On June 20, 2017, a thunderbolt hit the golf world. “After 25 very rewarding and memorable years, Bones and I have mutually decided to end our player-caddie relationship,” Phil Mickelson said in a press release sent out by his management team. “Our decision is not based on a single incident. We just feel it’s the right time for a change. Bones is one of the most knowledgeable and dedicated caddies in the world. He is always prepared and has the ability to make decisions in pressure-packed situations. Bones is without a doubt one of the most thoughtful people that I have ever known. The next player to work with him will obviously be very lucky.”
“When Phil hired me in 1992, I had one dream: to caddie in a Ryder Cup,” Jim Mackay said in his own press release. “Last year, at Hazeltine, Phil played in his 11th straight Ryder Cup. It was so cool to have a front row seat. I wish Phil nothing but the best. His game is still at an elite level, and when he wins in the future (definitely the Masters), I will be among the first to congratulate him.”
“He has been one of the most important and special people in my life since the day we met and I will always be grateful for everything he has done for me,” Mickelson’s press release continued. “Amy and I, and our children, will always think of Bones, Jen, Oliver and Emma as family. We are looking forward to sharing life and friendship with them forever.”
The overriding emotion in golf circles was disbelief. “It felt like your parents were splitting up,” says John Wood, a longtime Tour caddie and now an NBC/Golf Channel commentator.
The press releases made the divorce sound amicable but it was all bullshit. Bones had actually fired Phil three weeks earlier at the Memorial, over some long-simmering grievances. The chummy public statements were a way for Mickelson to save face and Mackay to make a graceful exit that kept various career options alive. Adhering to the caddie code of omertà, Mackay declined to comment for this book, but those with direct knowledge of the situation say money was a longtime source of contention. The FedEx Cup debuted more than a decade into their working relationship; Mickelson made various promises to distribute to his caddie a percentage of the bonuses he won but for a full decade failed to pay up. By Mackay’s calculations, he was owed $900,000. In the months before the breakup, as things were becoming increasingly strained between them, Mickelson paid Mackay $400,000 toward the FedEx Cup debt, but Bones was miffed to not get the full amount. He was also increasingly irked by Mickelson’s disregard for his advice and habit of showing up later at the golf course than he told his caddie to arrive. Then there was the dispute about the eighteenth-hole flags from their victories. Mickelson had always insisted on nabbing these keepsakes for his grandfather’s kitchen wall. This included the 2004 Masters, four months after Nunu’s death; Phil had that one framed and presented it to his grandmother Jennie, Nunu’s widow. Mackay understood and respected that gesture, but nineteen more Tour victories would follow, including four majors, and he never got to keep a single flag. “That’s a giant fuck-you to a caddie,” says someone very close to Mackay. “When Phil wins the Masters, he gets the green jacket, the trophy, the big check, all the glory. He had to take the flags, too? Every other caddie who has ever won the Masters got to keep the eighteenth-hole flag. For Phil not to follow tradition was hugely disrespectful.” During the week of the Phoenix Open, the Mackays would often host dinner parties for players and caddies at their home, and a frequent question was “Where are all the flags?” It nettled Mackay in a way that is hard for any outsider to understand.
A week after their bust-up, during which Mackay finally aired all of his gripes, Mickelson paid his caddie another $400,000 of overdue FedEx money and overnighted to Bones the flags from their wins at the PGA Championship, British Open, and the 2006 and ’10 Masters. But Phil autographed them in comically large letters, which Mackay felt disfigured the keepsakes. Bones has never displayed them in his home and, according to the source, has plans to someday sell them and donate the money to charity. As for the flags from their other Tour victories, Mickelson’s motivation in continuing to keep them may transcend sentimentality. Like a few other top pros, including Tiger Woods, Mickelson habitually declines to autograph golf balls because it’s difficult to execute a clean signature on a round, dimpled surface, which looks sloppy and is also easier to forge. But locked away in a safe-deposit box are dozens of golf balls Mickelson has painstakingly signed and set aside for his kids as part of their inheritance. Perhaps someday he will also try to monetize the victory flags.
