Phil Mickelson’s victory at the PGA Championship inspired many emotions, including wonderment. Thirty years after winning a Tour event as an undergrad, he had once again pulled off the improbable. The latest triumph led to a reexamining of Mickelson’s place in the golf firmament, and the larger sports landscape. Among modern athletes, only Tom Brady and LeBron James can boast the same combination of longevity and excellence. Jim Nantz has had a front-row seat for Mickelson’s and Brady’s careers and become close to both men. “What I see are two guys who love what they do and it comes from a place deep in their heart and their soul,” says Nantz. “They play with a boyish joy that never gets old for them. Whatever processes it takes that allows them to compete, that doesn’t grow old. Think of when you’re a little kid, bag over your shoulder, it’s getting dark but you just want to play one more hole, and you’re afraid your mom is going to be mad at you, but the pure joy of hitting a golf ball makes you keep playing—Phil has never lost that. Down the stretch at the Ocean Course, he might as well have been in his backyard with his dad, hitting flop shots. Just like Tom Brady, in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, it’s as if he’s slinging the ball around the backyard with his father. Tom still throws the football with the same intensity as when he was in his twenties. Phil still swings at the ball as hard as when he was in his twenties. They were both born to do it.”
Mickelson’s midlife burst made it impossible not to rethink the career-long comparisons with Tiger Woods. If Phil’s 2021 was defined by triumph, Tiger’s was marred by more catastrophe. There are twenty-six bones in a human foot, and, according to someone very close to Woods, he shattered twenty-one of them in the single-car accident that sent him to the hospital in February. This bracketed a dozen years of strife for Tiger, during which he broke his body and severely curtailed his career, throwing into sharp relief Mickelson’s unparalleled longevity. “One of the reasons Phil has lasted so long is because he’s had a joyful life,” says Charles Barkley, who has been close to both Woods and Mickelson. “Tiger won a bunch of tournaments, but there wasn’t much joy in it. Sure, Tiger is a better golfer. You’re just in awe of his talent. But it’s not fun to be around him. Everyone in his world is uptight and shit, afraid to say or do the wrong thing. Tiger himself has always acted like he’s under siege. Gimme a fuckin’ break—you’re just a golfer, dude. When you’re with Phil, you’re guaranteed to have fun. He makes people feel good. Everyone around him is always smiling. That’s a huge difference, man.”
Mickelson’s victory at the PGA Championship also demanded a reassessment of his place in the pantheon. My list:
“He’s inches from immortality,” says Golf Channel analyst Arron Oberholser. “If he got a U.S. Open, he’s easily top 10 of all time. How much of his cash do you think Phil would give for one U.S. Open? I think he’d give a kidney. He might give both of them. Would Phil go on dialysis for a U.S. Open? Maybe!”
For all that Mickelson has accomplished, it’s impossible not to wonder if he could have been an even more prolific winner with a more disciplined and less unbridled style of play. “Oh, of course he would have,” says Nicklaus. “He would have won a lot more. Right after he won the PGA this year I dropped him a note. I can paraphrase what I said: Hey, you reined yourself in, you didn’t try to do dumb stuff, and look what happened? You won. When it comes to winning golf tournaments, it’s not about your good holes—it’s about minimizing your bad holes. Golly, he’s cost himself so many tournaments over the years with the double and triple and quadruple bogeys.”
“Listen, every good player, they have to do whatever is necessary to get their heartbeat in the right place for them to succeed,” says Peter Kostis. “You know? Some people have to play very conservatively. When I worked with Tom Kite, that’s the kind of player he was. He had to go from point A to point B and stay very structured and rely on his thousands of hours of practice to carry him. Phil has a style of golf that gets his heartbeat in the right place for him. He has a constant need to feel the excitement, feel the juice. And I commend him for understanding that and living that way. Could he have won more with another style of play? I’m not sure. If he tried to be someone he’s not, it probably would have hurt his game more than it helped.”
