Phil Mickelson shot a four-round total of 274 (–14) at the 2015 Masters, a score that previously had been bettered only four times in tournament history. Unfortunately for Mickelson, Jordan Spieth was four shots better. It was the second major championship in a row that he brought out the best in one of the game’s brightest stars. (And an epic duel in the fog with Henrik Stenson was still coming.) “I’m a fun guy to beat,” Mickelson says, by way of explanation. “I really am. Because when you don’t beat me, I really stick it to you. So I think guys really get a lot of enjoyment out of beating me. I know I would. I think that I have a very positive energy. The way I view life is so positive. I don’t really have much negativity. I love my life all the way through, from what I do for a living, to my family, my kids, the people I spend time with, the friends I have, everything. I just have a very positive outlook and I guess [opponents] feed off that positive energy. I don’t try to stare ’em down or I don’t try to be mean or use gamesmanship or anything like that. I just have fun and play. And I think in that environment, it allows me to play my best when I’m talkative and smiling and having fun. And I think it does the same for others, too.”
Mickelson brings that same energy to his famed practice-round money games on Tour. The stakes are not that big—rarely does more than a thousand dollars change hands—but the competition is cutthroat. One of Mickelson’s favorite battles came at the Players Championship circa 2015, when he and Rickie Fowler took on Keegan Bradley and Brendan Steele. “Keegan was about ready to bow out of these games ’cause he’s never won,” Mickelson says. “It’s been a year and a half and he’s had to pay every time. It gets demoralizing. So he’s like, ‘If I don’t win today, I’m out. And this is the day I’m gonna win.’ ” Fast-forward to the twelfth hole. Bradley-Steele are 2-up. Mickelson has a fifteen-footer for birdie, while Bradley faces twelve feet for a bird of his own. Says Mickelson, “As I’m standing over this putt, I back away. And I say, ‘Oh, my goodness, this putt is the entire match.’ And Keegan bites. He goes, ‘Oh, yeah? How so?’ Which is what I was hoping he would say. And I said, ‘If I miss, you’re gonna make your putt. You’ll have momentum, you’re gonna make it. And you’re going to be three up with six to go and you guys are gonna win. But if I make it, you’re gonna quick-peel yours on the low side. You’re gonna be so pissed off, you and Brendan are gonna give us a hole. Next thing you know, we’re gonna be tied. Then Rickie and I will have the momentum. We’ll make a birdie or two comin’ in, probably beat you 2 & 1.’ So I knock it in. And of either side that Keegan could’ve missed his putt on, he missed it low side. He quick-peeled it low side. Now they’re so pissed off they both bogey the next hole. And we get that hole. Now we’re tied. So Rickie and I birdie fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, and win 2 & 1. And I chuckle about that story every time because it’s just funny. And I don’t care about the money—I get to give him smack about this every time I see him.”
“Most of Phil’s stories are fabricated,” says Bradley with a sigh, “but unfortunately that one is totally true. I want to beat him so bad and it pisses me off when I don’t.”
Bradley wound up excusing himself for a while from further money games with Mickelson. “He picked up his toys and he went home,” Phil says. “He took a one-year sabbatical. But he eventually came back. He pulled up his big-boy panties and came back out. And he’s had some success, he’s won some matches and he’s no longer totally defeated.”
Mickelson is a big believer in the maxim that fast pay makes fast friends. At the 2014 Ryder Cup, he and Bradley beat Fowler and Jimmy Walker two days in a row in practice rounds. Since they were in Scotland, Walker claimed not to have any U.S. currency, so Mickelson agreed he could settle his debt the next time they saw each other on the PGA Tour, which turned out to be when they were paired together at Torrey Pines at the outset of the 2015 season.
