The third round of the 2009 Colonial Invitational brought the most unexpected and touching sight: PGA Tour players wearing pink polos, pink trousers, pink shoes, pink belts, pink hats, and pink visors. The PGA Tour Wives Association had organized the “pink-out” to honor Amy Mickelson nine days after her breast cancer diagnosis. Back home in Rancho Santa Fe, Amy and her husband were ugly-crying as images of the tribute were beamed into their living room. The outpouring of support and affection for the Mickelsons was a reflection of Amy’s unique place in the game: a combination of den mother, big sister, and head cheerleader. “I can’t think of any other person who would bring the whole Tour together like that,” says Amanda (Mrs. Justin) Leonard, a close friend of Amy’s.
Phil took nearly a month off after the diagnosis, but in early June resurfaced at the Tour stop in Memphis, striving for what he called “a little normalcy.” Amy was not going to have surgery until July 1, so he was squeezing in a little golf ahead of that: Memphis was a tune-up for the following week’s U.S. Open. (En route to Memphis, he had flown overnight to work in a practice round at Bethpage.) In a wrenching press conference, Mickelson said, “Well, I mean, we’re scared, yeah. These last three weeks have been kind of an interesting thing—I’ve never felt this emotional. I’ve never been this emotional where if I’m driving alone or what have you and I’ll just start crying. It’s kind of a weird thing. I’m looking forward to having a four- or five-hour mental break [on the golf course] where I force myself to focus on something else.”
At the time of the diagnosis, Amanda was nine; Sophia, seven; and Evan, six. “We’re going to go through this together,” their dad said. “She’s always been there for me. She’s always been there for her friends and family. It’s our turn to be there for her.” Mickelson spoke with great emotion about the woman he has always called his soul mate: “I think she’s the most charismatic person I’ve ever met. She touches people in a way that people don’t get touched. It’s just right to the heart.”
Amanda Leonard recalls reaching a nadir at a long-ago FedEx Cup event; she was traveling with three kids under three when her husband fired their nanny midweek. Amy happened upon her in the clubhouse and, reading Amanda’s body language, asked how she was doing. “The way she looked at me, with such real care and concern, I just burst into tears,” says Amanda. They talked for a while, and then Phil appeared, antsy to leave after his round. Amy shooed him away to go the hotel on his own and stayed behind to console Amanda and help her work out childcare logistics. Julie (Mrs. Ben) Crenshaw says she has seen Amy befriend kids in the crowd at countless Tour events and, mid-round, snag a ball or glove from her hubby or Bones to impart as a gift. Every year on their wedding anniversary, Phil and Amy take a big trip, just the two of them, and they alternate years in which each does all the planning and surprises the other. “I think every wife on Tour is jealous of that,” says Julie with a sigh. “It’s so romantic.”
Amy began the tradition of the American players and wives exchanging gifts at every Ryder and Presidents Cup. Hers are noted not for being extravagant but for the thought and detail that goes into them. One year Amy gifted bracelets with different colored stones, each said to have its own intrinsic healing property. During a practice round, Patrick Reed’s bracelet busted mid-swing, scattering the stones into the rough. “We had six or eight guys crawling around trying to find them,” says Davis Love, who wore his bracelet for years afterward. “Someone was shouting, ‘Just find the blue ones, they bring peacefulness!’ ” Phil is also a beneficiary of Amy’s gift-giving; for his birthday in 2008, this science nerd received from his bride an intact T. rex skull, valued into the low seven figures, and for that Christmas she got him a three-hundred-pound meteorite.
Now it was Phil’s turn to deliver something special. “[Amy] has left me a number of little notes, texts, cards, hints, that she would like to have a silver trophy in her hospital room,” he said arriving at Bethpage. “I’m going to try to accommodate that.” He insisted he was not as rusty as his ragged play at Memphis the week before had indicated: “When Amy’s going through tests and I’m sitting in a hospital for ten hours, I was thinking about a lot of things, but I would take a break and think about my golf swing. I would talk to Butch.”
