In 1930, Bobby Jones arrived at Merion Golf Club outside of Philadelphia attempting to complete the final leg of the Grand Slam. On the eve of that U.S. Amateur, he received a telegram from a friend, written in Greek: E tan e epi tas. This was something mothers in ancient Sparta told their sons as they carried their shields to battle: “With it, or on it.”
That, on a lesser scale, is the brutal reality of tournament golf at the highest level—a player takes into combat fourteen clubs, and they will lift him to triumph or bury him. It took Jones two fingers of corn liquor to soothe his nerves after a tournament round, and the crushing pressure chased him from the game at twenty-eight, less than two months after he completed the Slam. Arriving for the 2013 U.S. Open at Merion—the first it had hosted in thirty-two years—Phil Mickelson could empathize with the metaphysical challenges Jones faced. The Open had become an annual psychodrama for Mickelson, a reminder that the national championship is a personality test as much as a golf tournament. It reveals more about a man’s mental makeup than it does his golf game. The relentless difficulty of the course setup pushes players to the breaking point—mentally, physically, spiritually—which is why golf’s most revered champions have been defined by their Open conquests, beginning with Jones, who won four. Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus matched that number, while Tiger Woods has snagged three.
Now Merion presented Mickelson, forty-three, with a unique opportunity. Even retrofitted for the modern game, it would play less than seven thousand yards, allowing him to drop the most unreliable club in his bag—the driver—in favor of a fifth wedge. More than that, Mickelson is a golf romantic, and to perform his best he has to fall in love with a course. The great golden-age course designer A. W. Tillinghast once described Merion as a “coy but flirtatious maiden with mocking eyes flashing at you from over her fan,” and Mickelson fell hard. During a scouting trip the week before the Open, he took time to admire the old black-and-white photos in the clubhouse and leaf through the vast historical archives.
Mickelson’s love affair with Merion continued during the first round as he shot a three-under-par 67 that propelled him into the lead and burnished his iconoclastic image. The day before, golf’s most high-profile family man was at home in California for the eighth-grade graduation of his daughter Amanda, and he then flew overnight to Philly, touching down at 3:30 a.m., less than four hours before his tee time. Amanda’s birthday has figured in U.S. Open weeks going all the way back to Pinehurst; she turned two when the family was in Tulsa for the Open at Southern Hills, so her parents threw a huge party that featured ponies and a life-sized Barney. Famously a psychology major at Arizona State, Mickelson didn’t feel disadvantaged by his whirlwind arrival into Merion because, he says, “I think that mental preparation is every bit as important as physical, and I was able to take the time on the plane to read my notes, study, relive the golf course, go through how I was going to play each hole, where the pins were, where I want to miss it, where I want to be, study the green charts. It gave me a great few hours to get mentally prepared.”
On Friday, Mickelson was unnerved by the extreme pin placements the USGA used to help the old girl maintain her reputation. (One prominent caddie memorably said that, tee-to-green, it was the best U.S. Open setup he had ever seen, but “the USGA monkey-fucked us on the hole locations.”) Mickelson didn’t make a birdie until the final hole, grinding out a 72 that kept him atop the leaderboard. Justin Rose putted beautifully en route to a 69 that left him one stroke off Mickelson’s lead. He, too, was smitten with Merion. Noting the ebb and flow of the routing, he quoted a maxim popular among the club’s caddies: “The first six holes are drama, the second six are comedy, and the last six holes are tragedy.”
Mickelson kept his lead on Saturday with a hard-fought 70, putting him at one under, the only player below par. (Rose was two back.) The tournament was Phil’s to lose, and it would be a solitary pursuit as his wife, Amy, stayed home to tend to Amanda’s siblings, Evan and Sophia, both of whom had strep throat. Speaking by phone, she predicted her college sweetheart would have a restless night. “He doesn’t sleep much the week of majors—he can’t turn off his brain,” said Amy. “He’ll lie there doing mental rehearsals of the next day’s round.” Indeed, Phil sent me a text at 3:34 a.m. on Saturday apologizing for having made a biting (but undeniably funny) crack about my physique hours earlier.