Only a couple of weeks after the breakup, Mackay signed on with NBC/Golf Channel to become an on-course reporter. He had already displayed serious chops in a two-day tryout at the Sea Island tournament in 2015. Given that Bones had both of his knees replaced in October 2016, it made sense that he would take a sabbatical from lugging around a Tour bag that can easily weigh forty pounds. Mickelson has always kept an insular circle, so for Mackay’s replacement he eschewed any established caddies and turned to his brother, Tim.
Seven years younger, Tim grew up in the shadow of his celebrated big bro. He was a good-but-not-great junior player with just enough game (and legacy standing) to be given a spot on the Arizona State team. After college, he got into coaching, ultimately earning the top job at the University of San Diego. Tim tooled around town in a jacked-up pickup truck with the school mascot, the Torero, stenciled on the doors. “He’s a grinder,” says Casey Martin, the former Tour player and now longtime head coach at Oregon. “I pride myself on spending a lot of time on the recruiting trail and going places that other coaches don’t, but along the way I kept bumping into Tim. We would just nod at each other like, Okay, I see you.”
In 2011, Tim leveraged his famous last name to help land the head coaching job at Arizona State. Tim’s most impactful recruit was a Spanish savant with thighs that looked like redwood trunks. When Jon Rahm turned pro in 2016, Tim followed Steve Loy’s playbook and became the phenom’s agent. Business was booming, but Tim couldn’t turn down his brother when he offered him the chance to step on the other side of the ropes. Having a different voice in his ear gave Phil the little jolt he needed to break a five-year winless streak, at the WGC-Mexico Championship in February 2018. On the seventy-second hole, the Mickelsons faced a knee-knocker to force a playoff against Justin Thomas. Given the slippage in Phil’s putting in the preceding years, those three feet looked like three miles. “I was standing on the back of the green and he came up behind me and whispered in my ear,” Phil says. “He didn’t mess up my concentration, he just whispered exactly what was in my head: ‘Control your breathing and connect with the target, connect with the hole.’ It’s exactly what I was thinking. And so he’s very in sync with me and that brings out my best.”
There’s one other thing Mickelson likes about having his kid brother on the bag: in contrast to Mackay’s grinding, slightly oppressed seriousness, “Tim and I have a very similar sense of humor,” says Phil. “We often say the same punch line simultaneously. So naturally, I find him extremely funny.”
Rancho Santa Fe is a hilltop hamlet a half hour north of San Diego, a sun-splashed Mayberry for the 1 percent. On a sleepy spring morning, the procession of Teslas and drop-top Bentleys down the main drag was interrupted by a middle-aged dude in a golf cart with a leather Tour bag bulging out the back. He was turned out in baggy shorts, flip-flops, and a Whisper Rock cap, carrying an oversized tumbler of coffee. Stepping into Caffe Positano, this jovial patron was sized up the same way Sam Malone gazed upon Norm Peterson. “You want the usual, Phil?” asked the barista. She dumped five shots of espresso into the tumbler, and then Mickelson took a seat at a table on the sidewalk to explain his coffee infatuation, which was born from his ongoing efforts to improve his health and longevity.
It was May 2018, and Mickelson, a month shy of turning forty-eight, was hosting me for a state-of-Phil cover story for Golf Magazine. He had a wistful vibe because Amy was back east, moving their eldest daughter out of her dorm room at Brown at the end of her freshman year, just another mileage marker as he sped into middle age. Phil had skipped the 2017 U.S. Open to attend Amanda’s high school graduation, at which she gave the valedictorian speech, part of a quiet year on Tour in which he had just one top-five finish and didn’t factor at any of the majors. But the victory in Mexico City, three months before our coffee summit, had validated some of his unusual methods of reinvention. Our meeting spot was not a run-of-the-mill coffee shop but rather a java temple run by his friend Dave Phillips, the cofounder of the Titleist Performance Institute who was now traveling the world sourcing the most exotic beans. They were in the early days of forming what would become their coffee and dietary supplement company For Wellness, which Mickelson was already touting as a fountain of youth. (It’s not the only magic elixir Mickelson has used to turn back the clock; a running gag on Twitter is showing old and current photos of Phil side by side to highlight how much less gray hair he suddenly has. Some folks in Mickelson’s orbit have nicknamed him “Black Cherry” as that’s the name of a popular color of hair dye.) A couple of years earlier, Mickelson had told me, “I went and got this food analysis from a doctor. Because I was getting sick six times a year, even though I was taking echinacea, which is an herb a lot of people take to help their immune system. I’d get sick immediately. It was awful. He said, ‘You are extremely toxic to echinacea.’ He says, ‘The opposite of echinacea is coffee.’ And I’d never been a coffee drinker. He says, ‘You need to drink coffee and as much as you can.’ Now I drink coffee all day long. I’ve not gotten sick one time in six years. So these are things that I’ve had to learn about that have really changed my life for the better.” Did Mickelson really go six-plus years without a head cold? As with various things he says, it’s un-fact-checkable but makes for good copy.
