A couple of days after the final round of the 2006 U.S. Open, Rob Mangini called up his old friend, expecting to have to talk him off the ledge. Instead, Phil Mickelson answered the phone from the happiest place on earth. “He was like, ‘I’m in line with the kids at A Small World, wearing a hat and big ol’ Prada sunglasses, and no one knows who the fuck I am—it’s great,’ ” says Mangini. A day later, they met for lunch. Mickelson got a huge sandwich with a side of self-loathing. “I was on pins and needles, not really sure what to say about Winged Foot,” says Mangini. “Phil just sits down, and right off the bat he blurts out, ‘Can you believe I almost won that fucking golf tournament playing like that? This is bullshit. I have to get better.’ ” Mickelson was not yet aware of Johnny Miller’s lacerating commentary during his final hole meltdown, but when Mangini mentioned it, his lunch date demanded a replay be cued up by phone. “He was cracking up,” says Mangini. “He said, ‘It’s totally true. What a debacle.’ ”
Things were only going to get worse for Mickelson. Three weeks after Winged Foot, Tiger Woods summoned the most precise and disciplined golf of his career, picking apart Hoylake to win the Open Championship. He dissolved into sobs on the final green, which had more to do with missing his late father, Earl, than the catharsis of winning his eleventh major championship. This was the beginning of an almighty tear, as Woods would win his next five starts, including the PGA Championship. Two months earlier, as Phil arrived on the seventy-second tee at Winged Foot, it had been possible to delude ourselves into thinking he was nearly Tiger’s equal. Now there was once again a yawning chasm between the game’s two best players. A month after the PGA, Mickelson laid another egg at the Ryder Cup, going 0-4-1, as the U.S. got blown out for the third straight time.
All of this strife finally culminated in Rick Smith’s firing in April 2007, which had become inevitable even before the ball came to rest after doinking the tree on the final hole at Winged Foot. The stunner was the announced successor: Butch Harmon. Gruff, profane, old-school in the extreme, Harmon brought a very different personality than anybody else in Mickelson’s inner circle. “Apart from Amy, I don’t think Phil has ever been told in his life to do something and done it,” says Peter Kostis. “If you want to be hypercritical, he’s surrounded himself with yes-people.” Harmon had the credibility and the self-belief to tell Mickelson what he needed to hear.
Their immediate focus was improving Mickelson’s driving accuracy. “If we can get him to play out of the fairway, he can rival Tiger,” woofed Harmon. He shortened his pupil’s backswing, while moving his hands farther from his head at the top of the swing, creating more width. Harmon also wanted to, in his words, “clean up the lower body and footwork and legwork, which was all over the place—he almost looked like Elvis Presley trying to hit a golf shot sometimes.” Working with Smith, Mickelson had become much more efficient from 150 yards and in, but his default shot with his wedges and short irons remained a big, hard swing that sent the ball sky-high with loads of spin. Harmon preached more ¾ shots and knockdowns, which would allow Mickelson better access to pins tucked on the very back or very front of greens. It was like teaching a changeup to Nolan Ryan. This shotgun marriage brought together two of the game’s biggest personalities, and Mickelson quickly fell under Harmon’s spell. “I have been entertained quite a bit with some great stories,” he said a month into the relationship. “There’s always a point to the stories; you know, whether they’re about his dad”—Claude Harmon, the 1948 Masters champion—“or other players, they always have a point. I find that very interesting. It’s a fun way to learn.”
The third tournament of the Harmon era was the 2007 Players Championship, on the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, a tight, claustrophobic, penal house of horrors so ill-suited to Mickelson’s game he had contended only once (barely) in thirteen previous tries. But in the first round he shot 67 in a stiff breeze to take the lead. “I was able to keep the ball in control, and my misses were very small and that allowed me to take a lot of the big trouble out of play that I had found in the past,” Mickelson said after the round. “I’m not curving the ball as much right-to-left or left-to-right. The ball is not having as much sidespin. It seems to be a much straighter flight.”