“Naturally, what are you gonna do?” asks Mickelson, already knowing the answer. “The first thing you’re gonna do is square up, that’s what you do. You walk over and say, ‘I haven’t seen you in a while, here’s the money I’ve owed you for four months.’ Didn’t happen. So I felt the need to drop Jimmy a line: ‘Hey, dude, tomorrow after the round, go to the bank, we’ll square up in the morning.’ And he didn’t do it.”
Walker finally paid up a couple of weeks later.
“So then we’re at Doral,” Mickelson says, “and he and [Brandt] Snedeker were talking smack: ‘Oh, yeah, we’re gonna play you at the Masters, blah, blah, blah.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s great, Brandt—I would love to play with you. But you’re gonna have to get another partner because Jimmy is suspended a match.’ And he thought that I was kidding. I wasn’t kidding. He had a one-match suspension. The commissioner has to draw the line somewhere, right?”
For all the verbal fireworks, these matches can be quite instructive, especially for Mickelson’s opponents. “He’s taught me so much about the game and about myself,” says Brendan Steele, a three-time winner on Tour. “For a long time he beat me every time we played.” Steele vividly recalls one occasion when both players were in the fairway but Mickelson missed the green with his approach, his ball settling in a bad spot. Steele followed with a cautious play to the center of the green, leaving himself a forty-foot birdie putt. Mickelson chipped to gimme range and then Steele had to rattle in a four-footer just to halve the hole. The Hall of Famer scolded his young adversary: “The mistake you made there,” Mickelson said, “was as soon as I missed the green you thought you were gonna win the hole. I will never hand you a hole. Ever. If I miss a green, you have to get more aggressive, not less, because that’s your chance to win a hole with a birdie.” Other lectures would follow. At the 2011 PGA Championship, Steele was tied for the lead heading into the final round, but on Sunday he double-bogied the first hole and then, in his words, “completely unraveled.” Mickelson told him, “The mistake you made was not that you got off to a bad start, it was not understanding you have eighteen holes to shoot a score. Everyone stumbles at some point—you have to use all eighteen holes to make your score. Maybe you birdie the last three holes and that’s what it takes.” At the 2016 Texas Open, Steele enjoyed a three-shot lead at the halfway point. But he had a mediocre weekend and faded to eighth place. Mickelson came through with another life lesson: “Your mistake was not how you played on Sunday, it was your approach on Saturday. You were obviously playing incredible golf to be leading. You should have birdied three of the first five holes on Saturday and put your stamp on the tournament and let everybody know they’re playing for second place. But you played defensive and tried to protect the lead and got run over.”
Says Steele with a laugh, “He doesn’t sugarcoat things, but he’s pretty much always right.”
Despite Mickelson’s continued success during the practice rounds, 2015 was another frustrating year as he again went winless on Tour. That November, he flew to Las Vegas to break up with Butch Harmon in person. After eight years together, he felt he owed him that. “We talked for about two hours,” Harmon said at the time. “I completely agreed that sometimes you need to hear things a different way, get a different perspective on things. He’s been frustrated the last two years. I thought it was a good idea that he would do this. He needs to hear things differently that maybe get him rejuvenated and get him back to what we all know he can be.” Mickelson hired an Aussie named Andrew Getson as his new coach. He knew Getson through their association with Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, where Getson had been teaching for the preceding six years. Getson worked with other pro golfers, including Kevin Streelman, who had long been celebrated for having one of the simplest and most repeating swings in the game. Mickelson made all the usual noises about tightening up his action and hitting more fairways.