Now, in great detail, he laid out the strange brew he had invented for himself (a powder version of which is currently sold on the For Wellness website): coarse-ground Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee, almond milk, cinnamon, cacao nibs, collagen, and MCT oil. He had just begun embarking on his habit of doing three-day cleanses during which he eats no solid food, but drinks as much joe as he craves. Remarkably, in his late forties, Mickelson would get himself in the best shape of his life. “I look back to when I won the PGA Championship at Baltusrol in 2005, I was fifteen pounds heavier,” he said. “I looked awful and here I am thirteen years older and I’m in better shape. I physically feel better. I eat better. I take care of myself better. Most people regress. I feel like I’ve improved over time.” His old friend Rob Mangini is more expressive, saying, “He can curl a fifty-pound dumbbell like it’s no big deal. He can bench-press a car, he can leg-press a house. He’s become monster-strong, but no one knows it.” Mickelson has found other ways to challenge himself. “Ten years ago, he spent a lot of time working with military snipers,” says Mangini. “He wanted to learn their secrets for focus and mental discipline, and how to take that onto the golf course.” This begs the question, Does Phil keep guns at his home? “I don’t want to answer that directly because of the political dimension,” says Mangini, “but put it this way: I’ve never heard of a guy who trains with military snipers who doesn’t have his own firearms.”
Sitting at the sidewalk table, Phil talked about how proud he and Amy are of their kids. Amanda is a cool, quirky young lady who preached tolerance in her valedictorian speech. (In her ensuing graduation photo from Brown, she would be turned out in a handsome suit and tie.) Sophia is a dancer and an artist who would go on to study film at Columbia. Evan is a coder and a member of a rock band who was occasionally spotted strumming his guitar at farmers’ markets around town. As much as Mickelson loves being a very involved dad, the freedom of an empty nest loomed. “I’m looking forward to getting to date Amy again once the kids are out of the house,” he said. The plan at some point is for him and his bride to live three to six months at a time in all of their favorite places around the world.
The Mickelsons’ has long been the most scrutinized marriage in golf. Julie Crenshaw has observed them up close everywhere from Ryder Cup team rooms to casual hangouts. “The love they have for each other, that is genuine,” says Julie, who hosted a baby shower for Amy at the 1999 PGA Championship. “It’s not for show. They’re the same way in private as they are in public. I’ve heard every rumor about them that’s out there and people love to talk junk, but I know the real couple. They are so devoted to each other and he absolutely thinks she walks on water. Ohmylord, Phil is a grown kid and he thinks he knows everything about everything, but Amy brings him back down to earth.”
Amy took on a lower profile as she became more immersed in their kids’ busy teenage lives. Some close to her have detected a fatigue from a lifetime spent in the public eye. “What I have observed,” says Amanda Leonard, “is that if she can’t a hundred and ten percent be the lovely, happy, sparkly Amy that we all know, she won’t show up. She’ll just stay behind closed doors. It’s one extreme or the other. And I say that without one ounce of judgment—I can’t imagine being in her shoes. I love them both, but Phil is a tricky one. Super tricky. They’re both complicated people and they have a big life. But I know Amy’s number one priority is Phil and their marriage and staying together no matter what comes their way. Amy will do whatever she needs to do. She is incredibly devoted to him.”