Mickelson wasn’t quite as sharp during the second round, but on Saturday he hit nine fairways and two other drives found the very playable first cut of rough. He had fought his way into the final pairing, one stroke back of leader Sean O’Hair. Mickelson’s putter overslept on Sunday, but he enjoyed his best ball-striking performance since the 2006 Masters, hitting sixteen greens in regulation to keep the pressure on O’Hair, who, despite Woods’s counsel, had never imbibed the prick juice. O’Hair led by two strokes heading to the dangerous seventeenth hole, but he drowned two tee shots in the water and Mickelson had a leisurely walk up eighteen, three strokes clear of the field. Owing to his suddenly reliable long game, he described the win in the most unlikely term imaginable: “stress-free.” That it came on such a fiddly finesse course only made the performance that much more satisfying. (Years later, he would say, “I was thinking to myself as I was walking around, I can’t believe I’ve actually won here.”) During a very jaunty champion’s press conference, I asked Mickelson how good he thought he could become under Harmon’s tutelage. “You are a cute little man, aren’t you?” he replied. “That’s such a good question from a brilliant individual. I don’t know.”
The answer would have to wait, as Mickelson’s ascent was slowed when he tweaked his wrist in the tangly rough at Oakmont during a U.S. Open scouting trip. He struggled throughout the summer as his practice time was curtailed by the balky wrist. He got healthy just in time for the season-ending FedEx Cup playoffs, and a showdown with Woods at the Deutsche Bank Championship. What added juice to the Harmon hiring was that he had been Tiger’s teacher and confidant for the better part of a decade. Now, after their bitchy split, Harmon was more than happy to share with Mickelson some of his rival’s secrets. Harmon explained that Tiger had employed four little bits of gamesmanship to try to unnerve Phil:
“He’s been doing it to you his whole career and you don’t even know it,” Harmon told Mickelson. With this as the backdrop, the Deutsche Bank Championship became fascinating theater as Woods and Mickelson played together in the penultimate pairing. This was their sixth final-round showdown in the same group, and Mickelson was oh-fer-five, while Woods had won three times. Phil started with a one-stroke advantage and came out flying, birdieing half of the first ten holes. He was strutting around as if he had the psychological advantage, and, indeed, Mickelson and Bones Mackay were stealing knowing glances at each other over Tiger’s theatrics, which they finally could recognize. With eight holes to play, Mickelson had seized the tournament lead and was up five strokes on his nemesis. But a wayward approach on the twelfth hole cost Phil a double bogey, and then Tiger birdied fourteen, slicing the lead to two strokes. At the par-3 sixteenth, they produced one of the most memorable sequences of their long would-be rivalry. Hitting first, Woods stuffed his tee shot to eight feet, and the Boston yahoos went a little crazy. (Perhaps as a rebuke to the Phil-loving New Yorkers, the Beantown brethren seemed to be pulling harder for Tiger.) Then Mickelson stepped up and hit a bullet that settled a couple feet inside of Woods’s ball. Check. Both made their birdie putts, and Mickelson iced the win with a nifty chip on the eighteenth hole for a closing birdie. Checkmate. “It does mean more to win against Tiger because I knew he was going to make a late charge and he did,” Mickelson said. “So, to stand there on sixteen after he knocked it close and follow it up with my own close shot and then put birdie on top of birdie, it feels terrific.
“Look, for ten years I struggled against Tiger in some of those settings. So, it means more to win this one and I value Butch’s insight.”
Of course, Mickelson managed to sully what should have been one of the most triumphant moments of his career. Standing on the edge of the eighteenth green for the victor’s TV interview, Mickelson was asked by Jimmy Roberts, who had been tipped off to the gathering storm, if he would skip the ensuing playoff event in Chicago even though it hurt his chances to scoop up the $10 million FedEx Cup bonanza. “I’m really torn, because I feel like there’s an obligation for me to play,” Mickelson said. “I’d be paired with Tiger again. I think it would be really great for the game and the Tour and the FedEx Cup. Another part of me is really frustrated because for the past year, I’ve been asking the commissioner to do a couple of things, and I told him I would play the last four [playoff] events [if he consented], and he has not done that. So I’m kind of torn.”
It was a bizarre moment and a wildly inappropriate way to air what turned out to be a minor grievance: after the Labor Day finish in Boston, Mickelson objected to the idea of having to play in a Wednesday pro-am in Chicago. For years he had been lobbying Finchem to drop pro-ams from the playoff events, to give the players more downtime and the events more of a big-time feel. Mickelson flew into Chicago to host a corporate outing and then headed home, blowing off the tournament and leading to much hand-wringing. “It’s hard for me to interpret some of his thoughts,” said the Chicago tournament director John Kaczkowski, choosing his words carefully.
