as a rainbow, Amanda, six, had only one line. “But it was a compelling line,” Amy would say later, with utter sincerity. Phil was so bummed to miss the performance he tried to persuade a friend to set up a live feed, but it didn’t pan out. Mother and daughter jetted back to Augusta on Friday, with Amy arriving just in time to make a six p.m. cocktail party. On Saturday, she didn’t get to see her hubby strike his first shot until suppertime. At 1:02 p.m., rain and lightning forced a delay of four hours and eighteen minutes. Mickelson squeezed in five holes before darkness halted the round. He didn’t make a par, following three straight birdies with two bogeys. On Sunday morning, Mickelson played the remaining thirteen holes of his third round in one under, taking the lead at –4. During the break between rounds, he predicted the rest of Sunday would be “an eighteen-hole shootout.” Indeed, as he played the seventh hole, he was in a five-way tie for first and fifteen players were within three strokes of the lead, including three of his primary rivals: Woods, Singh, and Retief Goosen. What had the makings of a classic back-nine dogfight instead turned into a suspense-free coronation. Mickelson made textbook birdies at the seventh and eighth holes to regain the outright lead, and then produced the kind of methodical, indomitable, airtight golf that has been the hallmark of Woods’s biggest victories. Mickelson simply refused to make a bogey while patiently allowing everyone else to beat themselves. By the time he reached the sixteenth hole, Mickelson was four strokes ahead and cruising. “This is the best round I’ve ever seen him play,” Smith said from behind the sixteenth green. “He has incredible control out there.” Only a meaningless bogey on the eighteenth hole prevented Mickelson from becoming the fifth Masters champion to play the final round without a blemish. “The back nine I drove it as good as I probably ever have,” Mickelson said.
The sunset was throwing off gorgeous light as the defending champ, Woods, placed the green jacket on Mickelson. It was the third straight year one of them had starred in this quaint tradition, harkening back to the glory days when Arnie and Jack passed the jacket back and forth for five straight years, beginning in 1962. Taking the microphone to address the throng, Mickelson called Sunday “a day that is going to be one of the most memorable of my life, after the birth of my kids and my wedding.” Even in his finest hour he took the time to nod at Woods and ask the crowd to say a prayer for Tiger’s gravely ill father, Earl. “We all know how important parents are in life,” Mickelson said.
Now halfway to the Mickelslam, having won three of the past nine major championships, he was beginning to transcend comparisons with his contemporaries and stir the ghosts of the game’s all-time greats. It was a mind-bending change from the lost years, during which Mickelson was measured not against other golfers but against Dan Marino and Charles Barkley and other mega-talents who never won the big one. Any chance Mickelson would get complacent after his latest triumph? He offered a resounding answer in the champion’s press conference: “Tomorrow we’ll start preparing for Winged Foot.”
Johnny Miller won the 1973 U.S. Open by torching fearsome Oakmont with a final-round 63. The USGA exacted its revenge the following year, when it took seven over par for Hale Irwin to win the Open, the highest score in the postwar years. That tournament was dubbed “The Massacre at Winged Foot” and cemented the course’s reputation as the sport’s ultimate examination, a fearsome combination of booby-trapped greens, carnivorous bunkers, man-eating rough, and other horrors. Mickelson was determined to crack the code. In the two months between the Masters and the U.S. Open, he made three separate scouting trips to Winged Foot, spending a total of ten days on the property, many of them nine- or ten-hour grindfests. After his first trip, he rang up Roger Cleveland, the wedge maestro at Callaway, and requested a special 64-degree weapon to use in the cavernous bunkers and for touch shots around the greens. Asked what inspired the 64-degree wedge, Mickelson, ever the smart-ass, said, “Well, I wanted one less than 65 degrees and one more than 63, and it just worked out perfect.” When tournament week arrived, he had four different drivers in tow, giving him varied options depending on the course setup and meteorological conditions. He also dropped his sand wedge and 3-wood, opting instead for a 4-wood and 3-iron.