Mickelson, who has a side business designing golf courses, can be shrill when discussing championship setups. His critical eye began his undoing in the final round. After lipping out birdie putts on the first two holes, his mood further soured when he arrived at the tee of the downhill par-3 third, which was playing 274 yards and into a twenty-mile-per-hour wind. “I needed a driver,” he later said mournfully of his absent club. Instead, he tried to smash a 3-wood and his ball skittered into an awkward lie on the edge of a greenside bunker. A chip and three putts followed, leading to a double bogey. Mickelson was still steaming coming off the fourth tee when he spied Mike Davis, the USGA executive director who had long overseen Open setups. Mickelson veered in Davis’s direction and barked some choice words about the third hole playing unfairly long. Nicklaus always said he loved to hear competitors complain about a course setup because it meant they were already beaten mentally. Davis, in an interview, claimed that a different wind had been forecast for Sunday. “Maybe Phil was right,” he said. “In that wind, maybe it was too long.” But the larger point is that anyone who wants to win an Open has to spend his energy saving par, not griping about the course. Mickelson made another ugly double bogey at the fifth hole when he drove into a hazard and three-putted again. The composure and patience that carried him the preceding three days was long gone.
But Mickelson has always been able to take a punch. On the par-4 tenth, he holed a seventy-five-yard approach for an eagle that vaulted him into the lead. Phil the Thrill was back, and the crowd was suddenly at full throat. “We had been struggling all day and there wasn’t any energy out there,” says Hunter Mahan, paired again with Mickelson for the final round of the Open. “When he holed that shot, the whole feeling flipped. It felt like it was finally his time.”
Rose responded to Mickelson’s eagle by birdieing the next two holes to reclaim the lead. Onions.
Mickelson arrived at the petite par-3 thirteenth and had to pick between one of his five wedges. With the pin back-right, perched atop a vertiginous slope, long was dead; most competitors were playing cautiously to the center of the green, leaving an uphill birdie putt. Mickelson took dead aim at the flag, but the pitching wedge was too much club, a whopping mental blunder. His ball bounded into the back bunker, pretty much guaranteeing a bogey. Still, Mahan doesn’t fault the play. “He was probably going to need one more birdie to win,” he says. “He’s got a wedge in his hand, the ball is on a tee—can’t think of a better time to be aggressive. But I was definitely surprised he flew it that far.”
At fifteen, Mickelson was again between wedges. This time he decided to hit a hard gap wedge, but he never quite committed to the shot and his ball expired short of the green, leading to another killer bogey. “I quit on it,” Mickelson said. After missing a ten-foot birdie putt on sixteen, Mickelson needed to birdie the stern eighteenth to have any hope. Alas, he fanned his drive deep into the left rough. The only consolation? It wasn’t quite as off-line as the final, doomed drive at Winged Foot.
Rose, meanwhile, locked up the trophy with two perfect shots on the seventy-second hole. His drive had finished four paces from the plaque that commemorates Ben Hogan’s one-iron on the seventy-second hole of the 1950 U.S. Open, maybe golf’s most famous single swing. “It’s hard to play Merion and not envision yourself hitting the shot that Hogan did,” Rose said. “And even in the moment today, that was not lost on me.”
Mickelson was left with a familiar emptiness after letting another Open slip away. “This one’s probably the toughest for me,” he said with glassy eyes, “because at forty-three and coming so close five times, it would have changed the way I look at this tournament altogether and the way I would have looked at my record. Except I just keep feeling heartbreak.” Only one person is truly qualified to psychoanalyze Mickelson’s serial crack-ups at the U.S. Open and he speaks from the grave. Sam Snead remains tied with Woods as the Tour’s all-time leader in victories—including three at the Masters, which rewarded his freewheeling play—but he lacked the discipline and course-management skills to ever conquer the Open. His signature blowup came in 1939, across town from Merion at the Philadelphia Country Club, when he triple-bogeyed a waterless seventy-second hole to finish two shots out of a playoff. “I’ll tell you about these Opens,” Snead once said. “They get tougher and tougher on the mental side. You keep remembering the mistakes you made in the past that cost you an Open title. I guess you keep trying too hard.”