Back at the coffee shop, Mickelson’s stomach was growling so we jumped in his souped-up golf cart, which has DirecTV and can touch fifty miles per hour. “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe and I’m a conservative driver,” Phil said with a wolfish grin. In fact, riding shotgun with him is a terrifying experience. The tires were chirping on every curve and he admonished me for not leaning properly to combat the g-forces the cart was pulling. We brunched at the posh Bridges Golf Club, where Phil greeted every valet and busboy by their first name. (There is a no-tipping policy, but at the end of the meal he discreetly slipped a couple of Andrew Jacksons under the place mat.) The conversation meandered, with him often pressing pause on my tape recorder to talk shit about this or that. The TV in the grillroom was playing Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris, which led Mickelson to riff on his taste in cinema: “I’m not a very good movie critic in that I’m not critical. I like ’em all. Except the movies that win awards, like The Shape of Water—I just didn’t care for that. A love story with a water alien? I just didn’t get it. I actually had dinner with Clint Eastwood one time and he was raving about La La Land. So I watched it and I’m like, ‘That was miserable. That was the worst frickin’ thing I’ve ever seen.’ So obviously my movie prowess is not very good.”
I mentioned that a few weeks earlier, Brandel Chamblee had taken to Twitter to offer a passionate testimonial about La La Land. “Oh, see, that makes perfect sense because he and I don’t see eye to eye on anything,” Mickelson snorted. “I was afraid you were gonna say we felt the same way about something, and that would have thrown me for a loop.”
I asked if he and Chamblee had some history I didn’t know about. “I just like people who build up the game,” Mickelson said. “I view this as, we’re all in the game of golf together. We all want to grow the game. We all want to make it better. And I feel like he’s made his commentating career off denigrating others. And I don’t care for that.”
Of course, this is a fundamental misreading of the role of the golf media. Reporters and analysts are not there to serve as Mickelson’s cheerleaders, no matter how hard he tries to co-opt them. A couple days after Mickelson called out Tom Watson at the loser’s press conference at the 2014 Ryder Cup, Chamblee was driving his kids to school when his cell phone bleated. It was Phil. “He wanted to tell me his side of the story,” says Chamblee, who had been critical of Mickelson in the immediate aftermath of the Gleneagles rebellion. “He was very polite, he didn’t get mad at me, he just went point by point and offered rebuttals to what I had been saying. In the following days I heard the very same things he told me come out of the mouth of numerous other media members, and I realized he had called them, too. It was a clever ploy, because we were probably less forceful in our arguments out of respect for Phil calling directly and debating the ideas. There is something Bill Clinton–ish about him in that he can use his charm and personality to wiggle out of things. He has a very cunning understanding of public relations.”
Mickelson was working so hard to preserve his image because, into his late forties, as the wins became sporadic, he had morphed into an even more relentless corporate mercenary, which is saying something, given his long-standing shamelessness in pushing product. (At the 2010 Players Championship, he spent the whole week talking about how Five Guys burgers were fueling his good play, and only later did it come out that Mickelson was part of a group that had just bought the franchise rights to the burger chain throughout Orange County; the year before, Mickelson, Steve Loy, and another partner offered $20.2 million for 105 Waffle Houses in four states, but were outbid. Good thing Mickelson’s foundation does not list combating obesity as part of its mission.) Now a guy who hates the taste and smell of beer is hawking Amstel Light.
At the 2018 Masters, a month before our brunch, Mickelson had created a huge buzz by playing a practice round with Woods, their first such game in two decades. But it was more about commerce than camaraderie: they were chumming the waters for the first of their made-for-TV spectacles, and Mickelson also used this high-profile spin around Augusta National to break out an awkward-looking oxford shirt made by a new endorsement partner. Now Mickelson stepped away from his avocado toast to take a couple of phone calls about details of The Match, each time returning to torture me with tantalizing details I was not yet allowed to print. The mano a mano versus Woods turned out to be a dud from a golf perspective, but it created another revenue stream that Mickelson has continued to exploit. (Not for nothing, the co-creator and producer of The Match is Phil’s golf buddy Bryan Zuriff, who in 2013 pleaded guilty to his role in an illegal online gambling enterprise with alleged connections to the Russian Mafia.)
