Phil Mickelson’s 70 in the first round of the 2021 PGA Championship tied him for eighth place but attracted scant notice. On Friday, when he birdied five of his last nine holes at the Ocean Course on Kiawah Island to surge into a tie for the lead, it felt like a curiosity. Following his 69, Mickelson said the key to his fine play was not his putting or ball striking, but rather more clarity in his mental game, which had increased after he recommitted to yoga and meditation earlier in the year. “I’m making more and more progress just by trying to elongate my focus,” he said. “I might try to play thirty-six, forty-five holes in a day and try to focus on each shot so that when I go out and play eighteen, it doesn’t feel like it’s that much. I might try to elongate the time that I end up meditating, but I’m trying to use my mind like a muscle and just expand it because as I’ve gotten older, it’s been more difficult for me to maintain a sharp focus, a good visualization, and see the shot.”
This New Age juju dovetailed with Mickelson’s age-defying efforts to remake his body and his swing in an effort to remain relevant. His obsessive quest for more distance off the tee felt like folly, or madness, until this PGA Championship, when he came to the brawniest major championship venue in history (7,876 yards) and bashed his way to the fifty-four-hole lead. “He’s hitting it so long and straight it’s incredible,” said one of his playing partners, Louis Oosthuizen.
During the third round, Mickelson had been on the verge of a runaway until the tenor of the tournament flipped on one swing when he sniped a drive into the water on the thirteenth hole, leading to a buzzkill double bogey. That stirred the angst living inside every Mickelson fan, who have long been traumatized by the big miss. More wild shots ensued, but Phil the Thrill showed a ton of heart getting in the house without further damage, posting a 70 to lead Brooks Koepka by one stroke. Still, the existential dread lingered as Mickelson faced a date with destiny in the final round. Could golf’s most wayward champion survive a booby-trapped course that severely punishes impudence? Five years removed from the last time he even contended at a major championship, could Phil become the oldest player ever to win one? Golf genius can be perishable; Mickelson’s idol, Seve Ballesteros, is proof of that. Yet here was Phil, still bailing himself out with wizardly wedge shots on one of golf’s toughest tests while his contemporaries were riding carts and battling the yips on the Senior Tour. It defied belief.
On the driving range before the final round, Mickelson’s burden was palpable. He suffered through a sketchy warm-up session despite alignment sticks, an iPad, a launch monitor, and a hovering swing coach in Andrew Getson. Mickelson exuded an edgy energy when he arrived on the first tee, jaw clenched tight and his eyes hidden behind aviators as if they were the tinted windows of a limousine. The swollen crowd was already in a frenzy, desperate to witness the crowning achievement of a career of unsurpassed longevity. But Mickelson would have to tangle with big, bad Brooks, who rolled up to the first tee with his familiar cocksure swagger, like a heavyweight prizefighter confident he is going to land a few haymakers. A win would end two years of injury-related frustrations and give Koepka a whopping five major championship victories, tying him with a trio of all-time geniuses: Seve, “Lord Byron” Nelson, and the living legend with whom he was paired. Koepka has strained to brand himself an antihero and now he had a chance to ruin another Hollywood story line, having already done so at the 2018 PGA Championship when he thwarted Tiger’s bid with a cold-blooded closing 66. He was clearly spoiling for a fight.
Koepka smashed a drive down the middle of the first fairway, taking the most aggressive of lines; over the first three rounds his ball striking had been so reliable it was boring to watch. As Mickelson stood over the ball, you could almost hear the clack-clack-clack of a roller-coaster car inching toward a summit. Sure enough, Phil lashed his drive deep into the left rough and then came up miles short with his approach, leading to a three-putt bogey. Brooks, with typical ruthlessness, brushed in a birdie and just like that snatched the lead. The ride had begun.
Mickelson steadied himself with a birdie on the par-5 second, thanks to an adroit up-and-down. But he bogeyed number three, a short par-4, after missing the green from thirty yards out. You could feel the tension, in the gallery at the Ocean Course and across Golf Twitter. On the tough par-3 fifth hole, Mickelson lost his tee shot into a bunker on the short side and it felt like the tournament was already slipping away. But he summoned some vintage magic, holing out for a game-changing birdie. It instantly joined the pantheon of Mickelson highlights.