It was left to Jim Mackay to help sort through all the options. His profile had risen along with Mickleson’s; at tournaments, Bones was now getting more attention from the gallery than many (most?) of the actual players. His dedication to Mickelson was absolute. Mackay was once rooming with fellow caddie John Wood at the Las Vegas tournament when a freak earthquake shook their room on the fifteenth floor of the Golden Nugget. Wood is a California native so, unimpressed, he rolled over to keep sleeping. Mackay, meanwhile, bolted out of bed toward Mickelson’s golf bag, which was standing in the corner. Gently, lovingly, he laid the bag on the ground, lest it topple over and the clubs sustain a little scratch. Says Wood, “I think it tells you something about the guy that his first instinct wasn’t his own safety, it was protecting Phil’s clubs.”
A perfectionist and worrywart, Bones could not have been more different than his freewheeling boss, which added to the fun and frisson of watching them work together. Each year, Mickelson granted his looper one—and only one—veto. “I say something like ‘I am officially submitting my veto to the committee,’ ” says Mackay. “But technically he is the committee when it comes to the veto. So, I have to deal with that, too, when it happens. Apparently, Phil can filibuster the veto.”
The first-ever veto came at the Tour stop in New Orleans, on the par-4 ninth hole at English Turn. Mickelson drove it into the right rough, under some trees. A lake was directly between him and the green. He says, “I thought I’d take a little 3-iron and I’m just gonna shoot a little skipper and it’s gonna skip off the water and hop up the bank and onto the green. And [Bones] goes, ‘Hell, no. You’re layin’ this up. You’re gonna hit a 9-iron out to the left. You’re going to hit a wedge up there close and make par.’ I go, ‘I really think three’s not out of play here. If I double skip it, it’ll hit in the bank just perfectly.’ And I was actually serious. I’m laughing now, but I was serious at the time. I thought I could do it. He said no and I had to go with it because I gave him his veto. I hit a 9-iron out there. I wedged up to four feet. I made par. Probably the right play.”
Did he consider missing the putt on purpose just to spite Mackay?
“I think that subconsciously I wanted to, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
At the 2002 British Open, at Muirfield, there was another veto dustup. On the par-4 thirteenth hole, Mickelson drove it into a pot bunker down the left side of the fairway. “Those bunkers, you really just have to wedge it out,” he says. “The ball was up against the right edge. I got down on my knees and I thought, I have a swing. If I get on my knees with a 6-iron, I think I can do it. So Bones says, ‘Hell no, I’m using my veto.’ And I go, ‘That’s only good in the continental United States, so you don’t get your veto.’ So I try to hit this 6-iron. And to make a long story short, I had to make about an eighteen-footer for a double [bogey 6]. Had I just wedged out, I would’ve made five, it wouldn’t have been an issue, it would’ve been no big deal. That was one of the dumbest shots I’ve tried to play.”
Early in the week at Winged Foot, Mickelson was asked what role Bones plays between the ropes at the big events. “Well, we don’t really talk too much about course management and stuff,” he said. “That game plan is set up well before we show up on Thursday. He is awesome at club selection, and he’s awesome at green reading. So, I have found over the years that he is right more often than I am on club selection and certain reads for greens. However, I still seem to go with my decision, and as I tell him, I say, ‘Look, if you like a 6 and I think it’s a 7, I can live with me hitting a 7 and coming up short. It’s hard for me to hit a 6 and go long.’ So I can live with my own mistakes if I’m wrong, and as it’s turned out, I’m wrong more often than not.” This is known as foreshadowing.
In the first round of the U.S. Open, Mickelson hit only eight greens in regulation but finagled an even-par 70, putting himself in a tie for second, one back of Colin Montgomerie. He credited his 64-degree wedge and all the homework he had done for a great escape. On Friday, he missed short par putts on each of the first two holes. Mickelson fought hard from there to piece together a 74 that left him tied for seventh, four back of Steve Stricker’s lead. Mickelson bogeyed the last hole after a big block off the tee, but he felt strangely buoyant because the wild drive was followed by further misadventures in the trees, yet he pulled off a semi-miraculous up-and-down to escape with a 5. “I know I can’t go left, and I still did like an idiot, and I barely made bogey,” Mickelson said. “Even though I walked off with a bogey, I walked off on a high note because it could have been a big number. Bogeys are okay. I just had to prevent the double, the big mistake.” (More foreshadowing.)