Brunch is over. Mickelson wants to show me the backyard practice area at his house, but stipulates there can be no photos. By way of explanation, he goes on a little monologue about how the general public has been conditioned to resent successful people and so he is cautious about showing off his lavish home. This calls to mind Mickelson’s remarks in 2013 when he complained about the steep California state taxes, which led to such a backlash he wound up apologizing shortly thereafter. I agree to his conditions and we screech up in the golf cart to an expansive compound of lovely stone buildings that evoked a Tuscan village. Mickelson has a well-manicured tee box from where he can launch full drivers onto a vast lawn, though he has to hit them directly over a good-sized cottage that is used by staff. I ask if he’s ever caught a drive a little low on the face and plunked the building. He looks at me as if I have three heads. Right, Hall of Famers don’t do stuff like that. Nearby, there are greens with different grasses, bunkers with different varietals of sand, and three artificial-turf greens. We step to the artificial greens and Phil notes one is set at two degrees of pitch, the next at three degrees, and the third at four degrees. On each green, one of the holes is encircled by balls, and Mickelson works his way around, stroking putts to demonstrate how the ball will tumble in from different angles. It’s like watching Michelangelo mix paint. He grooves the feeling of these different vectors and then, once on Tour, having spent decades absorbing the green-reading books that displayed the pitch of each putting surface, he has already cracked the code of how any given putt will break. I had always thought of Mickelson’s short game as pure art—who knew there was so much science, too? He loves the seclusion of the setting, but Mickelson’s privacy is occasionally compromised by the hot-air balloonists who traverse Rancho Santa Fe’s lovely hills. At a dinner party at their home, Phil and Amy told the story of a balloon hovering overhead a bit too long while Mickelson was hitting balls… so he retrieved a firearm and sent a warning shot toward the heavens. According to two guests at the dinner, Amy was aghast about the tale while Phil seemed gleeful.
It was now deep into the lunch hour. Mickelson had a few calls to make and Sophia and Evan would soon be home from school. So we hopped back in his golf cart and roared back into downtown Rancho Santa Fe, where my rental car was parked. I thanked Phil for his time. “That wasn’t too painful,” he lied. With a wave he tore off down the street, headed for home.
To spend a morning with Mickelson is fun and exhausting. It reminds me of the time I interviewed Donald Trump back when he was merely a blustery real estate developer: the charm and hyperbole is relentless and disorientating. You can never tell what is real and what is pure puffery, and that seems to be the point.
The U.S. Open returned to Shinnecock Hills in 2018. It is one of Mickelson’s favorite courses and represented perhaps his last best chance to win the national championship, given that he had contended there until the bitter end in both 1995 and 2004. The return to Shinnecock also gave the USGA a chance at redemption after having screwed up the golf course fourteen years earlier. That week, Mickelson played some of the best golf of his life, but was thwarted by the out-of-control conditions (and, to be fair, Retief Goosen’s unflappable excellence). Mickelson’s disenchantment with what the blue blazers did to Shinny began his cold war with the USGA. The feelings were inflamed in 2007, when he injured his wrist in Oakmont’s over-the-top rough, and reached a boiling point at Merion in 2013, when Mickelson barked at executive director Mike Davis about the course setup in the middle of the final round as he was trying to win the tournament. “I think it’s a very difficult job to find the line of testing the best players to the greatest degree and then making it carnival golf,” Mickelson says. “I think it’s a very fine line, and it’s not a job I would want. And I know that the USGA is doing the best they can to find that line, and a lot of times they do, and sometimes they cross over it. It’s not an easy job. It’s easy for all of us to criticize. The difficulty is, when you dream of winning these tournaments as a child and you work hours and hours and you fly in days and days [early] to do all this prep work, and then you leave the outcome to chance, as opposed to skill, that’s a problem. That’s the problem that I have with it.”
After the unpleasantness at Merion, the USGA leadership extended the ultimate olive branch: they offered Mickelson the Bob Jones Award to be presented at the 2014 U.S. Open at Pinehurst. The grace Mickelson had displayed in defeat there fifteen years earlier is exactly what the Bob Jones Award celebrates, as, according to the USGA, it “recognizes an individual who demonstrates the spirit, personal character and respect for the game exhibited by Jones.” Presented annually since 1955, it is the highest honor bestowed by the USGA and the recipients include classic golfing gentlemen like Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Ben Crenshaw. But in an unprecedented act of pique, Mickelson turned down the award. According to someone very close to him, “Phil told the USGA to shove it up their ass.”