Walking off the fifth green, Mickelson spied a fan named Kyler Aubrey positioned in the walkway in his wheelchair. Kyler has cerebral palsy, but that doesn’t stop him from attending numerous tournaments each year with his father, Josh, a sportswriter for the Statesboro Herald. Mickelson pressed the ball into Kyler’s hand, and for a split second their fingers were intertwined. “Thanks for bringing me some luck,” he said. Kyler loosed a guttural grunt, which is his way of showing joy. That night, he would tap out a message on his iPad, every letter requiring great effort: Golf ball. Meet Phil. Thank you Daddy.
The sweetness of the moment faded when Mickelson bogeyed the sixth hole out of the rough. Walking off the green, his usually taciturn brother/caddie, Tim, got in his ear: “If you’re going to win this thing, you’re going to have to make committed golf swings.” Says Phil, “It hit me in the head. I can’t be passive. I can’t control the outcome, I have to swing committed. The first one I made was the drive on [the par-5 seventh hole]. Gave me a chance to get down by the green and make birdie. That was the turning point for me. From then on, I hit a lot of really good shots because I was committed to each one. It was the perfect thing to say. I think that’s why we work so well together—he knows how to say things that resonate. He doesn’t say a lot. He says the right thing at the right time.”
The birdie on seven pushed Mickelson’s lead to two strokes. Across the front nine, he would hit only two fairways, suffer a three-putt, make three bogeys… and somehow double his lead. It was beginning to feel like the 2019 Masters all over again, when the crushing pressure and the palpable will of the golf gods overwhelmed every would-be contender except for a cagey Hall of Famer.
On the tenth hole, Mickelson stood in the fairway and deliberately assessed his options. With the pin tucked on the extreme left edge of the putting surface, behind a bunker, the safe play was to aim for the middle of the green and accept a par. But where’s the fun in that? Mickelson played a low, hard draw with a sawed-off 7-iron. His ball tore through the wind and nearly knocked over the flagstick. “Now this was salty,” he said afterward on Golf Channel, “because I had to start that over the bunker just left of the green because I couldn’t cut it back into the wind—because it would take too much off it.” Meanwhile, Koepka played the wrong shot shape, a towering fade that got gobbled up by the breeze and tossed into a bunker, woefully short. These two swings illustrated the difference between a modern, mindless basher and a crafty old-school shotmaker. Koepka’s soft bogey and Mickelson’s kick-in birdie gave Phil a commanding four-stroke lead and a time-share in Brooks’s head.
On the back nine, Mickelson’s routine became increasingly leisurely as he took long pauses before every swing, visualizing the shot he wanted to play. He was like a baseball closer strolling around the mound, going to the rosin bag, and shaking off the catcher; the game-within-the-game would be played at his pace. On the eleventh hole, Mickelson blew his drive left into the dunes and called for a rules official after a fan picked up the ball. While Phil worked the crowd, Koepka leaned on his club, exasperated. In the thirteenth fairway, Mickelson took so long going through his mental processes that Koepka slumped against his bag and shook his head ruefully. “A great example of gamesmanship is what Phil did to me at the PGA,” Koepka said with a couple months of reflection. “I got trounced on that one. I thought it was pretty good what he was doing. It was tough for me to get into a rhythm [with] the timing of how things were going.”
But Mickelson began playing prevent defense a little too early, and bogeys on 13 and 14 trimmed his lead to three strokes with a tough closing stretch ahead. Nick Faldo was calling the tournament for CBS; having won a Masters at age forty-two, he recognized the demons on Mickelson’s shoulder. “People say you never forget how to win and that’s true, but to do it you need trust in your game, and that’s the hardest part,” says Faldo. “You get deep into your career and you’re experiencing failure a lot more. At the ’96 Masters, I didn’t have the same self-belief I used to. Mentally I had to walk myself through the process of hitting the shots. It used to be intuitive, now I had to force myself to do it. ‘What do you want to do here, Nick? Hit it fifteen feet right of the flag. What about the pond? I’m not going to hit it in the pond. Yes you are. No I’m not. If you do, the wheels are coming off. No they’re not.’ It was exhausting. You could see Phil having the same conversations with himself. He was working so hard to free his mind.”
Oosthuizen finally showed some life with a birdie on the par-5 sixteenth hole, cutting Mickelson’s lead to a tenuous two strokes. But on the sixteenth tee, Phil responded with an utterly fearless swing, uncorking a 366-yard piss missile that was the longest drive of the day by any player on that hole. That one swing validated years of quixotic speed training. He was a little too pumped up on the 6-iron approach shot, his ball rolling just over the green. Now Mickelson had to get up-and-down to salvage a crucial birdie. Was there ever any doubt? His delicate chip led to a tap-in birdie, and the crowd broke into delirious chants of “Phil! Phil! Phil!”