Brandt Snedeker recalls a long-ago Crosby Clambake when he was paired with Mickelson on Saturday. They were in the middle of the pack playing Pebble Beach’s fourteenth hole. For his second shot to the par-5, Mickelson aimed his 3-wood at the houses right of the green and tried to cut his ball back onto the putting surface. Instead, it sailed out-of-bounds, as did the reload. Mickelson made a 9 and missed the cut by one stroke. That night at dinner Snedeker asked him what the heck he had been thinking. “I was trying to win the tournament,” Mickelson said, baffled by the question. “I was 9 back—I’m not going to lay up. If I make a 3 there and another one on eighteen, I could’ve given myself a chance to win.” Says Snedeker, “It’s an entirely different way of thinking about things. He was always, always playing to win. I respect that, even if he set himself on fire a few times as a result.”
“You have to take the whole player as is, the whole package,” says Hank Haney. “You can’t swap out this piece or that piece, because if you change one thing you change everything. If Phil hit his driver straighter he would have been Tiger Woods. But you can’t have everything. Phil had one weakness but so many other strengths. To make him play another way, that would be like putting reins on a racehorse. You just gotta let them go. That’s how he plays golf, and it’s helped him enjoy it for a really long time and kept him engaged and kept him going forward. You know what, when I was [commentating] at ESPN, it felt like I was always getting Jim Furyk’s group. I fucking hate watching Jim Furyk play golf. It was like, Gawd anybody but fucking Furyk. He would hit every fairway, hit every green, and either make or miss the putt. That’s it. Same boring shit hole after hole, and the entire time he has the same goddamn frown on his face. I used to beg them to let me watch Phil Mickelson. He’s fucking fun to watch. He’ll hit some wild shots, some great ones, he’ll do some crazy shit, but he plays with so much personality.”
In the end, maybe that’s all that matters, not whether Mickelson won this tournament or that tournament. He had fun and so did we. And he did it his way.
In the wake of Mickelson’s PGA Championship victory, the tributes and the outpourings of goodwill were unrelenting… until he again managed to be his own worst enemy. Five weeks after the PGA, Mickelson turned up at the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit, his first time playing a recent addition to the schedule that has been trumpeted as a sign of the host city’s ongoing renaissance. The Detroit News uncovered a juicy local angle: Phil’s connection to “Dandy Don” DeSeranno, a Motor City character who was an alleged associate of the national Mafia organization La Cosa Nostra. Dandy Don favored gold medallions and shirts unbuttoned to his belly button, and had his pick of vintage Thunderbirds for tooling around town: red (1957), white (’55), or blue (’56). On Wednesday of tournament week, one of the newspaper’s most decorated investigative reporters, Rob Snell, dropped a thoroughly researched story detailing how Dandy Don, having served as Mickelson’s bookie, bilked him out of half a million dollars in winnings from sports wagering. “According to the trial transcript, DeSeranno was questioned about Mickelson after receiving immunity from federal prosecutors and testified as a government witness in the 2007 racketeering trial of Jack Giacalone, a reputed organized crime leader in Metro Detroit,” the story said. “Giacalone’s dad was the admitted mob captain Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone, a suspect in the unsolved disappearance of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa.” The trial transcript was reprinted in the story:
Giacalone’s lawyer, Neil Fink, asked, “Did you cheat—do you know Phil Mickelson, the golfer?”
“Who?” DeSeranno said.
“Phil Mickelson, the golfer.”
“Yes.”
“Lefty?” the lawyer said.
“Yes.”
“Did you cheat him out of $500,000?”
“I wouldn’t say I cheated him.”
“What would you call it?” Fink asked. “What did you do?”
“I couldn’t pay him.”
“You booked his action, correct?”
“Yes.”
The story quoted Mickelson’s lawyer Glenn Cohen, who confirmed the reporting. “Phil and a bunch of his buddies back then were betting on sports, and Phil was the guy placing the bets,” Cohen said. “They got this guy’s name and had no idea what his background was.” U.S. attorney Keith Corbett made it clear in the story that Mickelson had done nothing worse than exercise terrible judgment. “We never looked at him,” Corbett said. “I don’t know what the laws were in Vegas, but from a federal standpoint, it is not a crime to be a bettor.”
