Phil Mickelson failed to notch a victory in 2014, only the third winless season of his career. He did contend until the bitter end at the PGA Championship, but Rory McIlroy nipped him in the twilight at Valhalla. That autumn’s Ryder Cup, then, offered a chance to redeem a frustrating year… and a vexing Cup career.
Just as in 2008, Tiger Woods would miss the ’14 Ryder Cup as he recovered from surgery, further cementing Mickelson’s standing as the leader of Team USA. In the early and mid-aughts, Mickelson was paired with old dogs like David Toms and Chris DiMarco at the Ryder Cup. In ’08, when the Americans won for the first time in the twenty-first century, he began to transition into the elder statesman role, charged with shepherding younger players. “Even though a couple of guys brought home more points, Phil was the heart and soul of that team,” says Paul Azinger, captain of the 2008 Ryder Cup team. “He took all those kids under his wing and showed them the way.” Mickelson had a particular chemistry with Anthony Kim, the vastly talented but enigmatic young star. Zinger sent them out in the tone-setting first match of each Friday session, and they delivered 1.5 points as the U.S. raced to a 5.5–2.5 lead that proved insurmountable. “I let Phil figure out who his partner was going to be,” says Azinger. “Those two together were a real dynamic duo. Phil wasn’t going to be able to out-confident AK. The bling of his belt multiplied by Phil’s flashiness, it became a dynamic energy that lifted the whole team.”
The following year’s Presidents Cup was notable for Mickelson’s mentorship of Sean O’Hair, whose fragility became apparent over the first two days when his shaky play led to a pair of losses. The U.S. was up only one point versus a stout International team that featured eight major championship winners. Mickelson had won both of his matches, paired with AK and then Justin Leonard, but for a crucial Saturday, which featured both morning and afternoon matches, he volunteered to take on O’Hair as a reclamation project. “The special thing about Phil is he brings so much energy to any team he’s on,” says O’Hair. “I was struggling with my self-confidence and he brought an enthusiasm I didn’t have. He made it fun and allowed me to play a little looser and get out of the funk I was in. There was so much positive self-talk. Everything I did was great and amazing. He’d say, ‘Go ahead and aim at that flag and it’s no big deal if you miss the green because I guarantee I’ll chip it up close.’ Or ‘Swing as hard as you want and don’t worry where it lands because I’ll take care of the next shot.’ I had been feeling like I had a ton of pressure on myself, but he put all the pressure on him and just let me play.” In two matches together they won 1.5 crucial points, and then a rejuvenated O’Hair thumped Hall of Famer Ernie Els 6 & 4 in singles as the U.S. pulled away. Paul Tesori, who was then caddying for Vijay Singh, got a close look at Mickelson’s coaching during the Saturday afternoon four-balls. “It’s one of most incredible things I’ve ever witnessed a player do for another player,” Tesori says. “I believe in my heart that when Sean is telling his grandkids about his career, he is going to start with that Presidents Cup, and how meaningful Phil’s generosity was.”
At the 2010 Ryder Cup, Mickelson was asked to shepherd Dustin Johnson (then twenty-six) and Rickie Fowler (twenty-one). They bonded to the point that both would become part of Phil’s Tuesday money games on Tour; alas, Mickelson and his partners went 0-3 in those matches during the U.S. loss. But the following year he was 3-0 in partner play at the 2011 Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne, maybe the best course in the world. During that Cup, Mickelson continued his cold war with Steve Williams, who had left Tiger Woods’s bag and was then caddying for Adam Scott. “As they’re going around, when Phil hits one off-line, Stevie is yelling, ‘Foooore riiggghhht!’ and ‘Fooooore left!’ ” says Steve Stricker, a member of the American team. “Like really yelling. More than was needed. It happens three, four times and it’s really getting under Phil’s skin. They get up on sixteen, a dogleg left where there’s stands down the right side, and Adam flares one toward the stands. Phil yells as loud as he can, ‘Foooooooorrreee riiiighhhhhhht!’ But Adam’s ball lands in the fairway. That was awkward.”