If he had hoped 2016 would be all about reinvention, the headlines throughout that spring and summer made it clear that Mickelson was not going to be able to outrun his past, as he was once again ensnared in a messy insider-trading case. Back in May 2014, two FBI agents had approached Mickelson after his first round at Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial Tournament as part of a probe related to allegations of suspicious trading of Clorox stock by billionaire investor Carl Icahn and Phil’s guy in Las Vegas, Billy Walters. The case garnered a huge amount of media coverage given the outsized profiles of all three protagonists. Mickelson maintained his innocence, and two weeks after the awkward encounter at the Memorial, the New York Times reported, “The F.B.I. and the Securities and Exchange Commission have found no evidence that Mr. Mickelson traded Clorox shares. The overstated scope of the investigation came from information provided to the Times by other people briefed on the matter who have since acknowledged making a mistake.” But buried in that piece was this ominous passage: “Although Mr. Mickelson is not connected to the Clorox trades, he is not in the clear. The F.B.I., federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the S.E.C. continue to investigate well-timed trades made by Mr. Mickelson and Mr. Walters in shares of Dean Foods in the summer of 2012, the people briefed on the matter said. The authorities are pursuing a theory that a source inside Dean Foods gave Mr. Walters a heads-up about the company’s plan to spin off its WhiteWave Foods subsidiary in an initial public offering, though it is unclear what exactly prompted Mr. Walters and Mr. Mickelson to trade. Shares of Dean Foods surged 41 percent on August 8, 2012, the day after the company officially announced the spinoff in a news release.”
For two years Mickelson lived under that cloud of suspicion, and then in May 2016 the Dean Foods case exploded into the public sphere. Walters was indicted on insider-trading charges, with the SEC alleging that he made $43 million on illegal stock tips provided by Thomas C. Davis, a Dean Foods board member who had taken loans from Walters while running up a massive gambling tab. (Davis is a former club president at Preston Trail Golf Club.) Mickelson was named as a relief defendant, meaning he was not accused of wrongdoing, but the SEC still recovered “alleged ill-gotten gains from schemes perpetrated by others.” Mickelson neither admitted nor denied the allegations in the SEC’s complaint; he agreed to disgorge trading profits totaling $931,738, plus interest of $105,292. The SEC laid out a damning case of alleged collusion between Billy and Phil: “In July 2012, Walters called Mickelson, who had placed bets with Walters and owed him money at the time. While Walters was in possession of material nonpublic information about Dean Foods, he urged Mickelson to trade in Dean Foods stock. Mickelson bought Dean Foods stock the next trading day”—in all, he would purchase 200,240 shares at a cost of $2.46 million—“in three brokerage accounts he controlled. About one week later, Dean Foods’ stock price jumped 40 percent following public announcements about the WhiteWave spin-off and strong second-quarter earnings. Mickelson then sold his shares for more than $931,000 in profits. He repaid his debt to Walters in September 2012 in part with the trading proceeds.”
Why would Mickelson be waiting on a Wall Street bonanza to pay back Walters? The massive scale of Phil’s gambling losses has never before been made public, but as part of the Dean Foods investigation, a forensic examination of his finances was conducted by government auditors. According to a source with direct access to the documents, Mickelson had gambling losses totaling more than $40 million in the four-year period (2010–14) that was scrutinized.
Mickelson had never previously traded Dean Foods stock, and phone records showed that around the time of his buying and selling he was texting frequently with Walters—so how on earth did he avoid criminal charges? Pure dumb luck played a big part. In December 2014, as investigators were building their case against Walters and, potentially, Mickelson, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit threw out the conviction of a man named Todd Newman, who had traded stocks based on a tip from someone who received it from a corporate insider. Cashing in on secondhand information, as the government alleged Mickelson had done, meant he was in a comparable position to Newman. According to the Second Circuit decision, a secondhand beneficiary like Mickelson could only be found guilty of insider trading if he knew that the source of the information (Thomas Davis, in Phil’s case) benefited by giving it to the middleman (Walters). Mickelson denied knowing about Walters and Davis’s relationship. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and under the case law of the Newman ruling, Phil could not be charged.