But Mickelson has always been strident about Tour politics. Brandel Chamblee recalls a B.C. Open at which he and Mickelson were paired together for all four rounds. “Knowing that I was on the Player Advisory Council,” says Chamblee, “he spent the whole time in my ear saying the PGA Tour should be reduced to only thirty players—nothing but the stars. He was totally oblivious to the fact that would eliminate my job.” Mickelson is a vocal opponent of “opposite events,” the tournaments conducted for the Tour’s middle class during the same weeks when the big names gather at the limited-field World Golf Championships. “I despise conflicting events,” he says. “I don’t think they’re right because I think they detract from the product that we’re presenting.” When his colleagues whisper snarky things about Mickelson it is not really because of jealousy, as is often cited as the reason; tournament golf is the ultimate meritocracy and other players respect that he has earned the crown and the jewels. What bothers the average Tour player is they know Mickelson thinks they are untalented, unpopular leeches. As one journeyman says, “Tiger might be a dick, but at least he knows who I am. Phil doesn’t know and doesn’t care.”
When paired with a rookie or marginal player for the first time, Mickelson has a favorite practical joke: in the scorer’s tent he will say, “I made a couple of mistakes on your card—let’s see if you can find them.” He thinks it’s hilarious, but for the other player it can be stressful and/or embarrassing. Mickelson is a dispenser of biting nicknames. He tabbed former Tour player Colt Knost “The Hammer,” explaining, “In poker, that’s the worst hand you can be dealt. That’s Colt. He got dealt the worst hand. He’s short, he’s fat, and he hits it short off the tee.” Mickelson’s reputation among certain peers has never fully recovered from an incident at the 1999 Las Vegas Invitational, when he big-timed the other players and decided to hit balls from the back of the range at TPC Summerlin, even though signage expressly forbade using that tee. After working his way through his bag, Mickelson launched a driver, and his ball carried over the heads of the players at the other end of the range and pegged in the knee Dave Renwick, Vijay Singh’s caddie. Renwick went down like he had been shot and ultimately needed medical attention. He was unable to caddie for Singh that week. This was the beginning of the feud between the big Fijian and Mickelson, which ultimately boiled over when they went nose to nose in a heated confrontation in the champions locker room at Augusta National in 2005; Singh had complained to Masters officials about the spike marks Mickelson was leaving on the greens from his ornate pre-putting routine.
Of course, Phil can be as magnanimous as he is petty. In 2007, it became public that he had been paying the college expenses of Holli Dobler, a young woman he had never met. She is the daughter of Conrad Dobler, who was left disabled after a brutal ten-year NFL career. In 2001, his wife, Joy, became a quadriplegic after a freak fall from a hammock. Mickelson was a fan of Dobler’s from his playing days, and when he saw a TV report about the family’s misfortune he was moved to help, leading Joy to call him “an angel without wings.”
Mickelson has been the source of many other random acts of kindness. At the 2005 PGA Championship, a young fan named David Finn was sitting in his wheelchair behind the fourteenth green during a Tuesday practice round. David suffers from a mitochondrial disorder that has left his limbs withered and has robbed him of his ability to speak. But a broken body can’t suppress the powerful spirit within. David’s bright blue eyes convey intelligence and an eagerness to connect. Mickelson sensed this and, after putting out on Baltusrol’s fourteenth hole, he walked over to David and said, “Hi, buddy, thanks for coming. Here’s a souvenir for you.” He laid an autographed glove in the kid’s lap. Says David’s father, John, “So many people don’t know how to act around the severely disabled. Pity is the worst possible emotion. The glove was a wonderful gesture, but what made that moment so meaningful was that Phil treated Dave like a normal kid, which is all he wants.” The Finns followed Mickelson throughout the week, with Phil often acknowledging David with a smile or gesture. Mickelson, of course, won the tournament, but even in one of the headiest moments of his career, he thought of his biggest fan, so as the trophy ceremony was beginning, Bones Mackay hustled over to say his boss was wondering if David would like to have a picture taken with the Wanamaker Trophy. The moment was recorded for posterity by the Newark Star-Ledger: Phil has the trophy in one hand and the other is placed tenderly on the left shoulder of David, whose head is thrown back in ecstasy. The glove is now enshrined in glass in David’s room, and he has a thick scrapbook of his PGA Tour adventures, which his three older sisters call The Book of Phil. Asked about his affection for Mickelson, David spelled out on a touchscreen monitor, “Phil is the Arnold Palmer of today.” His father gently chided him for parroting something they had heard on Golf Channel. David thought a bit longer. With great determination, he tapped, “Phil was the first person to make me feel special.”