At the 2012 Ryder Cup, Mickelson was given the reins to Keegan Bradley, twenty-six, who is high-strung and fidgety even in the best of circumstances. Now Bradley was going to have to hit the opening tee shot in the second match of the Cup, in alternate shot against one of Europe’s strongest teams, Sergio Garcia–Luke Donald. “I was freaking out,” Bradley says of the walk to the first tee. “I mean, two years earlier I was playing the Hooters Tour. Phil could sense that, so he calls me over and says, ‘Listen, Keegan, I don’t want a 7-iron in. I don’t want an 8-iron. I want an f-ing sand wedge.’ He made me laugh when I didn’t think it was possible to laugh. I stepped up and hit the best drive of my life, and he did have a sand wedge in”—actually, it was a seventy-eight-yard lob wedge on a hole playing 433 yards—“and he hit it to a foot and we were off and running.” They went 3-0 together over the first two days, including an overwhelming 7 & 6 victory against Donald and Lee Westwood in alternate shot. Mickelson was gassed by Saturday afternoon and asked to sit out; U.S. captain Davis Love would take some shrapnel for not insisting his hottest team keep playing, especially after Europe won the last two matches on the eighteenth hole to end the day with a huge morale boost. Still, the U.S. had a formidable 10–6 lead heading into singles. Then came the “Miracle at Medinah.” The whole Ryder Cup flipped when Justin Rose buried a big-breaking fifty-footer on the seventeenth hole against Mickelson, keying Rose’s 1-up victory. But in an enduring showing of sportsmanship, Mickelson stood next to the green and applauded the putt.
Despite the stinging loss, the 2012 Ryder Cup was edifying for Mickelson. It marked the first time a true contemporary had been captain. Davis Love III is a gentle soul and natural consensus-builder. He recognized Mickelson was the biggest personality on the team and treated him deferentially. “Phil had a big voice in everything we did,” says Love. That began well ahead of the Ryder Cup, when Love organized a dinner at a steakhouse for probable team members to engage in male-bonding rituals. Given the casual setting, he didn’t plan to make any opening remarks, but Mickelson admonished him. “Phil said, ‘Get up and say something—you’re our captain and we want you to act like it,’ ” says Love. That dinner was also notable for the banter between Mickelson and Woods, who, in the wake of his sex scandal, had been humbled enough to need more human connection with his teammates. “There was a lot of stuff said between them that I can’t repeat,” says Brandt Snedeker. “It was the first time I saw a real friendship there. But there were a few moments where it was like, Are they gonna laugh, or get pissed off? Like, man, I don’t know if you can say that. That’s borderline—it could end in blows. By the end of the night, Phil had Tiger laughing so hard Tiger almost went under the table. Me and Davis were laughing so hard we were crying.”
Given Mickelson’s elevated status within Team USA, imagine his shock when, out of left field, he was informed that sixty-five-year-old Tom Watson would be captain for the 2014 Ryder Cup. Strident, old-school, and set in his ways, Watson was a hard-ass who loved to work the land on his farm in Kansas City. Mickelson had caught wind of enough of Watson’s diatribes to know they saw the world in very different ways. He once described Watson to me as “rarely right, but never in doubt.”
Watson’s surprise appointment exposed the serial flaws in Team USA’s fractured approach to the captaincy. Overseen by the PGA of America, the American effort had to start over willy-nilly every two years when a new PGA president was installed. Watson, who was totally out of touch with modern Tour players, had been handpicked by an Indiana driving range operator turned PGA president named Ted Bishop, who thought it would be cool to pal around with one of his idols. There was minimal communication between Watson and Love, typical of the lack of collaboration between administrations. This was a stark contrast to the European way. Its Ryder Cup committee is run by current players and former captains and stresses continuity in the leadership. Captains are groomed with apprenticeships as Ryder Cup vice captains and, previously, with managerial positions at the Seve Trophy, a biennial competition held from 2000 to ’13 that pitted Great Britain & Ireland against Continental Europe.
The meltdown at Medinah meant the U.S. had lost five of the preceding six Ryder Cups, so Watson had no qualms about doing things his way. He didn’t exactly endear himself to his players when, in the run-up to the Cup, he said in an interview he wouldn’t be afraid to “tell one of these prima donnas they were going to sit, or play.”
Mickelson, as always, had his own idiosyncratic ideas. “He’s really into numerology, he talked about it a bunch with me,” says sportswriter Rick Reilly. “What it means for his future, which tournaments he’s going to win. Phil thinks he can use it to predict the future.” Adds Jordan Spieth, “He’s a big energy guy. How the sun and the moon are positioned and how that can bring you certain energy.” Mickelson has been known to expound on things that are even more out-there. “There’s a famous story about Phil telling a few of the guys that aliens were captured in the U.S. in the early 1940s and that was how we got the technology to develop the atomic bomb,” says Shaun Micheel. “I don’t know if he was serious. You can never tell with him.” Anyway, ahead of the Ryder Cup, Mickelson buttonholed Bishop to explain his groovy chemistry with Freddy Couples, a fellow Californian who captained the U.S. at three straight Presidents Cups beginning in 2009. “Certain players are just going to have good or bad weeks based on the position of the sun,” Mickelson told Bishop. “There are charts that depict this, and Fred studies them.” Bishop asked Mickelson if he had shared this information with Watson. “No, Tom would never listen to that,” Phil said, quite correctly. “He has his own way of doing things.” But in the months before the 2014 Ryder Cup, Mickelson had employed his own team of what he called “Ivy League statisticians” to make models that forecasted the most effective pods and pairings for the U.S. team. He had screenshots of all the notes on his phone and pressed them upon anyone who would listen. “He was so invested in it,” says Mark Baldwin, whose money match with Mickelson took place a couple of weeks after the Ryder Cup, “and he thought it was the most brilliant thing ever. But the longer he talked about it, the less it sounded like astrophysics and the more it sounded like astrology. There were definitely components of that in this formula.” Mickelson did eventually present the reams of data to Watson, and was embittered when the captain blew it off.