Is that a direct quote?!
“No, but that was the gist of it.”
All of this is necessary background to explain how and why Mickelson lost his mind—and the respect of swaths of the golf community—on the thirteenth hole of the third round of the 2018 United States Open. Mickelson drove the ball beautifully but putted poorly during opening rounds of 77-69. He had designs of going low on moving day, but by the time he arrived at number thirteen, he had bogeyed five of his previous eight holes and Mickelson’s mood had soured considerably, even as the fans occasionally serenaded him with “Happy Birthday,” as this was the day he turned forty-eight. It was hotter and windier than had been forecast, and the USGA put a couple of pins in spots that turned out to be dicey as the greens baked in the sun. At thirteen, the hole location was atop a crowned section of the green, tucked behind a bunker. Mickelson’s approach shot raced over the green, and the ensuing pitch carried a little too far and his ball rolled (and rolled and rolled and…) all the way off the front of the green. He shook his head in disgust, but it was not yet clear if he was vexed by his imprecise play or the exacting hole location. Mickelson chipped past the flag again and then hit his eighteen-foot bogey putt too hard. As the ball trickled past the hole, Mickelson lumbered after it. Instead of letting his ball roll off the green yet again, he smacked it with his putter while it was still in motion. The crowd went silent with confusion. His playing partner, Andrew “Beef” Johnston, stared at Mickelson with a blank look. “I said, ‘That’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen,’ and then just started laughing,” said Beef. “I think it’s just a moment of madness.” Mickelson missed his ensuing putt for triple bogey and then tapped in for an eight. Moments later, a rules official dinged him with a two-stroke penalty for violating Rule 14-5 by playing a moving ball, bumping his score on the hole to a perfect 10.
This is where things got interesting. On the Fox telecast, former USGA executive director David Fay called for Mickelson to be DQed, citing Rule 33-7, which states, “A penalty of disqualification may in exceptional individual cases be waived, modified or imposed if the [tournament] Committee considers such action warranted.” Clearly, Mickelson had violated the sanctity of the Open by flagrantly flouting one of the sport’s most fundamental rules, which is to never touch a ball in motion. He probably could have gotten away with it if, as Beef suggested, he pled temporary insanity. “We’ve all been there,” says Paul McGinley. “The red mist comes down and you lose the head. It’s a difficult game and sometimes we snap. You apologize for it and people can accept that. But Phil had to double down and be a smart-ass about it. He tried to talk his way out of it, and that was more disappointing than what he did on the green. He brought the game, and himself, into disrepute.”
After signing for his 81—tied for his worst score ever in a U.S. Open—Mickelson said, “Look, I don’t mean disrespect by anybody. I know it’s a two-shot penalty. At that time I just didn’t feel like going back and forth and hitting the same shot over. I took the two-shot penalty and moved on. It’s my understanding of the rules. I’ve had multiple times where I’ve wanted to do that, I just finally did it.”
He had previously displayed petulant civil disobedience in other ways: at the 2010 Western Open, while facing a thirty-seven-footer for birdie on the fifteenth green at Cog Hill, he chipped with his wedge instead of employing his putter to highlight his displeasure with the ridgy greens that had been redesigned by Rees Jones, whom Mickelson has been bullying ever since Jones’s unpopular reworking of Torrey Pines South.
“I think knowing the rules is never a bad thing,” Mickelson continued at Shinnecock. “I mean, you want to always use them in your favor. It’s a risk. I could have maybe hit a shot and somehow made the putt [if he had let his ball roll off the green]. I don’t know if it would have saved me a shot or not, but I might have saved a shot doing it the way I did it, too.”
Pressed on whether he had disrespected the national championship, Mickelson didn’t exactly strike a conciliatory tone. “If somebody is offended by that, I apologize to them, but toughen up,” he said, “because this is not meant that way.”
The headline writers on various golf websites saw through the bad-faith filibustering: “Phil Mickelson Will Have to Live Down His Actions—and Words—at Shinnecock”; “Phil Mickelson’s Rule Abuse Was Equal Parts Hilarious and Troubling.”