Back in San Diego, the Mickelson kids moved in the same circles as the Northbrook family—Sophia had dance classes with Sydney Northbrook, while Sydney’s brother played on the same coed peewee soccer team as Amanda Mickelson. Eric Northbrook would see Phil at games and dance recitals and get a friendly nod, dad to dad, but their relationship didn’t go much deeper than that. When his son was four and his daughter six, Northbrook crashed his motorcycle and was paralyzed from the chest down. He spent five months in a specialized hospital in Denver, recovering and learning to adapt to his new reality. When his family returned to San Diego, the Mickelsons had retrofitted the Northbrook home with ramps, an interior elevator, hardwood floors instead of carpet, and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, a project that cost roughly a quarter-million dollars. “It was a game changer,” says Eric. Determined to live a purposeful life, Northbrook started his own foundation, HeadNorth, which has now raised over $3 million to help nearly six hundred families in San Diego County affected by catastrophic spinal cord injuries. “It’s my legacy,” Northbrook says. “Phil inspired me to pay it forward.”
True to his word after almost losing Amy and Evan in the delivery room, Mickelson has used his influence to better the lives of others through large-scale philanthropy. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, he donated $250,000 to relief efforts and added the New Orleans Classic to his schedule, pledging to charity all of his winnings for the 2006 tournament, which inspired a number of players to do the same. Mickelson was disappointed to finish fifteenth and earn “only” $81,720, so he rounded up his donation to a quarter mil, then matched that same number the next year. When your annual income is north of $40 million, it’s easy to just write a check, but Phil and Amy wanted to experience firsthand Katrina’s impact and meet folks who had been affected. The day after the ’06 tournament, they spent nine hours exploring the city and chatting with residents. “They were deeply moved,” says Tommy Fonseca, the tournament staffer who spent the day driving the Mickelsons across New Orleans. “I remember Amy breaking down three or four times.”
As a tribute to his dad, the old navy pilot, Mickelson became so involved with military charities that in 2004 the PGA Tour took his idea and formed Birdies for the Brave to support a variety of home-front charities. Mickelson remains a financial supporter and spokesman for the Wounded Warrior Project, dedicated to providing college scholarships for the children of fallen special ops soldiers, and Homes for Our Troops, which purchases and adapts houses for seriously injured soldiers. Staff Sergeant Jake Keeslar is a beneficiary of one of these homes. In the Al Anbar province of Iraq, Keeslar was manning a .50-caliber machine gun from the gunner’s hatch of a Stryker, an eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicle, when it rolled over an IED buried in the sand. The explosion tore a three-foot hole in the metal floor of the Stryker. Jake was standing directly above the blast. His back was broken in five places, his pelvis shattered, his liver lacerated, and his legs were, in his words, “pulverized.” Jake awakened four days later in Walter Reed Army Medical Center and had stumps for legs, as each had been amputated at the knee. Homes for Our Troops purchased for Jake and his wife, Vanessa, a three-bedroom house in Fallbrook, California. Among the special adaptations are ramps, wider doorways, lower countertops, cutouts beneath the sink and stove to allow Jake to roll right up, a huge wheelchair-accessible shower, and one heckuva fancy toilet. Says Jake, “It’s pretty cool that, one way or another, my dad’s favorite golfer helped build my house.”
Every summer, the Mickelson ExxonMobil Teachers Academy selects six hundred educators from around the country for a week of cutting-edge math and science instruction. The academy has outposts in Houston, New Orleans, and Jersey City, and the trips are all-expenses paid, which is how Mirandi Squires, from the two-stoplight town of Johnsonville, South Carolina, wound up on an airplane for the first time at the age of forty-two. She calls her week at the academy “life-altering”; after incorporating all that she learned into her classroom, Squires won a presidential teaching award. In a state that routinely sees squabbles about adding creationism to the school curriculum, Squires became an elected officer of the South Carolina Science Council and joined a review panel of the statewide science standards. A good deal of her inspiration came from mingling with the host of the academy. “When we got to meet Phil, it was obvious how passionate he is about education,” says Squires. “People like to say that children are our future, but Phil and his wife are actually making a real investment in them.”