Walters went to trial in March 2017. Mickelson was not called to testify by either the defense or prosecution because his lawyer Gregory Craig—former White House counsel to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—had made it clear that his client would exercise his Fifth Amendment right to protect himself from self-incrimination. Still, Mickelson had a starring role in the trial, being mentioned by name more than a hundred times. In his opening statement to the jury, Walters’s lawyer built his defense largely on the notion that his client was too sophisticated an investor to give insider information to his celebrated friend: “When there is a big event for a company, whether it’s a merger, acquisition or a spinoff, the Securities and Exchange Commission looks to see who are the buyers leading up to that, and they investigate; that’s what they do. So if you’re Bill Walters, I would submit, and you believe that someone has given you illegal inside information, the last thing you would do is give it to Phil Mickelson, one of the most famous athletes in the world. That is immediately going to attract regulatory scrutiny and lead back to Bill Walters.” Walters had been a Dean Foods shareholder going back a decade. When Mickelson asked for a stock tip, as he is wont to do, Walters had indeed recommended Dean Foods, but he has always maintained his confidence came from readily available public information. After Mickelson’s sell-off in the summer of 2012, Walters still held on to four million shares of the stock because he believed in its long-term potential. The prosecution saw it differently. “When [Walters] knew he had a sure winner, he let his friends in on the action,” U.S. attorney Brooke Cucinella said in her closing argument. “Mickelson made just under $1 million—money that ultimately he transferred right back to the defendant because of a gambling debt. Of course, Phil Mickelson could pay it back, but this was another way for Billy Walters to feed himself, by giving Mickelson this sure thing. Information that he knew was going to happen, he knew that the money would come back around, and that’s exactly what it did.”
The jury found Walters guilty on all ten counts against him. Speaking to reporters after the verdict, he said, “I just did lose the biggest bet of my life.” At the age of seventy, he was sentenced to five years at the Pensacola Federal Prison Camp, a minimum-security facility housed on a naval air station in the Florida Panhandle. Walters lost his appeal; Mickelson again loomed large in absentia. “It was clear from the pleadings, the public documents during the trial, Mickelson was interviewed on more than one occasion [by FBI agents],” says Richard Wright, Walters’s longtime personal attorney. “And he denied any wrongdoing on his behalf as well as Bill’s behalf. Essentially denying he got any tips. He had denied that to the government. If he had testified, he would have denied he had any insider information from Bill Walters. In my judgment, it would have helped us.”
Walters’s view, more succinctly, is that he got sold down the river by Mickelson. “Here is a guy that all he had to do was come forward and tell the truth,” he told ESPN shortly before reporting to prison in October 2017. “That was all he had to do. The guy wouldn’t do that because he was concerned about his image. He was concerned about his endorsements. My God, in the meantime a man’s life is on the line.”
If Mickelson did not receive any inside information—as both he and Walters contend—why did he pay back more than $1 million to the government? “Anyone of Phil’s stature in that situation would gladly write a check to make the whole thing go away,” says a friend of Walters. “The problem is, by doing that he made Bill look guilty as hell. And then to not testify on Bill’s behalf, when he could have saved his skin, that was the ultimate betrayal. Phil had nothing to lose—he had already cut his deal. If there were any questions he didn’t like, he could have taken the Fifth [Amendment] up on the stand. But to hang Bill out to dry the way he did, after calling him a friend and a mentor, that tells you a lot about the character of the man.”
A member of Mickelson’s inner circle sees it quite differently: “Look up the meaning of ‘relief defendant’—it means you’re an innocent bystander to someone else’s crimes. Phil gave the money back because he was required to by law, but even the government admitted there was no wrongdoing. They would have loved to nail him to the cross, but they had nothing on him. Why on earth would he testify? He wasn’t part of Billy Walters’s case at all—that was between Billy and Tom Davis. Phil just got dragged into it because the government wanted to make headlines. If there was a betrayal it was by Billy Walters, because he gave Phil tainted information without telling him the source.”