So, Mickelson was not surprised to fire a 69 in the opening round of the U.S. Open, though it was only good for a tie for seventh on the rain-softened course. Mike Weir led with a 64. On Friday, Mickelson double-bogeyed the second hole and had to fight hard for a 70 that left him in thirteenth place, eight shots off the lead of Ricky Barnes, whose two-round total of 132 was a record low. On Saturday, Mickelson birdied four of the final six holes for another 69 that moved him into a tie for fifth, six back of Barnes. Among the players in front of him, the only major champion was David Duval, a surprise contender who had been suffering through a brutal multiyear slump. The crowd was always going to be on Mickelson’s side but, given the situation back home, something felt different. “They were incredibly loud, but it wasn’t just cheering, it was like encouragement,” says Hunter Mahan, who was paired with Mickelson. “It felt like the crowd wasn’t just there to watch, they were trying to will him to victory.”
After three days of weather delays scrambled the schedule, the final round was halted by darkness on Sunday evening with Mickelson on the third hole. It had been a long, grinding, emotional week, and he looked flat once the Monday morning restart commenced, bogeying the sixth and seventh holes to fall off the leaderboard. But dastardly pin positions, juicy rough, and the greens drying out a bit had finally given Bethpage some teeth, and one by one the contenders began going backward. Mickelson birdied the ninth hole, rousting the fans. At twelve, he poured in a forty-footer and celebrated with a big fist pump. Suddenly he was only two strokes off Lucas Glover’s lead. At the par-5 thirteenth, Mickelson smashed a 325-yard drive and played a precise long iron that never left the flag. Eagle, and a share of the lead. “It was electric,” says Mahan. “There’s no one else you’d want to be with in that arena other than Phil. He was having fun, the crowd was going crazy, it was just an incredible atmosphere.” The air was tinged with disbelief. Could Mickelson really win the U.S. Open at last for his cancer-stricken wife? You can’t make this stuff up.
Alas, the arc of the U.S. Open bends toward cruelty, not sentiment. On the brutal par-4 fifteenth hole, Mickelson played a stellar hybrid out of the rough, but his ball skittered to the back fringe, leaving a big-breaking downhill putt. It expired three feet short. He made a tentative stroke on the par putt, missing on the low side to fall one off the lead. But Glover bogeyed fifteen, so as Mickelson stood on the tee of the par-3 seventeenth hole, he was back in a tie for the lead, with Glover and a surging Duval. He flared his 5-iron short and left of the green. A good pitch left Mickelson with a do-or-die six-footer. In Rancho Santa Fe, Amy and the kids were gathered around a TV, fighting back tears. A nation was riveted to Mickelson’s quest. With so much riding on one par save, Mickelson’s putter must have felt like an anvil. He didn’t hit the putt nearly hard enough, his ball peeling away at the hole. Bogey. Needing a Hail Mary on eighteen, he pounded a driver into the narrow fairway, but his flip wedge flew well past the hole and he missed the last-gasp birdie putt. Glover played the last three holes birdie-par-par to nab the trophy. It was Mickelson’s fifth runner-up finish at the U.S. Open, a dubious record that supplanted Sam Snead, another lavishly talented free-swinger whose flaws were serially exposed in the national championship. But unlike Winged Foot, or Shinnecock, or Pinehurst, or the previous spin around Bethpage, Mickelson was not devastated by this defeat. “Certainly, I’m disappointed,” he said, “but now that it’s over, I’ve got more important things going on, and, oh well.”
Straight from New York, Phil flew home to pick up Amy and the kids and they jetted off for a tropical vacation, knowing it would be their last such trip for a while. Amy’s ensuing surgery was a success, with strong indications the cancer had been caught in time. Still, she faced a long, tough road ahead. “There are different kinds of breast cancer and she got a very bad, very aggressive kind,” says Julie Crenshaw. “It required a very aggressive form of treatment, and they knew if it ever came back, that was no bueno. They told Amy she was looking at five years of treatment.”
Less than a week after Amy’s surgery, the Mickelsons were hit by another thunderbolt: Phil’s mom, Mary, was diagnosed with breast cancer, too. Amy may have helped to save the life of her mother-in-law. Said Phil, “I think it did have a little bit of an effect in that the awareness of it made her be more concerned if she were to feel a lump, and I think that led to her having something checked and getting a biopsy and having it come back positive.”