That investment is even more direct when the Mickelsons host their annual Start Smart event at a Target in east San Diego at the end of the summer. Bus after bus disgorges two thousand elementary school kids from the region’s economically depressed school districts. Each child can pick out a backpack, clothes, shoes, and school supplies. The Mickelsons are always on hand to help supervise the controlled chaos. At the Start Smart I attended (uninvited), Amy spent the whole time helping young girls try on shoes. One little pixie kept shaking her head no every time Amy presented an option. “I totally understand because I’m picky about my shoes, too,” she said with a laugh. Finally, Amy found a pair of hot-pink, glittery sneakers and the girl didn’t need to say a word—her huge smile was the answer. Acting as a chaperone at a different Start Smart was a gent named Donte Locke. His daughter, Kailea, a third-grader, and son, Donte Jr., a first-grader, were getting much-needed provisions. Life was a paycheck-to-paycheck struggle for this single dad. He called Start Smart “a tremendous blessing,” adding, “I had wanted to take them school shopping, but, honestly, the finances were not there. It was great for their self-esteem. It made me feel good, too, because I want my kids to have nice, new things. They deserve that.” Donte had never heard of Mickelson, but came away impressed. “Just watching Phil interact with the kids and parents, you can see he’s genuine,” he said. “You can see it’s from the heart. Because he doesn’t have to help people like us.”
Mickelson is a giver and a taker. He is always canny about mixing business and friendship. “Phil is the only guy on Tour who actually likes pro-ams because he can pick the brain of a surgeon or pilot and then for the rest of his life he will reuse the information in conversation as if he’s an expert,” says Davis Love with a smirk. If paired with a CEO or investment guru, Mickelson has been known to pump them for usable intel and then buy stocks accordingly. Whereas Woods and Rory McIlroy leveraged their superstardom to get their fathers as pro-am partners at the Crosby Clambake, Mickelson has always used the tournament as a networking event, insisting on playing with a top executive from one of his endorsement partners. In 2007, when he was in the final year of a lucrative deal with BearingPoint (a management and technology consulting firm), he arranged to play with Harry You, the company’s CEO, who carried a handicap index of 18. Ahead of the tournament, he sent You to the Callaway Performance Center to be custom-fit with the latest technology, and once the tournament began Mickelson worked his tail off to help his partner succeed (and possibly earn a contract extension for himself). On the fifth hole at Spyglass Hill, You knocked his tee shot onto the windswept green. As he waited to try a long birdie putt, Mickelson whispered in You’s ear, “The wind can actually affect the roll of the ball. With a putt like this, I sometimes put a little saliva on my cheek as I’m addressing the ball and that helps me gauge at the last minute how much break to play.” You replied, “Phil, I’m not good enough to deal with that—my brain would short-circuit.” Mickelson won the tournament on his own ball and led his partner to victory in the pro-am portion, what You calls one of the highlights of his life, golfing or otherwise.
“We paid Phil eight to ten million bucks a year and people were startled by that number, but he’s worth ten times more,” says You. The logo on the front of Mickelson’s hat is prime real estate, but the company was really buying Mickelson’s time: a half dozen private outings a year, in which he would play and dine with BearingPoint’s most important clients. Prior to these events, Mickelson would be presented with index cards containing biographical information about the key attendees. Mickelson likes to claim he has a photographic memory, and it certainly seemed like it at these outings. “We’d introduce him to someone and Phil would say, ‘Hey, I heard you and your dad just won the member-guest at such-and-such club,’ and you should see how their faces light up,” says You. “He makes people feel happy and feel special, and in the context of entertaining and building relationships, that’s invaluable.” Mickelson provided other services. You recalls BearingPoint bidding on a fat contract with the state of California when a company insider heard that one of the key decision-makers in Sacramento happened to be a big golf fan. Mickelson gladly called this fellow up to chat and make a little sales pitch for his favorite consulting firm. BearingPoint won the $70 million contract. “No one else on Tour would do something like that,” says You. “I can’t say if that was a factor in the decision. I can say it certainly didn’t hurt.”