Leaving the grounds at the end of a wrenching Father’s Day, Mickelson’s dad talked about how proud he was of his son. “He has a lot of resiliency,” he said. “No matter how many times he gets his heart broken, he keeps throwing himself into the fray.”
Mickelson conducted himself with his usual dignity in the aftermath of blowing another U.S. Open, but in the privacy of his home he felt the full weight of defeat. “He stayed in bed for two days with this blank look on his face,” says Amy. “He was a shell of himself.” On the third day, Mickelson finally rose, to leave for a long-scheduled family vacation to the Yellowstone Club in Montana, which is a sleepaway camp for the ruling class. (Other members include Bill Gates, Google founder Eric Schmidt, Dan Quayle, and investor Peter Chernin, as well as Tom Brady, Justin Timberlake, and Ben Affleck.) Part of Mickelson’s charm is that, despite all the trappings of middle age, he has never really grown up. Alongside his three kids, he lost himself in whitewater rafting, rock climbing, archery, skeet shooting, and various other kinds of fun. At the Yellowstone Club, Mickelson often organizes dodgeball games in which he is the only adult. “I find it very therapeutic,” he says with a laugh.
When he returned home to Rancho Santa Fe, a refreshed Mickelson was ready to go to work. How would he pick himself off the mat yet again? “Because he’s Phil,” said Bones. “He’s resilient. And there are birdies to be made.” Mickelson’s commute had been greatly reduced: in his backyard he had built a practice facility that stretches for three hundred yards, with numerous bunkers and five greens, each with a different grass and design style. A full-time greenkeeper tweaks the putting surfaces to Mickelson’s every whim. Before the 2013 Masters, one green was stimping at 14.5 to replicate Augusta National’s speed, while ahead of the Open Championship, two greens were slowed to 10. Since turning forty, Mickelson had been beset with putting problems, leading to dalliances with a belly putter (2011) and an unorthodox claw grip (2012). But in 2013, Mickelson had been saying he was putting better than at any point in his career, and, indeed, Merion was his fifth top-three finish of the season. The improved putting was due to old-fashioned hard work, with a dash of Cali swag. “He loves to go out there in shorts and flip-flops,” says Amy. “He just loves to practice.” Dave Stockton remained his putting guru and continued to try to negate the influence of Dave Pelz, who was charged with overseeing the wedge game. “I was amazed he worked with Pelz and me at the same time because we don’t exactly have the same philosophies,” says Stockton. “Pelz would have him think more, I would try to have him get more creative. I could always tell when Phil had gone to Pelz. He would say something like ‘I got a question for you: What do you think is a tougher putt, uphill or downhill?’ Aww shit, he’s been to Pelz again. Pelz told him downhill, but I said uphill is definitely much tougher. Phil says, ‘No way, that’s not right.’ I said, you’re an aggressive putter, right? On a downhill putt, if you rip it by the hole, you can see how it breaks and then you have an uphill comeback. That makes it much easier. On an uphill putt, if you rip it by, now you have four feet downhill coming back, which is definitely worse. Phil just looked at me and said, ‘I love it. I needed to hear that.’ ”
Mickelson continued to try to better himself into his forties. He had begun working with sports psychologist Julie Elion in 2011, and one of their focuses was changing his attitude at the Open Championship. She encouraged Mickelson to think of the quirky linksland as a playground that could unlock his imagination. That summer he finished tied for second at Royal St. George’s, his first time contending at the Open since 2004.
A couple of weeks after Merion, Mickelson turned up for the Scottish Open—at a firm, fast, rollicking Castle Stuart—and played a dizzying variety of shots en route to his first victory on European soil since a B-list event in France in 1993. That British Open tune-up was part of Mickelson’s ongoing education in links golf. For most of his career he had tried to impose his game on the course, pounding towering drives and high, spinning iron shots, wind be damned. Nick Faldo was paired with Mickelson at the 2003 Open, at Muirfield, and he says, “His course management was horrendous. He kept hitting wrong shot after wrong shot. It was baffling, actually.” Only in the last couple of years had Mickelson learned to embrace the ground game and strategic play necessary on these ancient courses where land meets sea. “He’s the most creative player in the game,” said swing coach Butch Harmon. “He just needed to change his thinking.”