Mickelson withdrew from the British Open to care for his loved ones, ending his streak of consecutive majors played at sixty-one, the longest in golf. He turned up at a few ensuing tournaments that summer, but played like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. However, he seemed more buoyant arriving at the season-ending Tour Championship. Mary had enjoyed a remarkable recovery, and Amy was rallying, too. The time away from the Tour had reenergized Mickelson, then in his seventeenth season. “I’m excited to play,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much I loved playing the game of golf. It’s made me relook at some of my longer-term expectations as far as if I would cut back the schedule at what age, all that stuff. It just makes me realize how much I really enjoy what I do, how much I love playing the game of golf, how much I love competing on the PGA Tour, and how I don’t ever want to take that for granted.” He also had a little extra pep in his step thanks to Dave Stockton, a two-time major champion who in his golden years had become a putting whisperer to some of the game’s top players. Mickelson had been unsatisfied with his putting for the better part of the preceding two years. He had been increasingly relying on Dave Pelz to be his putting coach, but the former NASA technician saw the game as science, not art. Finally, Mickelson charged Bones with coming up with a plan to get them out of their putting slump. The next day, Mackay came back with the recommendation to see Stockton, who in a matter of an hour or two got Mickelson back in touch with the longer, more free-flowing putting stroke of his youth.
Mickelson rolled his rock beautifully over the first three rounds of the Tour Championship, and heading into the final round he was in third place, four strokes behind leader Kenny Perry and two back of Woods. Tiger had reached out to the Mickelsons after Amy’s diagnosis, sending a heartfelt text in which he included the sentiment that he hoped doctors would someday find a cure for cancer, which had struck Woods’s father in 1998 and begun his declining health. Phil thanked Tiger for the note but, typically, couldn’t resist including a zinger: “I hope they someday find a cure for your hook.”
Now another showdown loomed. It’s debatable how much Harmon had improved Mickelson’s swing; Harmon himself harbored doubts. “I was talking to Butch one day,” says Gary McCord, “and he said, ‘All I tell him is not to straighten his back leg, which makes him overturn. Keep a little knee bend in there. He’ll do that for four swings, then he’s back to straightening that leg to turn as much as he can so he can hit bombs. He’ll go home and struggle and call me up and ask what’s wrong. And I tell him the same damn thing over and over: Keep a little knee bend in there. I don’t know why he pays me. I really don’t. There’s only one thing that works, but he doesn’t want to listen to it.’ So that’s Phil in a nutshell.” Still, there is no question that having Harmon in his corner had altered Mickelson’s dynamic with Woods, and it played out again in the final round of the Tour Championship. On the third hole, Mickelson buried a fifteen-footer for birdie, then topped that with a thirty-foot bomb on the next hole. Meanwhile, Tiger couldn’t buy a putt. On eight, Mickelson knocked his approach stone-dead and then at nine made a slick twelve-footer for yet another birdie. He was now three strokes ahead of Woods and leading the tournament. The advantage was still two strokes when Mickelson attacked what he called a “salty” back-right pin position on the sixteenth hole. He flew his approach one yard too long, his ball burrowing into a nasty lie in the thick rough. His only play was an almighty rip with his 64-degree wedge. “That ball could have shot off in any direction,” he says, but instead it disappeared into the hole. Double fist pump. Game over. Mickelson shot 65 to smoke Woods by five shots and win the thirty-seventh tournament of his career. Tiger earned a minor consolation prize, the $10 million bonus that came with winning the FedEx Cup points race, but that only meant he was compelled to take a bunch of photos next to Mickelson, who between cheesy smiles was whispering all manner of trash talk. This Tour Championship gave Mickelson another chance to trot out a cheeky line that had become one of his favorites: “If Tiger is the greatest player of all time and I start beating him regularly, what does that make me?”
They receded into the long off-season, heading in very different directions. Mickelson would be at home caring for his family. Woods had a trip to the Australian Open, where he was to rendezvous with his mistress, Rachel Uchitel. (Unbeknownst to them, the National Enquirer would be staking out the hotel lobby.) Then Tiger was looking forward to a nice, quiet Thanksgiving with his wife and kids.