After his disappointing showing in 2007’s major championships, Mickelson came out guns blazing in ’08, winning on two of the best courses on Tour, Riviera and Colonial, sandwiched around a tie for fifth at Augusta. This just ramped up the anticipation for the U.S. Open in his hometown at Torrey Pines, where he had won three times in his first decade on Tour. But in the days after that third win, the bulldozers rolled in, reshaping Torrey from a beloved muni to a penal championship test. Mickelson hated the changes, which might account for his weird headspace when the ’08 Open rolled around. On a 7,643-yard course, playing in foggy coastal air, the man who won a Masters with two drivers in his bag elected not to carry one big stick. Over the first two rounds, Mickelson was paired with Woods, who was as baffled as the rest of us. Says Hank Haney, “Tiger was like, ‘How does he come up with this shit? It makes no sense.’ He got a kick out of it.” Mickelson couldn’t hit a fairway even with his 3-wood. On the thirteenth hole on Saturday, he had three straight chips roll back to his feet and took a nine, helping to send him to a dispiriting eighteenth-place finish. Meanwhile, Woods summoned his most mythologized performance, winning on a broken leg for his fourteenth major championship victory.
The always complex relationship between Tiger and Phil had another flare-up at season’s end, stoked by Woods’s caddie, Steve Williams. Speaking at a boozy charity dinner in his native New Zealand, Williams told the crowd, “I wouldn’t call Mickelson a great player, ’cause I hate the prick.” Those fighting words were inevitably leaked to the press, creating quite a kerfuffle. Woods issued a bland statement saying, “I was disappointed to read the comments attributed to Steve Williams about Phil Mickelson, a player that I respect. It was inappropriate. The matter has been discussed and dealt with.” Mickelson went with something spicier: “After seeing Steve Williams’s comments all I could think of was how lucky I am to have a class act like Bones on my bag and representing me.”
Proving the golf gods have a sense of humor, Mickelson and Woods were paired together for the final round of the 2009 Masters, their first Sunday head-to-head at a major since the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage. Even though they were seven strokes off the lead shared by Ángel Cabrera and Kenny Perry, both players were feeling frisky as they retreated to the champions locker room for lunch ahead of their afternoon tee time. “It’s a small locker room, if you’ve ever been in it,” says Butch Harmon. “There’s only three tables in it. Phil’s at the middle table and there was somebody’s sandwich on the first table. So we sit down and Phil’s taking his pants off and Tiger walks in. That’s Tiger’s sandwich. Tiger doesn’t sit with us. About this time, Phil’s standing there in his underwear and he’s folding his pants over this chair. Tiger goes, ‘Dude, what are you doing?’ Phil goes, ‘Look, I don’t wear the cheap Nike shit like you do. Tom Ford makes my pants. I don’t want them wrinkled when I’m kicking your ass this afternoon when we play.’ And Tiger Woods, without missing a beat, says, ‘I don’t care who makes your pants, cover your shit up so I can eat my sandwich.’ ”
Once the round began, Mickelson wasted no time eating Woods’s lunch, birdieing five of the first seven holes. Struggling with his swing, Woods finally showed some fight on the 570-yard eighth with two mighty blows to set up an eagle, but Mickelson answered with yet another birdie. After parring nine from out of the trees—where else?—Mickelson was within one of the lead, having tied the front-nine record with a six-under 30. (Woods will say he “Band-Aided” his way around in 33.) “I would say it was the most fun I’ve ever had on a golf course caddying,” says Bones.
But Mickelson made a killer mistake on the twelfth hole, pulling his tee shot into Rae’s Creek, which led to a double bogey. He was rattled enough to blow two ensuing golden opportunities: a ten-footer for birdie on fourteen and a four-footer for eagle at fifteen that would have tied him for the lead. Of the latter, he said, “I didn’t trust my read, I didn’t commit to it, I just made a terrible stroke.” In a Masters parable of the tortoise and the hare, Woods patiently chased down Mickelson, and when Tiger stuffed his tee shot at the sixteenth and made birdie, the two were ten under and tied for second, setting Augusta National on its ear. The fun didn’t last much longer, as both players’ bids petered out at seventeen, when Tiger made bogey after an errant tee shot and Phil missed another short birdie putt. The only solace for Mickelson was that he clipped Woods again, 67–68. “It was a very emotional day because it’s up and down, up and down, a lot of highs and lows,” Mickelson said. “The crowd made the highs even higher and the moans made the lows even lower, and it was just an emotional day.”
Shortly after the Masters, I asked Mickelson for an interview for a story I was writing about PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem. He waved me off, saying, “I promised my wife I wouldn’t create any controversy this year. There’s been too much of that the last year, year and a half. We just want things to settle down.”
A couple of weeks later, Amy detected a lump in her breast.