Muirfield, the site of the 142nd Open, presented the ultimate test. Most Open venues are blondes, with long fescue waving in the breeze, but Muirfield was a brunette, the dying greens and fairways turning browner by the day, thanks to an ongoing heat wave. The brick-hard greens and crazy-fast fairways dotted by ball-gobbling pot bunkers made for a brutally tough setup. Mickelson played well but not quite well enough over the first three rounds; at two-over par he was tied for ninth, five off Lee Westwood’s lead, and staring up at Woods (one under) and Adam Scott (even), among others. But Mickelson was typically jaunty on Sunday morning. On his way out the door, he told Amy, “I’m gonna go get me a Claret Jug.” He called his buddy Rob Mangini, who recounts Mickelson’s monologue: “I’m playing so good. Jesus Christ, if I don’t show up today I’m gonna be so pissed. I have to show up. All of it means nothing if I don’t show up.”
A mistake-free front nine put Mickelson in position, and then he simply blew everyone else off the course. Three strokes off Scott’s lead playing the par-3 thirteenth hole, Mickelson flagged a 5-iron. “It was a putt that was going to make the rest of the round go one way or another,” he said afterward of a testy eight-footer. “Because I thought if I made it, it would give me some momentum and get me to even par for the championship, a score I thought had a good chance of being enough [to win]. And that putt went in and it just gave me a nice momentum boost, because it’s very hard to make birdies out here.” On fourteen, he played a crafty links shot, landing his ball short of the green and letting it bounce and trickle all the way to a back flag. When he made the curling twenty-footer, he was just one off the lead. Then Scott lipped-out his par putt at thirteen. Tie ball game.
Scott continued to fade, sending Mickelson into the lead. He was one ahead of Henrik Stenson, standing in the fairway of the par-5 seventeenth hole, having found the fraught fairway with a bullet 3-wood that tore through the wind. He used the same club, and trajectory, on the next shot, and his ball rolled out seventy or eighty yards into the heart of the green. “When I was walking up seventeen, that was the moment that I had to kind of compose myself, because I’d just hit two of the best 3-woods I’ve ever hit,” he said. “As I was walking up to the green, that was when I realized that this championship is very much in my control. And I was getting a little emotional. I had to kind of take a second to slow down my walk and try to regain composure.” He deftly two-putted for birdie, pushing his lead to two strokes. Then at eighteen, Mickelson hit another perfect drive and precise approach, and one last birdie put an exclamation point on a back-nine 32 that was every bit as thrilling as his closing 31 at the 2004 Masters. Walking off the green, he dissolved into a long hug with his wife and kids. Mackay, fighting back tears afterward, called the 66 the best round his boss had ever played, and Zach Johnson, who was in the group behind Mickelson, added, “That will go down as one of the greatest rounds ever at a major championship.”
“I don’t want anybody to hand it to me, I want to go out and get it,” Mickelson said. “And today I did.”
Phil’s fifth career major championship victory tied him with two players he has patterned himself after: swashbuckling escape artist Seve Ballesteros and Byron Nelson, the ultimate golfing gentleman. He was now three-quarters of the way to becoming just the sixth player to win the career Grand Slam. But for all the historical import, this victory was deeply personal for Mickelson. “I’m so proud to be your champion,” he said at the trophy ceremony. “I never knew if I’d be equipped, if I’d have the shots, if I’d have the opportunity to win this tournament. To play some of the best golf of my career, and break through and capture this Claret Jug is probably the most fulfilling moment of my career.” Two hours later, having cured his U.S. Open hangover in the most audacious way imaginable, Mickelson found himself at a party holding a flute of champagne in one hand and the Claret Jug in the other. Amy motioned toward the trophy her hubby was lugging around. “Why don’t you drink it out of that?” she said with a mischievous grin. Phil glanced around the room at the assembled tweedy gents from the R&A. With a little smile, he said, “Not here.” But definitely somewhere else. And soon.