The 2010 Masters was always going to be a morality play in the pines. Woods arrived amid the tawdriest sex scandal of the internet age, and the day before the first round was subjected to the moralizing of Augusta National chairman Billy Payne, who, glossing over his club’s ugly history of exclusion, said, “It is not simply the degree of his conduct that is so egregious here: it is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids.”
Mickelson came in under the radar. Instead of feasting on the West Coast swing, per usual, he had a series of middling results. Amy was still not well enough to travel week-to-week and golf’s most high-profile family man looked out of sorts without his best friend and support system. At the Houston Open, the week before the Masters, “Phil played as bad as I’ve ever seen him play,” says Bones. But Mickelson is an emotional player who accesses his best golf on courses that stir the soul, like Pebble Beach and Riviera and, especially, Augusta National. More important, on Tuesday of Masters week, Amy decided she was well enough to travel to Georgia. “I wanted this week to be all about Phil,” Amy told me in Augusta, her first public comments since her cancer diagnosis. “I didn’t want to put him in a compromising position—does he hit balls or take care of me because I’m not feeling well?” Everything changed for Phil once Amy and the kids touched down in Augusta. “He has a different energy, a different excitement,” Harmon said during the first round. “He’s playing for something bigger than himself.” Mickelson made birdies by day and held court at night over lively family dinners that included his parents and in-laws. (His mother was doing so well in her recovery she walked nine holes a day at hilly Augusta National.) With extra babysitters on hand, Mickelson even sneaked off on Friday morning to a coffee shop to play chess with daughter Sophia before his afternoon tee time. So giddy was Mickelson when he showed up to work that Bones began referring to Augusta National as “Phil’s playground.”
During the first round, Mickelson shot a 67 to tie for second with Tom Watson, one behind Fred Couples. Despite the star power on the leaderboard, the white-hot spotlight was fixed solely on Woods for his first competitive round in four months. He played in dark sunglasses, hiding behind them like the tinted windows of a prison bus, but there was no escaping the ritual humiliation of the scandal: he had arrived in Augusta just as Vanity Fair released a salacious story about his serial infidelities, complete with a photo gallery of buxom babes who claimed to have been his paramours. On the eve of the tournament, the National Enquirer leaked details of an alleged tryst involving one of Woods’s Florida neighbors. For the first round, Woods’s short walk from the clubhouse to the practice green and then to the first tee added to the mixed feelings; instead of a humble return, Tiger’s arrival looked like a Secret Service procession, as he was flanked by a dozen grim-faced goons who acted as if their job were to protect a head of state from whizzing bullets, not a mere golfer who was in danger of being hit by nothing more than a few stray wisecracks. But Woods’s private army had neglected to clear the airspace above Augusta National. With a nod to Woods’s born-again Buddhism, a prop plane appeared towing a banner that read TIGER: DID YOU MEAN BOOTYISM? It was a stunning breach of Augusta’s meticulously curated artificial reality. Amid this circus, Woods somehow gutted out a 68, what has to be considered one of the most remarkable rounds of his life.
In the second round, Mickelson shot a quiet 71, leaving him (and Woods) tied for third, two strokes back of the English lads Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter. Slumped forlornly against the ropes on the fourteenth hole, Harmon offered a succinct report on his pupil’s game: “Playing beautifully. Putting horrendously.”
On Saturday, Westwood competed with the fierce determination of a man desperate to shed the label Best Player Never to Have Won a Major. He birdied four of the first ten holes to open a whopping five-shot lead. It was right about then that Mickelson decided to play H-O-R-S-E with his golf clubs. He went with a risky drive that hugged the left side of the thirteenth fairway, hard against Rae’s Creek, and was rewarded with only 195 yards to the flag. A 7-iron to ten feet followed. Eagle. After a good drive on fourteen, Mickelson had 141 yards left. With his pitching wedge, he dropped his ball ten feet left of the pin with a little side sauce and it obligingly spun into the hole. Eagle, eagle. In Mickelson’s gallery, as always, was his dad, who declared, “That’s as loud as I’ve ever heard it here.” Most players would have been elated with their good fortune. Stepping to the tee of the par-5 fifteenth, Phil the Thrill was getting greedy. “I was trying to make a third [eagle],” he said afterward, with one of his naughty schoolboy grins. A bad drive seemingly eliminated the possibility, but after laying up to eighty-seven yards, Mickelson danced his wedge shot over the hole, stopping the ball a few inches away. Augusta National shook, and Mickelson was only mildly disappointed to settle for a tap-in birdie.