Watson had already raised eyebrows when he admitted to reporters that Webb Simpson basically talked his way into a captain’s pick with an early-morning text volley on the day the picks were to be announced. Once the U.S. team arrived at Gleneagles, in Scotland, Mickelson began to question Watson’s acuity. Early in the week, the captain asked Mickelson for his phone number, which was baffling since there were so many ways Watson could have previously acquired it. He had a stray golf ball in his pocket, so he used a Sharpie to write Mickelson’s number on the ball, embellishing it with the initials PM. Shortly after that, Watson encountered some fans who beseeched him for a souvenir and he absentmindedly tossed one of them the ball. Almost immediately, Mickelson began getting random phone calls and texts at odd hours. He had to have an associate change his phone number in the middle of Ryder Cup week.
The day before the competition was to begin, Watson and Mickelson had words about a money game Phil had organized during a practice round; the captain preferred a more rigorous approach to preparation. “There was a tension between them all week,” says Bishop. “They’re two very stubborn, very headstrong individuals who are used to getting their way. It was probably inevitable they were going to butt heads.”
On the first morning of the Ryder Cup, Watson sent out Mickelson-Bradley to face the powerhouse European team of Rory McIlroy and Sergio Garcia in better ball. Before heading out to play, the American duo found themselves alone in the dead-quiet locker room. “I think about this all the time because it’s one of the favorite moments of my career,” says Bradley. “Rory and Sergio were one and three in the world. I was freaking out to the point that I was having trouble breathing. And Phil says to me, ‘Hey, I’m really nervous right now, give me a pep talk.’ He just turned the energy around and made me focus on something besides my own nerves. I said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me. If you’d told me as a kid I would be playing with and against my idols, in Scotland, representing my country, I’d never have believed it. This is the honor of a lifetime.’ And we both got so pumped up.” Then they went out and won an emotional match, 1-up, raising their Ryder Cup record together to 4-0. Watson had no choice but to send them back out that afternoon, even though it altered his scripted pairings. Both Mickelson and Bradley drove the ball poorly during alternate shot foursomes. On the ninth tee, Watson approached them and barked, “When are one of you two guys actually going to hit a fairway?” That was his version of a pep talk.
Mickelson-Bradley got beat 3 & 2 by Graeme McDowell–Victor Dubuisson, part of a lost afternoon for the Americans, who won only half a point to put themselves in a 5-3 hole. Watson sat Mickelson-Bradley the next morning, a curious choice given that better ball played to their strengths as occasionally wayward birdie machines. Presumably, that meant Watson would have to trust them in the more awkward alternate shot format. Per usual, Watson hadn’t consulted any players in his decision-making. If Love and Azinger had run their teams as democracies, Watson’s style was far more dictatorial. The U.S. won 2.5 points in the morning to close the gap. Mickelson and Bradley were warming up on the range when they received word that they were benched for the afternoon session, too. Watson was out on the course, so Mickelson began texting him furiously, begging his captain for a chance to play. Watson remained unmoved. (He sent out Rickie Fowler–Jimmy Walker for a fourth straight session, even though they had halved their previous three matches in intense battles; they were visibly drained and got trounced 5 & 4 by McDowell-Dubuisson, and Watson later lamented that he had leaned too hard on “tired” players.) Watson returned to the clubhouse to try to talk down Mickelson. It didn’t go well. “Phil said it got so heated, that they had such an extremely confrontational exchange, that if Tom hadn’t done what he’s done in golf and if he were a few years younger, it could have gotten physical,” says Baldwin.
The U.S. again won only half a point in alternate shot, falling behind by the score of 10–6. They gathered in the team room that night hoping to find some inspiration and camaraderie. Addressing the team, Watson said, “You guys suck at foursomes.” If that was his version of levity, it didn’t exactly lighten the mood. The team had made a replica of the Ryder Cup trophy to give to Watson as a gift. Befitting his standing on the team, Mickelson had been tabbed to present the bauble, but now he begged off, saying, “You don’t want me up there talking tonight.” Jim Furyk did the honors, but Watson dismissed the gesture, saying he only wanted “the real thing.” That bruised some feelings. When he left the room, Mickelson stood up and offered a pep talk to his teammates, trying to breed a little solidarity. It didn’t work: Team USA went down meekly in singles, losing yet another Ryder Cup. (Mickelson prevailed in his match versus Stephen Gallacher, making him one of only three Americans with a winning individual record.)