This legal saga had one final plot twist. In December 2016—long after the charges against Walters were filed and three months before he went to trial—the Supreme Court ruled on Salman v. United States, a case from California that had limited insider-trading law in virtually the same way that the Newman verdict had done in New York. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court rejected parts of the Newman ruling and, according to a lawyerly analysis in Golf Digest, “held that recipients of inside information could be prosecuted even if they didn’t know what the original tipper received.” Ergo, if Mickelson’s case had arisen before December 2014 or after December 2016, it’s much more likely he would have been indicted for insider trading and been staring down the gun barrel of prison time. But because the Newman case was the law of the land when his case came due, he skated. This was the greatest escape in a life defined by them.
Mickelson is a master compartmentalizer. In his first start after the news broke about his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he held a pretournament press conference at the Memorial, site of his chat with FBI agents two years earlier. “I’d like to say that I’m disappointed to have been a part of that whole thing, but after a thorough investigation, I’m pleased that it’s behind me, that it’s over,” Mickelson said. “I’m appreciative of my family and friends and my companies and their faith in me and their support of me.” Asked what lessons he had learned, Mickelson responded, “I have to be responsible for the people I associate with. Going forward, I’ll make the best effort I can to make sure I represent myself, as well as my family, as well as my companies, in the way that I want to and they deserve.” The emphasis on his corporate partners was unrelenting. A reporter pointed out that Billy Walters had been a regular in PGA Tour pro-ams and asked if the sport needed to examine its intimacy with such a notorious gambler. “I’m not singling out anyone,” Mickelson said. “I just think that I just need to be more careful because, as a representative of companies which I take a lot of pride in, those relationships mean a lot to me, and I need to make sure that I represent them as well as myself in the best possible way.”
Clearly there would be no public soul-searching from Mickelson. The side-eye from colleagues or stray barbs from the gallery didn’t seem to affect him in the slightest, as he finished twentieth at Memorial and then tied for second in his next start, at Memphis. This momentum traveled with him all the way to Royal Troon. Walking to the eighteenth green in the first round of the Open Championship, Mickelson said to Bones, “I need your best read. I don’t know if you know this….”
“Oh, I know,” Jim Mackay said. The right-to-left eighteen-foot birdie putt they were facing was for a 62, what would be the lowest round in the history of the major championships. They played it two balls outside-right, and Mickelson hit a perfect putt. A couple feet out, there was zero doubt his ball was going in, but in the last few inches it inexplicably wiggled to the right, leading to a vicious horseshoe. It was eerily similar to the final-hole lip-out that denied Mickelson a 59 at the 2013 Phoenix Open (and Tiger Woods a 62 at the 2007 PGA Championship). “It was one of the best rounds I’ve ever played and yet I want to shed a tear right now,” Mickelson said afterward. “That putt on eighteen was an opportunity to do something historical. I knew it, and with a foot to go I thought I had done it. I saw that ball rolling right in the center. I went to go get it, I had that surge of adrenaline that I had just shot 62, and then I had the heartbreak that I didn’t and watched that ball lip out. Wow, that stings. I mean, if I had just hit a weak flail-off and never had a chance and left it short, so be it. But this ball was hunting right in the center and didn’t go in. It was just heartbreaking.”
Mickelson became the twenty-eighth player to shoot 63 in a major. How to explain that not one of these players was able to shave off one more stroke? “Well, it was obvious right there that there’s a curse, because that ball should have been in,” he said. “If there wasn’t a curse, that ball would have been in and I would have had that 62.” (Branden Grace would finally shoot a 62 at the 2017 Open Championship.)
Phil, do you believe in golf gods?
“I didn’t, but I do now.”
The most disappointing 63 in golf history gave Mickelson a three-stroke lead. The second round featured much colder, windier conditions. Mickelson shot 69, but his lead was trimmed to one stroke by Henrik “Iceman” Stenson, who posted a sizzling 65. Stenson, the Swedish Iron Byron who had inherited the good news/bad news title of Best Player Never to Have Won a Major, went around in 68 on Saturday to take a one-stroke lead over Mickelson, who said, “I was off today. I didn’t have my best stuff. My rhythm was a little quick from the top as we started downwind. I was a little bit jumpy.” Still, he was five shots clear of the player in third place, Bill Haas, setting up a Sunday duel between fire and ice.