On the front nine of the third round, Mickelson was, in his words, “all over the place” off the tee. It is a vexing question that has always followed him: Why is it so hard for such a great player to hit a goddamn fairway?
“Phil has gone through various instructors, but his swing has never really changed,” says Peter Kostis, who served as an unofficial swing adviser to Mickelson early in his pro career. “The lead hand is your power hand, and because Phil is naturally right-handed, he’s pulling the hell out of that club with his right side. And because he has weak right-hand grip, he has an extraordinary amount of face rotation through impact. The straighter players have less rotation through impact. But they tend to have less speed as well. And Phil’s pursuit of speed, I think, has been addictive. The more you can get the toe to close over the heel, the farther you can hit the ball, but you never know where it’s going.”
“Phil has the laziest legs I’ve ever seen in a great player,” says Brandel Chamblee. “He has a very steep angle of attack but, partly because his legs aren’t powering through the swing, he doesn’t hold the angle, so the release coming down is inconsistent.”
“He has a lot of wrist action at the bottom, a little bit of a flip,” says Johnny Miller. “Right after impact, the toe turns over. He does not keep the face square very long at all through the ball. That is the opposite of the really great drivers of the golf ball: Trevino, Calvin Peete, Moe Norman, Dustin Johnson. Their face is so stable. His club flops around. One thing about Phil, timing is everything for him. He’s such a gifted feel player that if he’s feeling good and timing his swing just right, he can have hot stretches, but it’s a dicey move under pressure. It’s amazing, really, that he’s won what he’s won, given the fundamental flaws in his swing.” This is part of Mickelson’s obsession with equipment: instead of changing his swing, he’d rather engineer a quick fix, which might actually be a defensible position, given all of his success.
On the back nine on Saturday at Winged Foot, Mickelson’s swing clicked; he hit five fairways in a row and came home in thirty-three. His 69 was one of only two scores under par on the day, and at +2 overall, he moved into a tie for the lead with Kenneth Ferrie, a little-known Englishman. The gifted but callow Aussie Geoff Ogilvy lurked one shot back. Montgomerie was among those tied for fourth, three strokes off the lead. Flying high after his stellar back nine, Mickelson enthused after the round, “Every year, one time a year, we get tested like this, and I love it. I love being tested at the highest level of the most difficult and sometimes ridiculous golf course setups we’ll ever see. I love it because I get to find out where my game is at, where my head is at, and it really challenges me as a player.”
The final round presented Mickelson with a defining test, but he was battling his swing from the jump. A long putt on number four brought him a precious birdie, but on the very next hole there was cause to wonder about his head: after a wild drive he tried to play a 4-wood out of the gnarly rough. He foozled the shot about ten feet, leading to a bogey on one of Winged Foot’s two par-5s. That Bones couldn’t talk him out of such a capricious play did not portend well. Mickelson bogeyed the seventh hole to fall two strokes behind Ogilvy, but this final round was destined to be a war of attrition.
As Mickelson played the eleventh hole, he was in a four-way tie for the lead with Ogilvy, Montgomerie, and Jim Furyk, all at +4. Singh and Padraig Harrington were a shot back. (All but Ogilvy are in the World Golf Hall of Fame, or will be.) On eleven, Phil played a gorgeous ¾ punch wedge that landed fifteen paces short of the green and trickled to ten feet. He buried the putt and uncorked a lusty fist pump. The lead was his alone, but the rest of the back nine featured more melodramatic twists than a telenovela. Ogilvy clanged a bunker shot off the pin on thirteen to save par. On the fourteenth tee, Mickelson overcooked a draw one foot into the rough; from a nasty lie he took a violent swing and somehow muscled his ball to five feet. The ensuing birdie gave him a two-stroke lead. The well-lubricated crowd was off the rails.