What followed was one of the most exquisitely awkward press conferences in golf history. Watson and all of his players were seated on a dais at the front of a drafty tent, facing their inquisitors. The captain was asked what formula the U.S. needed to actually win a Ryder Cup. “Well, the obvious answer is that our team has to play better,” he said. “I think they recognize that fact; that somehow, collectively, twelve players have to play better.”
It was a simplistic response. The players can’t just magically play better without a culture change achieved through cohesive and supportive leadership. Another reporter raised his hand and asked, “Anyone who was on the team at Valhalla, can you put your finger on what worked in 2008 and what hasn’t worked since?” (At that Ryder Cup, Azinger had instituted a ballyhooed “pod” system in which players were broken into groups of four, so they could practice and bond together, knowing who their playing partners would be in the upcoming matches.) With a glint in his eye, Mickelson leaped at the question.
“There were two things that allowed us to play our best I think that Paul Azinger did, and one was he got everybody invested in the process,” Mickelson said. “He got everybody invested in who they were going to play with, who the [captain’s] picks were going to be, who was going to be in their pod, when they would play, and they had a great leader for each pod. In my case, we had [vice captain] Ray Floyd, and we hung out together and we were all invested in each other’s play. So we were invested in the process. And the other thing that Paul did really well was he had a great game plan for us, you know, how we were going to go about doing this. How we were going to go about playing together; golf ball, format, what we were going to do, if so-and-so is playing well, if so-and-so is not playing well, we had a real game plan. Those two things helped us bring out our best golf. And I think that, you know, we all do the best that we can and we’re all trying our hardest, and I’m just looking back at what gave us the most success. Because we use that same process in the Presidents Cup and we do really well.”
Mickelson’s words hung in the dank air. The players on the dais fidgeted uncomfortably. Reporters were arching eyebrows at one another. Blood was now in the water and the sharks immediately went in for the kill. “That felt like a pretty brutal destruction of the leadership that’s gone on this week,” a reporter responded.
“Oh, I’m sorry you’re taking it that way,” Phil said in classic Mickelsonian bullshittery, because that’s exactly how he had wanted it to be taken. He continued, “I’m just talking about what Paul Azinger did to help us play our best. I don’t understand why you would take it that way. You asked me what I thought we should do going forward to bring our best golf out and I go back to when we played our best golf and try to replicate that formula.”
“That didn’t happen this week?”
“Um”—here Mickelson paused dramatically—“no. No, nobody here was in any decision. So, no.”
Now the energy in the room shifted again, from disbelief to low-grade giddiness. Something unprecedented was happening, and reporters’ thumbs began twitching wildly, tweeting the news that a full-blown insurrection had broken out at Gleneagles. An otherwise run-of-the-mill U.S. defeat belatedly had its defining moment.
Watson was asked, “Do you think that Phil is being disloyal? Because it sounded like that.”
Watson’s ramrod posture never changed. “Not at all,” he said. “He has a difference of opinion. That’s okay. My management philosophy is different than his.” For all the mistakes Watson made as captain—and they were legion—this was his finest moment, a showing of restraint, class, and discretion with the whole world watching. Per Omar Little, a man gotta have a code. This proud champion would live his, even while getting clowned by his own player.
The blowback from the fractious loss and contentious press conference was so intense that Watson’s vice captains—Floyd, Andy North, and Steve Stricker—made a vow that night to never discuss the inner workings of that Ryder Cup publicly, for fear of further inflaming the hard feelings. But with Watson’s blessing, North agreed to be interviewed for this book. (Watson himself declined, saying in an email, “Sorry, but the story that you want from me is not for public knowledge.”)
“It was one of the worst thirty minutes of my life,” North says of the Team USA press conference. “It was shocking. I couldn’t believe what was transpiring. No captain will ever put as much into that event as Tom did for two years. I know it meant more to him than anything in the world. It’s sad that what he’ll be remembered for is that press conference. It’s not right. Phil was upset, so he thought it would be okay to throw a great man under the bus? No, that was totally unacceptable. He wanted more of a voice, but at what cost? I wonder if he thought about that before doing what he did.”
Of course he did—Mickelson almost never opens his mouth without an agenda. Was he fueled by personal vendetta? Definitely. But, with an eye on the big picture, he also made the calculated decision that the only way to create the necessary momentum for reform was to take his grievances public, even if it meant savaging Watson in the process. I said as much in a story I wrote that dark night in Scotland. When it dropped online, Mickelson texted me his approval: “It’s like you can read my mind.”