Four days later, Mickelson issued a statement: “I know this should’ve come sooner, but it’s taken me a few days to calm down. My anger and frustration got the best of me last weekend. I’m embarrassed and disappointed by my actions. It was clearly not my finest moment and I’m sorry.”
Oh, by the way, the 2014 Bob Jones Award was awarded posthumously to Payne Stewart.
The golf gods ensured that Mickelson struggled in the immediate aftermath of Shinnecock, but he enjoyed another renaissance at Pebble Beach in February 2019, winning the Crosby Clambake for a record-tying fifth time. (Nunu’s coin once again made its annual appearance.) It was the forty-fourth victory of his career, ninth all-time, and most memorable for a spicy conversation he had in the Sunday twilight with Paul Casey, who was in second place, three strokes back. The sun had already set, but Mickelson wanted to try to rush through the final two holes. Casey exercised his right to stop playing due to darkness and they finished out the tournament the next morning. “He was trying to bully me, but I can’t be bullied,” says Casey. “That was Phil flexing. He’s allowed to flex—he’s a Hall of Famer. Of course he can, but he was still wrong. The funny thing was Phil acting like a politician: he came out the next day and said I was right to have stopped play, but he never actually apologized.”
As often happens with Mickelson, the good vibes from the victory were compromised by untoward headlines: a month after the win he publicly acknowledged that he and Amy had paid the disgraced college adviser Rick Singer to help get Amanda into Brown University. Mickelson insisted Singer did nothing unseemly on his daughter’s behalf, and no evidence ever emerged to the contrary. But of all the players in golf, and all the college advisers on the planet, it had to be Mickelson who got mixed up in another scandal, even unwittingly.
However, in the battle for the hearts and minds of golf fans, he suddenly had a powerful new tool: social media. Mickelson reinvented himself yet again by joining Twitter and Instagram and playing a caricature of himself—jokey, goofy, swaggering, and eager to talk trash to fellow players and random followers. Given how stiff and stale most other Tour players are on social media, the public spooned it up.
At the 2020 PGA Championship, Mickelson conquered another medium when he visited CBS’s eighteenth-hole tower for his first-ever stint as a guest commentator. He offered the viewers at home nuanced analysis of the course and various players and provided plenty of laughs as he thoroughly flummoxed Nick Faldo with his huge presence and quick wit. Golf Twitter lost its collective mind at the entertainment value and sheer cheekiness of Mickelson rendering Faldo obsolete in real-time. Sir Nick is only a little defensive about it. “I don’t think he was trying to steal my job,” says Faldo. “It was more like Phil just showing off, as he is wont to do anytime there is an audience, big or small. But having a free mic is very different than what we were doing. We have a system. We go to Frank [Nobilo] on one hole, then Ian [Baker-Finch] on the next, then they come back to Jim [Nantz] and I, et cetera. Phil just came bowling in with an open mic and talked right across everybody.” Mickelson was even more uninhibited as the lead commentator of “The Match” that pitted Brooks Koepka against Bryson DeChambeau in November 2021. Coming off of that performance, there was zero doubt Mickelson had a future in television if he so desired; think Johnny Miller with more star power and a sharper needle. Longtime TV agent and publicist LeslieAnne Wade said Mickelson could command “Romo money”—former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo is now making a reported $18 million a year as a wildly entertaining football analyst for CBS.
As he approached his fiftieth birthday, Mickelson began obsessing over his driving distance the way other men fret about a receding hairline. A large part of his social media schtick involved him woofing about the “bombs” and “hellacious seeds” he was now hitting with his driver, thanks to an emphasis on speed training. Off camera, Faldo buttonholed Mickelson to learn more about his methodology. “He said it starts with your mind, that you have to recondition your brain that you can do that,” says Faldo. “Then you focus on mobility, then strength, then explosive exercises. Only then can you start swinging the club faster. It’s not a five-minute gig or five weeks. It’s months and years that you have to bring the commitment. To add six miles per hour more clubhead speed at age fifty, that’s off-the-charts impressive.”
Mickelson ended 2019 with a grace note. Tom Watson’s wife, Hilary, succumbed to cancer that November; Phil and Amy flew to Kansas City for the funeral services. Watson was surprised to see them there and deeply touched by the gesture. “For a lot of us, that closed the door on the Ryder Cup stuff,” says Ted Bishop, the former PGA of America president who tabbed Watson as captain and remains a good friend. “For Phil to come all that way to pay his respects, that showed a lot of class. In his own way I think that was Phil trying to make things right.”