Mickelson faced one final test on the seventeenth green, with a knee-knocking three-footer to save par. He had recommitted to a conventional putting grip months earlier, but now, with the PGA Championship hanging in the balance, he switched to a claw grip. “The ball rolled into a low area and I wanted to launch it higher so it didn’t push into the ground and shoot off-line,” Mickelson tweeted the next day. “The claw allows me to angle the shaft vertical and eliminate my forward press.” Yet another crafty veteran move. He rattled in the putt, setting up a delirious scene on eighteen.
Running, sweating, screaming, tweeting, the fans who swarmed the final fairway were not merely cheering for a golfer. They had been swept up in a communal experience that was bigger and grander than that. Mickelson wasn’t just on the verge of winning the PGA Championship a month shy of his fifty-first birthday, he was exploding our collective notion of what is possible. The fans had become so unmoored that Mickelson had to shove his way through the crowd (with the help of a phalanx of cops). Finally, he reached the final green to tidy up his two-shot victory. “It was a little bit unnerving, but it was exceptionally awesome, too,” he said of the crush of humanity. The gallery erupted at the sight of him, but it wasn’t awe or reverence that fueled the cheers. It was unfettered joy. Mickelson has always had a deep connection with the fans, who appreciate the dignity he has displayed during slapstick losses and his class through forty-four victories… and counting. They cried along with him when he won the 2010 Masters for his cancer-stricken bride, and now they laugh at his deadpan, self-deprecating social media posts. They forgive his trespasses (meaty gambling debts and questionable stock transactions; talking smack about Tiger Woods’s equipment; attempting hero shots on the seventy-second hole at Winged Foot) because even Mickelson’s failings feed his image as an uninhibited thrill-seeker. Love him or hate him, Mickelson inspires emotion. In the Sunday twilight at the Ocean Course, Paul Casey stood on a hill behind the eighteenth green. He had finished his round nearly an hour earlier but stuck around to take in the scene. “This is cool shit,” he said.
Jon Rahm, in a T-shirt emblazoned with DAD BOD, wormed his way to the edge of the green to get a better view of history. “If I know one thing about Phil,” Rahm said, “he wants to make this putt.” It wouldn’t make a difference in the outcome but Mickelson is always looking to show off. He missed the birdie putt yet secured the trophy, a dizzying turn of events even he struggled to put into words. “Although I believed it, until I actually did it, there was a lot of doubt,” he said. “Certainly one of the moments I’ll cherish my entire life.”
Mickelson had been stoic all week about what a victory would mean, part of the renewed emphasis on mental discipline, but in accepting the trophy he finally let a little emotion flow: “This is just an incredible feeling because I believed it was possible, yet everything was saying it wasn’t. I hope that others find that inspiration. It might take a little extra work, a little harder effort, but it’s so worth it in the end.”
Says Faldo, “I think it’s one of most remarkable achievements in golf, ever. How do you open the gates to do it again? How do you generate that amount of emotion and intensity and determination? You can’t just flip the switch and generate that kind of want. We’ve all tried to and it hasn’t worked. For Phil to actually do that, it’s legendary stuff.”
“It’s so cool that a whole new generation of fans got to see what a stallion he is,” says Keegan Bradley. “It just shows what kind of greatness Phil has inside of him. He hadn’t played good all year”—in fact, the PGA Championship would be Mickelson’s only top-10 finish of the season—“but drop him into that situation and he took total control of the tournament. What a gift to golf fans and, really, the whole game.”
Mickelson’s sixth major championship victory tied him with his diametric opposite, the fastidious Faldo, and Lee Trevino, one of the three or four greatest ball-strikers who have ever lived. If he can somehow steal another one—and at this point, how can you possibly bet against him?—Mickelson would join the immortals with seven majors: Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Gene Sarazen, and Harry Vardon. One measure of the greatness of a career is the span between a first and last major championship victory. Nicklaus, of course, leads the way at twenty-four years. Since the birth of the Masters, only Tiger Woods (twenty-two), Gary Player (nineteen), and Ernie Els (eighteen) can say they were big-game hunters longer than Mickelson (seventeen).
When it was all over, Mickelson marched triumphantly across the grounds of the Ocean Course, serenaded by the fans. It now takes two hands to count his major championships, but in victory he offered only one digit: a thumb raised triumphantly to the sky.