Before the final round, Mickelson had a long practice session with his new swing coach Getson, who, unlike the very in-demand Harmon, is always on call. On the first hole, Mickelson flagged his approach shot for a birdie and Stenson 3-putted from sixty feet, a two-shot swing that propelled the left-hander into the lead. Stenson punched back with three straight birdies, but Mickelson countered with an eagle at four. They both birdied six, then Stenson stuck his tee shot to ten feet on the short par-3 eighth, the famed Postage Stamp, to make birdie and retake the lead. On the long, tough par-4 tenth hole, both hit flawless approach shots and rolled in their birdie putts. How long could perfect golf be played? There was a giddiness in the air. The entire golf course had tilted in the direction of the final group—J. B. Holmes would finish third, eleven shots out of second place. The Scots knew they were witnessing something historic and TV producers began unspooling archival footage of the 1977 Open, Nicklaus and Watson’s fabled “Duel in the Sun.”
Stenson bogeyed the eleventh hole and they were once again in a tie, which Mickelson preserved with a gritty fifteen-footer to save par on twelve. But Stenson birdied fourteen and then on the next hole landed a roundhouse, a fifty-footer from the fringe. Mickelson was two down and on the ropes, but at the par-5 sixteenth, playing into the wind, he nuked a 3-wood from 279 yards out to within thirty feet for eagle. His putt singed the edge of the cup. Stenson matched the birdie with a slick downhill five-foot putt that he later called the nerviest of the whole round. Mickelson couldn’t get a putt to drop on the last two holes. He shot a bogeyless 65, but Stenson did him two strokes better. Mickelson’s four-round total of 267 (17 under) had never been bettered in the history of golf’s oldest tournament. It was his eleventh career runner-up finish in a major, the second most all-time behind only Jack Nicklaus (nineteen), who leads in wins, 18–5. “It’s probably the best I’ve ever played and not won,” said Mickelson. “I think that’s probably why it’s disappointing in that I don’t have a point where I can look back and say, I should have done that or had I only done this. I played a bogey-free round of 65 on the final round of a major—usually that’s good enough to do it, but I got beat by ten birdies. You know, it’s not like I have decades left of opportunities to win majors, so each one means a lot to me. I’m happy with the way I played, but even more disappointed that it wasn’t enough, because you look back and say, What do I need to do?”
The PGA of America had to act after Mickelson flayed Tom Watson at Gleneagles, so a Ryder Cup Task Force was created within three weeks of the infamous press conference revolt. It included three PGA of America officials; past Cup captains Davis Love III, Ray Floyd, and Tom Lehman; and current players Rickie Fowler, Jim Furyk, Steve Stricker, Tiger Woods, and, of course, Mickelson. The first gathering was held in December 2014 at the PGA of America headquarters in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and Mickelson flew cross-country to be there “on his own dime,” said Furyk, for added emphasis. The Task Force—capital letters were needed to add gravitas—was charged with reexamining every aspect of how Team USA selected and prepared its players and chose its captains and vice captains. The collaboration between Woods and Mickelson took their relationship to a different level; in early 2015, when Tiger suffered a case of the chip-yips, Phil offered to meet him for a private lesson, a deeply empathetic gesture. But Woods was destined to have a smaller role in the Ryder Cup effort—with his body breaking down, he missed the 2008 and ’14 Cups and would be sidelined again in ’16. (Incredibly, Woods has played on only one winning Ryder Cup team, way back in 1999.) “Phil had the loudest voice,” says Love. “Since 2014, on any question about what we should do, Phil is the first person I call.”