Mickelson struggled throughout 2020 as COVID took away the crowds, and this consummate showman seemed lost without an adoring audience. The weirdness with Bones was also becoming more apparent. Though Mackay forced himself to offer chipper insight about his former boss in his on-air commentary, they pointedly ignored each other any time their paths crossed at tournaments. The awkwardness was surely amplified by various whispers getting back to Phil, as Bones had begun telling intimates of the real reasons for their split. At the 2020 WGC in Memphis, Justin Thomas had to find a replacement caddie after his looper suffered dizzy spells, so he asked Mackay to moonlight on the bag. Inevitably, Thomas and Mickelson played together in the third-to-last pairing in the final round. Phil and Bones didn’t so much as exchange a glance or a single word throughout the front nine as JT ran off a string of birdies to take control of the tournament. On the tenth hole, Thomas hit his approach to twenty feet, while Mickelson was in a greenside bunker. He played the ensuing shot and Tim Mickelson descended into the bunker to rake it. In such a scenario it is standard protocol for Bones to clean Phil’s ball as a courtesy and to speed up play. Mackay started walking with his towel toward Mickelson to do his duty when Tim sprinted out of the bunker and wedged himself between them, like Moses Malone blocking out a would-be rebounder. It was odd and awkward and, since the PGA Tour is more insular and gossipy than high school, the story made the rounds at the speed of light. Mackay again caddied for Thomas the following week, at the PGA Championship, where they were paired with Woods. On the fourteenth hole, a repeat scenario played out when Tiger was in a greenside bunker. After his shot, caddie Joe LaCava raked the sand, so Bones strolled over to Woods to clean his golf ball. Without missing a beat, Tiger growled, “I’d rather have Tim clean it.” Bones almost fell over laughing.
Mickelson’s 2021 season got off to an awkward start when Donald Trump, in the dying hours of his presidency, commuted Billy Walters’s sentence. (“Gambler Tied to Phil Mickelson Released from Prison Early” was the headline on GolfDigest.com.) The White House named three of the most popular figures in the game—Butch Harmon, David Feherty, and Peter Jacobsen—as among those who had sponsored the commutation on behalf of Walters. It was a reminder that Billy still had many friends in the golf world and, if folks had to pick sides, plenty of them were going to shun Phil. But what made the White House announcement all the more stunning was Mickelson being included in the list of Walters’s sponsors. The simple explanation is that Trump’s people screwed up; Mickelson had no role in the commutation process. “The press release referencing Phil Mickelson is erroneous,” Mickelson’s lawyer Glenn Cohen told ESPN. “The reason we are upset is because it’s untrue.” Walters returned to his life in Las Vegas. In his quiet time he has been working on a tell-all autobiography that is sure to give Mickelson (and Cohen) more heartburn when it is published.
Throughout the first half of the 2021 season, Mickelson appeared to be losing the battle with Father Time. Reluctantly, he made a few cameos on the Senior Tour, having turned fifty the previous June. He breezed to two easy wins but seemed unfulfilled without the bright lights of the big show. Mickelson continued to be a nonfactor when he played against the far tougher competition of the PGA Tour: in his first nine tournaments of 2021 he missed four cuts and failed to record a top-twenty finish. Augusta National seemed like the best bet as to where Mickelson could turn back time, but at the ’21 Masters he had to fight to make the cut on the number. On the eighteenth tee, Mickelson smoked a drive that stopped one pace short of the fairway bunker. He cracked up the smattering of fans on hand by quoting Ben Stiller from There’s Something About Mary: “Strong like bull.” After the round, Mickelson excitedly informed a gathering of friends near the clubhouse that his drive had traveled 312 yards, uphill. And he offered a rosy assessment of his game: “It’s close,” he said. “It’s very close. When it clicks I’m gonna go off.”
This felt like wishful thinking. Two years earlier, Tiger Woods had defied belief with his epic victory at Augusta, but it seemed increasingly unlikely that Mickelson would get to enjoy his own such encore.