After the round, Westwood’s agent, Chubby Chandler, and his caddie, Billy Foster, commiserated behind the eighteenth green, trying to come to grips with what had befallen them. “Going down eleven, we were five up,” Foster said. “Then all of a sudden we were one down.”
“Twenty-seven minutes,” said Chandler, smiling ruefully. “That’s all it took.”
“Bloody hell,” said Foster.
Mickelson’s bogey on the seventeenth hole allowed Westwood to reclaim the fifty-four-hole lead, at twelve under. Woods was tied for third, four strokes back, and he was lucky to be that close. Throughout the round, Woods had fought his swing and struggled with his speed on the greens, leading to a few slipups in his pledge to clean up his on-course language and comportment. But in a showing of sheer stubbornness, Woods made three late birdies to claw back into the tournament.
Mickelson didn’t have time to be nervous on the eve of what was shaping up to be an epic final round because he stayed up late on Saturday awaiting the X-ray results after elder daughter Amanda injured her wrist while roller-skating. (She suffered a hairline fracture.) “I am so proud of Phil and how he has handled it all,” said his dad. “To be the father that he is, I couldn’t be more proud.”
Mickelson came out parrying on Sunday, parring the first seven holes and then birdieing the par-5 eighth with an all-world up-and-down. Woods was battling his swing, and his coach detected a rare air of defeat. Says Haney, “At majors, we always looked to see what Phil shot. He was the one player Tiger didn’t want to spot three or four shots to. I could tell by Tiger’s demeanor he knew [a comeback] wasn’t going to happen. He knew he was spotting the wrong guy a lead on the wrong course.” Mickelson began to take control of the tournament on the twelfth hole, with a fearless tee shot right over the flag. When he rolled in his twenty-footer, the birdie served two purposes: it gave him a one-stroke lead over K. J. Choi and it thoroughly rattled the burly Korean known as Tank, as the roar was so loud that Choi backed off his shot in the thirteenth fairway. He followed with his first bad swing of the day, pulling his shot into a bunker behind the green.
When Mickelson arrived at thirteen, he hit his drive a little too straight and it ran through the dogleg, onto the pine straw. There were two trees directly between Mickelson’s ball and the green. He had no shot. Or so it seemed. A couple of years earlier, at the Players Championship, Mickelson had talked about the difference between being a champion and just another Tour player who is content to cash bloated paychecks: “Sometimes you’ve got to take risks to win the golf tournament, and a lot of times people will wedge that out and play safe, and they don’t put themselves in position to win. If you want to win tournaments against the best players in the world you’ve got to take some chances. The weeks I’m able to pull them off I have a chance at winning and the weeks that I don’t, I get ridiculed. But you have to take chances to win.”
Now an entire career—perhaps even a worldview—had been perfectly distilled into one moment, with the Masters on the line. As Choi futzed around on the thirteenth green, Phil and Bones talked over the strategy at hand. “TV does no justice to how narrow the gap in the trees was,” says Mackay. “It looks fairly wide on television, but I can tell you that it was about as wide as the length of a box of a dozen balls. And there was a lot of pine straw. My biggest concern wasn’t that Phil could fit it through the gap, it was that Phil would lose his footing, and then hit one of the trees as a result. So I gave him the yardage [206 yards to the flag]. He tells me, ‘I’m going for it in two.’ So, okay, I know that. Now, part of any caddie’s job is, when you talk to your player, to figure out if they’re a hundred percent in. Sometimes they’re eighty percent in. And it’s not hard to judge. But sometimes you may go back to ’em a little bit just to see where they are. The previous day, on Saturday, he had made two straight eagles, almost three, on thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. I just reminded him, ‘You’re the best wedge player in the game. If you lay this up, you’re going to have a very routine up-and-down for four.’ And he said, ‘I’m going.’ Okay, now I know he’s a hundred percent in. And that’s great.”