The Task Force revamped the qualifying timeline for players and codified how captains and vice captains would be selected going forward. Those on the outside looking in were not impressed: Nicklaus called it “overkill,” while Billy Horschel, who has never actually played in a Ryder Cup, offered, “I think the Task Force is a lot of political B.S.” Jimmy Walker, whose relationship with Mickelson has become frosty, says, “There’s cliques for captains, cliques for vice captains, cliques for captain’s picks. There’s a club and it’s tough to get into the club.” How does he see Mickelson’s role? “He gets in the middle of everything, for sure,” says Walker.
Including the selection of the 2016 Ryder Cup captain. Mickelson wanted an insider who had bought into his vision of how things should be done and—voilà—Love was named captain again. Internally, Love had been a vocal supporter of Mickelson’s activism. “I hated that it played out publicly, but Phil was one thousand percent right calling for a system of consistency and continuity that we didn’t have,” says Love. “We all knew it and were thinking it, but he was the only one who had the guts to say it out loud. That took leadership.”
Mickelson’s spectacular play at Royal Troon guaranteed him a spot on the U.S. team, and heading into the Ryder Cup at Hazeltine, he knew there was a giant target on his back. “The pressure started when some dumbass opened his mouth two years ago in the media center,” he said. Love sent out Mickelson in the second match of the Cup, paired with his Task Force buddy Fowler against Rory McIlroy and Andy Sullivan. The Americans won a tense match, one-up. After two years of controversy and recriminations and questions about their chemistry, the Yanks had fire in their eyes and swept the Friday morning alternate shot, the first time Team USA had won all four matches in a session since 1981. Mickelson sat in the afternoon as Europe took three of four matches to claw back into the Cup, and then he and Fowler lost in the Saturday alternate shot as Europe closed the gap to 6.5–5.5. That made Saturday’s better-ball session monumentally important. Paired with Matt Kuchar, Mickelson made a bevy of birdies in a 2 & 1 win, which helped stake the U.S. to a 9.5–6.5 lead. “This is like playing with my big brother,” Kuchar said. “It was such a thrill. I have seen him do it so much from the other side as a competitor. As a friend, to watch him down the stretch go after it, he hit great shot after great shot, and I was so proud to be alongside of him.”
For singles, Mickelson wound up with a delicious matchup versus Garcia, Europe’s emotional leader. (Ian Poulter didn’t make the team.) Over the first six holes, Sergio threw four birdies at Phil… and the match was all-square. Of the first four singles matches to conclude, Europe won three of them, drawing within one point and putting intense focus on the Mickelson-Garcia tussle. They kept trading blows—Garcia didn’t make a bogey and shot an unofficial 63, but Mickelson countered with ten birdies. It ended the only way it could, with Garcia gutting a fifteen-footer on eighteen for a halve. “It was amazing,” Sergio said afterward. “Obviously to shoot nine-under and end up tying the match, it was heartbreaking. I gave it everything I had, but Phil just made it from everywhere.”
The Task Force enjoyed one final validation. One of its tweaks to the process was to delay the last of four captain’s picks until after the Tour Championship, which ended the Sunday before Ryder Cup week began, the theory being this allowed the captain to pick a player who had suddenly gotten hot. That pick turned out to be Ryan Moore, who lost in a playoff to McIlroy at the Tour Championship. Seven days later, Moore delivered the Ryder Cup’s clinching point with his singles win over Lee Westwood. The U.S. victory validated Mickelson’s rebellion, and he helped salvage his reputation with fine play: only three players on the winning team delivered more than his 2.5 points. Mickelson had survived what Bones called “definitely one of the most pressure-packed weeks” of his boss’s career.
Still, a few barbs were inevitable. As Team Europe shuffled in for its press conference behind its captain, Darren Clarke, McIlroy bellowed, “Oi, Darren, it’s the end of the Ryder Cup. Is this where I throw you under the bus?”
Replied Clarke, “You gonna do a Phil?”