At the par-4 seventeenth, Ogilvy got hung up in the rough and, laying three, was still chipping. His caddie, Alistair “Squirrel” Matheson, pulled a Bruce Edwards, and his boss was all too happy to play the part of Tom Watson. “He said, ‘Just chip it in,’ ” Ogilvy recalled afterward. “ ‘Why don’t you just chip it in?’ ” So he did, to save a highly unlikely par. At sixteen, Mickelson hooked his drive into deep rough, then his approach expired twenty yards short of the green, into a fried-egg lie in the bunker. He took a bogey to fall back to +4, slicing his lead in half. Harrington, riding a flawless round, gave himself a chance to win from the clubhouse, but bogeyed the final three holes to post +7. Furyk tugged his approach at eighteen into a greenside bunker and then missed a five-foot par putt, posting +6. On the seventeenth hole, Mickelson’s drive was trash. Literally. He blocked his ball so far left it sailed over the gallery’s head and hopped into a garbage can. (On the day he will hit only two of fourteen fairways.) After taking a free drop, he played a crafty slice under a tree branch and his ball bended perfectly into the middle of the green. The roar could be heard clear across Westchester County. Mickelson saved his par, and he was so close to finally nabbing his U.S. Open you could almost taste it.
Up ahead, Ogilvy’s approach to eighteen came up just short and trickled backward off the false front, leaving him a thirty-yard pitch up and over the mound. Having grown up in Australia’s Sandbelt, he knew exactly how to play the shot and zipped it to five feet and then wiggled in the putt to take the clubhouse lead at +5. “I thought that might be for a playoff,” said the twenty-nine-year-old Ogilvy, who to that point in his career had only two PGA Tour wins. Montgomerie, having inherited Mickelson’s title as the dread Best Player Never to Have Won a Major, was next to arrive at the exacting finishing hole. He hit a perfect drive. At +4, Monty was tied for the lead with Mickelson and flooded with the confidence of having just made a forty-foot birdie bomb on the seventeenth hole. One more good swing by one of the game’s preeminent iron players and the trophy could be his. But Monty uncorked a shot so bad it called to mind Dan Jenkins’s description of Watson’s errant approach on the Road Hole that cost him the 1984 Open Championship: “a semishank, half-flier, out-of-control fade-slice.” Montgomerie’s ball buried in the rough short of the green. He blasted a pitch forty feet past. Looking more and more like Mrs. Doubtfire with every flailing moment, Monty three-putted to make a tragic double bogey. This will be the last good shot to win a major for the kind of guy Fleet Street likes to call a “nearly man.” “I had a very bad flight home that night,” Montgomerie will later write in his autobiography. “I remember sitting there in a daze, not knowing what to say or do. I wasn’t crying. I had gone beyond that. I was incapable of any analysis. The same three words kept going through my head: What just happened?”
After all this craziness, Mickelson arrived at the seventy-second tee with the clearest of mandates: make a par, win the U.S. Open, at last. Two days earlier, Tiger Woods, still mourning the recent death of his father, missed his first cut at a major championship since turning pro. With one more par, Mickelson would be three-quarters of the way to Woods’s grandest achievement, the Tiger Slam. For all of his spectacular success, Mickelson had never been player of the year or reached number one in the world ranking; he was one more par from securing both honors. There was a frenzied feeling in the air, fed by the final-hole crack-ups and the fact that for the preceding seventy-one holes, Mickelson had been juggling chain saws on a high wire while wearing Rollerblades. “He had no business being anywhere near the lead,” says Miller. “He had literally no control of his golf ball. What Phil did at Winged Foot might be the greatest four days of scrambling in golf history. Well, three days and seventeen holes.”