Watching on TV at a rented house near Augusta National, Amy yelled at the TV, “Use your veto, Bones!”
“That would have been a dumb play,” Phil says of a layup. “That would have been a bad play, mathematically, to hit anything other than what I did. Because the gap that I had was so small that had I hit a higher-lofted club, there would’ve been a greater chance for a pine needle to get in between the ball and the face and cause it to shoot it a little bit left or right and hit the tree. So the shot was much easier with a square, flat-faced club. Could I have just chipped it down there with a 6-iron? Possibly. But the angle that I was hitting on and the way the fairway runs, it would’ve taken the ball right to the water. The high-percentage play, believe it or not, was actually the shot that I played. Not to mention, when you talk about shot dispersion for a left-handed player. If you’re aimed at the pin and a left-handed player pulls it, it’s gonna go longer right. And if he pushes it, it’s gonna go shorter left. And that’s how thirteen green sits. So I had a massive margin of error. If I push it a little bit or open up the face, it goes short left, on the green, and I have a sixty-footer. If I hit it perfect, I’m fifteen feet left of the hole.”
This was all well and good until Choi missed an eight-footer to take a messy bogey just as a charging Anthony Kim was making another birdie. “Phil’s a big scoreboard watcher,” says Bones. “It’s my job at this point to say to him, ‘Hey, does the fact that you’re leading change the way you want to play this hole?’ And he looks at me and he says, ‘Listen, if I’m going to win this tournament today, I’m going to have to hit a great shot under a lot of pressure. I’m going to do it right now.’ And that is the ultimate Get the eff out of the way to your caddie. You know what I mean? He says, ‘I’ve got it. You like 6-iron. I like 6-iron. I’m ready to go. I’m ready to do this thing.’ I have now said what I need to say. And I get out of there as quickly as I possibly can. And he hits the most famous shot of his career.”
“I shouldn’t admit this,” says Mickelson, “but I pulled it fractionally.” His ball squeezed through the trees and fell out of the sky three feet from the hole. It was the ultimate rebuttal to Winged Foot. “A great shot is when you pull it off,” he said after the round. “A smart shot is when you don’t have the guts to try it.” Put it on his tombstone.
Still flooded with adrenaline, Mickelson blasted his eagle putt by the hole on the high side, but steadied himself to make the comebacker. It was not an artistic triumph, but the birdie gave him a two-stroke lead. At fifteen, another laser with his 6-iron set up a two-putt birdie, pushing the lead to three. Amy jumped off the couch and headed for Augusta National, not wanting to miss out on the fun. As her hubby walked up to the eighteenth green, amid thunderous applause, Amy was standing discreetly a few paces behind the putting surface. Both Phil and Bones spotted her as they approached the final green. The day that Amy received her diagnosis, Mackay and his wife, Jennifer, drove all night to be there to comfort her, and they traveled to Houston to be by her bedside before and after surgery. Now Bones refused to make eye contact with Amy behind the green. “I really didn’t want to look up, because I knew I was going to get choked up if I saw her,” he says. Imagine how Phil felt. He rolled in one final birdie putt, an exclamation point on a bogeyless 67 and a four-round total of 16-under 272 that had been bettered only three times in tournament history. Then slowly he made his way to his bride. The Masters has a long history of freighted hugs, but the Mickelsons’ embrace was cinematic in its sweetness. In public, Phil had been remarkably stoic throughout Amy’s cancer battle, but as they hugged, a lone tear streaked his cheek. The golf world cried along with them. “I pretty much turned into a puddle,” says Mackay. Nearby, Harmon was bawling like a schoolgirl. “I’ve never been this emotional when any of my guys have won,” he says. “This was special. They’re special people.”
After the green jacket ceremonies, Amy was standing alone outside Butler Cabin, her eyes twinkling in the twilight. I asked her what the victory meant for her embattled family. She sighed, took a deep breath, and wiped away a tear. Words would not come. After another deep breath, she summoned a radiant smile. “I’m going to go join my husband,” Amy said, and then she floated up the stairs, into the victory party.