Now Phil and Bones had to decide which club to pull on the tee of a 450-yard dogleg left. “You can’t hit driver there,” says Jack Nicklaus, a four-time U.S. Open champion. “How many fairways did he hit that day? Two! Driver is just inviting trouble. You have to keep the ball in front of you.” Bones will go to his grave defending driver. “There was never even a consideration about hitting anything but driver,” he said the day after the tournament. “Phil hits his 4-wood no more than about 240 yards. A 4-wood into a ten- to fifteen-mile-per-hour wind uphill is going to go about 225 yards. There was no possible way to hit 4-wood long enough to reach the dogleg if he missed the fairway.” That was the calculus: given the two-way miss that haunted Mickelson throughout the round, it seemed likely he would uncork another wild drive, and in that case it would be better to wind up closer to the green, allowing for more recovery options. Two-time U.S. Open champ Andy North disagrees with that thinking. “It’s the dumbest fifteen minutes in golf history,” he says. “You hit 3-iron then 5-iron and win the U.S. Open. Hello?! Even if he comes up a little short of the green, the way Phil was chipping and putting that week, you have to bank on him getting it up-and-down, like Ogilvy did.” On Sunday’s fourteenth hole—which played only eight yards shorter than eighteen—Mickelson had employed his 4-iron off tee; he made a mediocre swing but the ball stopped a couple paces from the edge of the fairway, in the intermediate rough, allowing for a straightforward approach shot to the heart of the green. “I know what Bones is saying,” says Miller, “but what makes Phil so shaky with his driver—that steepness in the downswing—is what makes him such a good iron player. All he has to do is get a 3- or 4-iron in play off the tee and he is still in control of the tournament. It doesn’t seem that hard.”
As Mickelson settled over the ball, holding lumber, Miller intoned on the telecast, “This better be the 4-wood.”
It ain’t.
“I tell you what, Ben Hogan is officially rolling over in his grave,” Miller added in an instantly famous quip.
With his driver, Mickelson took a mighty lash at the ball. “Phil has had the same miss his whole life,” says his boyhood teacher Dean Reinmuth. “His left knee and foot pop out toward ball on the way down, not forward to ball and up into his toe like on a normal swing. His left hip drops, his pelvis thrusts toward ball, and it’s like a baseball player with an inside pitch—he gets jammed. The club is blocked by his body on that way down, so he misses left. Add in adrenaline and pressure, and slight flaws get amped up.” This is the swing Mickelson made on the eighteenth hole at the 2004 Ryder Cup, leading to Woods’s icy glare. It’s the swing he made fifteen minutes earlier on the seventeenth tee at Winged Foot. He did it again on eighteen, and his ball flew so far left, it hit the roof of a hospitality tent seventy or eighty or a hundred yards off-line. Given the stakes, and the result, it could quite possibly be the worst drive in golf history. But Mickelson got the break of a lifetime when his ball ricocheted in the direction he was aiming and drew a clean lie in rough that had been trampled down by the fans. Still, a towering Norway maple tree was directly between him and the green. Now he faced another decision. “It’s a crazy game, innit?” says Nick Faldo, a celebrated tactician in his day. “If you need a three there, it’s easy—all the decisions are made for you. If you need a four, there are so many ways you can make that score. People talk about choking under pressure, but just as often that is mental, not physical. When Phil knocks it in the trees, his thinking has to change. It’s no longer about making a four. He’s got to make a five no matter what. Not losing the tournament becomes more important than winning it outright. Because if there is [an eighteen-hole Monday] playoff, he’s going to beat Geoff Ogilvy.”
“You’re talking about one of the best wedge players of all time,” says three-time U.S. Open champion Hale Irwin. “He can hit a little shot back into the fairway to his favorite yardage. Then you knock that up to ten or fifteen feet, and you have that putt to win the championship. Worst case, you tap in for bogey and take your chances in the playoff. I have a hard time understanding any other play, but maybe I’m old-fashioned.” Mickelson knows how ruthlessly effective this kind of thinking man’s golf can be: he lost major championships to both Payne Stewart and David Toms when they laid up on the seventy-second hole par-fours after errant drives and then saved par with full-swing wedges.
Mickelson and Bones quick-walked to the ball, propelled by the unseen forces of fate. They were moving fast, but the ensuing discussion was brief; Mickelson unsheathed his 3-iron. He was going to attempt to reach the green with a banana slice around the tree, more or less the exact same shot he had played on the previous hole.
“I was trying to make a four,” Mickelson said.
After a lifetime of swashbuckling and being celebrated for his derring-do, he couldn’t see any other way out of the trees. Says Miller, “He got seduced into trying the hero shot. He wanted to win in dashing style. I guess Phil thought winning with a layup would somehow be less manly. He wanted the thrill of hitting a high-risk shot on the last hole of the Open.”
For those who know Mickelson’s game intimately, the slicing 3-iron did not seem like a risky play. “When I saw he had a good lie, I raised my arms because I knew he was going to win,” says Rob Mangini, Mickelson’s college teammate and still close friend. “That’s just a bread-and-butter cut for a guy who can curve the ball more than any human on the planet. I’ve seen him do that a thousand times. Phil can play that shot in his sleep.” Ogilvy agrees, saying, “His handicap is how good he is at that shot. Most players don’t have that shot, so they don’t see it and don’t even consider that it’s an option. They just wedge it out. They’re forced into the right decision because they don’t have the skills. Unfortunately, Phil has the skills to hit it from anywhere. He thought he had the shot, so you can’t second-guess that because he can pull off the impossible.”
For 71.5 holes, Mickelson had been tempting the golf gods with unlikely and occasionally miraculous recoveries. Now, finally, at the worst possible moment, his luck ran out. For his approach shot to the green, the strike was clean but the start line ten yards too far left. His ball headed inexorably for the trunk of the elm. I was standing right there with Rick Smith and will never forget the sound of the ball hitting the tree: as loud as a judge pounding the gavel with a guilty verdict. Smith went ashen—he knew his life has just changed. Mike Lupica, the in-your-face New York newspaper columnist, panted up to Smith and shouted, “He might not make five from there!” Smith somehow didn’t punch him.
Mickelson’s ball ricocheted into the rough, maybe twenty-five yards ahead of where he had been standing. “You rarely see a great player hit two bad shots in a row,” says Paul Azinger. “Ever rarer is for them to make two bad decisions in a row. Somehow Phil did both.”
The situation was grim, as Mickelson still had tree trouble and now a worse angle to a well-fortified green. This time he played too much cut and his ball expired short and left of the green, burrowing into the fluffy sand. With the green sloping away from him, it would be impossible to get the ball close to the hole and everyone knew it. The swollen crowd around the eighteenth green whistled and buzzed with disbelief. The enormity of the unfolding disaster visited Mickelson as he trudged up the fairway. There was a blank look in his eyes and his face went sallow. He blasted out of the bunker and his ball skittered across the green and into the rough. Now he had to make the bogey chip to force a playoff. He missed the hole, and his last chance at salvation. For the fourth time in the last eight years, he had blown the United States Open.
Mickelson hid out in the scorers’ area for a long time, trying to collect himself; Amy draped an arm around his shoulders and whispered in his ear. When Phil finally emerged, his eyes were red and watery. “I still am in shock that I did that,” he says. “I just can’t believe I did that. I am such an idiot. I can’t believe I couldn’t par the last hole. It really stings.”
“For the most part, the best players are the best because they’re the best up here,” Ogilvy said in the champion’s press conference, tapping his melon. “Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world because he’s got the best brain. He hits the ball well, but there are plenty of guys that hit the ball well. He’s got the best head.”
Conspicuously absent from the discussion was the star-crossed Mickelson. He had retreated to the privacy of the second floor of the clubhouse and was sitting at his locker, motionless, staring into space with his head resting wearily in his hands. Amy came by to give him a kiss, but Phil didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve never seen him like this,” she whispered. “I think he’s in shock.”
Finally, Phil stirred, packed up his belongings, and began the slow trudge home. As he snaked through the locker room, he passed numerous mementos of Winged Foot’s glorious U.S. Open history and the legends who have enjoyed starring roles. There was a reproduction of a 1929 newspaper trumpeting Bobby Jones’s victory. A 1959 clipping celebrated Billy Casper’s heroics. A photograph from 1984 showed a beaming Fuzzy Zoeller holding the winner’s trophy aloft, and there was also a picture of Irwin, signed by the man himself: To Winged Foot G.C. Where my dreams were fulfilled. Mickelson walked past all of this history without even noticing, leaving the locker room deserted but for its ghosts.