Despite the fair and balanced reporting, Mickelson went on the offensive, taking to Twitter to rip the story and telling reporters at the tournament, “I feel that Rob Snell made an article this week that was very opportunistic and selfish and irresponsible. I was looking at some ways that my foundation might be able to get involved. When you have a divisive voice like that, it’s very hard to bring people together, and that needs to change because the people here are great. But when that’s your voice, it’s hard for me or somebody else to come in and get other people and bring other entities involved to help out because you’re constantly being torn down as opposed to brought together and built up. It was so much effort for me to be here to have that type of unnecessary attack. Not like I care, it happened twenty-something years ago, it’s just the lack of appreciation. Yeah, I don’t see me coming back. Not that I don’t love the people here and they haven’t been great, but not with that type of thing happening.”
Mickelson wanted to dismiss the story as old news but it was built on new revelations: the trial transcript did not appear in Giacalone’s court file until 2018, and it wasn’t until June 2021 that the connection to Mickelson was discovered, as Giacalone faced prison time in a new case connected to an overdue tax bill of $537,222. Mickelson’s ire may have been less about the timing of the story than the fact that it made him look like a putz and a pigeon and a palooka. All the whinging was certainly not crafty public relations: The original article had been locked for subscribers to the News, giving it only a small regional audience, but once Mickelson made it big news, the paper tore down the paywall so the whole world could read (and retweet) it. Things took a turn for the absurd when a local golf fan created a petition at Change.org to try to convince Mickelson to come back to Detroit. Sensing that his threats to boycott a feel-good tournament over a lone newspaper story made him look small and thin-skinned, Mickelson quickly backtracked and said he would return if the petition garnered fifty thousand signatures and each signer agreed to do “one random act of kindness for another member of the community.” (Insert eye roll emoji here.) Flailing for further damage control, Mickelson donated $100,000 to the Detroit-based Children’s Foundation.
He hadn’t teed it up in the state of Michigan since 2008, so the locals weren’t used to the Mickelsonian bobbing and weaving. “The way he handled it was stunning, frankly,” says Gary Miles, the editor and publisher of the Detroit News. Fighting for a spot on the U.S. Ryder Cup team, Mickelson finished in seventy-fourth place, third from last, fifteen strokes behind winner Cam Davis. How did his act play with local sports fans? Miles is too polite to answer directly, but he says, “Detroit prides itself on work ethic, and as a sports town, the folks who tend to retain stardom are not flamboyant—they just put their head down and deliver. You score a touchdown and you hand the ball to the referee and don’t say much afterward. As for Mickelson, Barry Sanders he isn’t.”
Dandy Don wasn’t the end of Mickelson’s bad press in 2021. Throughout the year, he was linked to a controversial plan by Golf Saudi to create a new golf circuit that would be a direct competitor to the PGA Tour. Mickelson has always been loathe to travel overseas for tournaments, but in February 2021 he jilted the Phoenix Open—what used to be his hometown event—and flew halfway across the world for the Saudi International, a tournament affiliated with the European Tour (which has since been rechristened the DP World Tour, the naming rights having been sold to a behemoth Dubai corporation). Steve Loy made the trip with Mickelson. He was the talk of the driving range, as word quickly got around that Loy had gotten himself in a pickle at the airport for trying to bring in bottles of wine as gifts to top Saudi officials; alcohol is forbidden by law in the Kingdom. (Loy did not respond to a request for comment.) Whatever his flaws may be, Coach remains a powerful force in Mickelson’s life. His role transcends merely being an agent and has come to include partnering with Mickelson on a variety of investments. “It’s more like a marriage than a business relationship,” says Davis Love. Someone who is close to both Loy and Mickelson believes the bond is stronger than that; after all, marriages can be dissolved. “They’re like blood brothers,” says this person. “They know all of each other’s secrets and they’re going to take them to the grave.”
Not long after Mickelson spent a week pressing flesh in King Abdullah Economic City, word began to leak out that the proposed Saudi Golf League (SGL) would feature tournaments with $20 million purses—the 2021 PGA Championship offered a record $12 million—and there were whispers that number would increase significantly year over year. Some of Mickelson’s colleagues were revolted by the idea that Saudi Arabia, which birthed fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, would become a home of professional golf. Rory McIlroy had already turned down seven-figure appearance fees to play in the Saudi International, saying, “There’s a morality to it.” Now he deemed the SGL “a money grab” and added, “I would like to be on the right side of history with this one.”
Mickelson refrained from saying anything of substance publicly about the SGL, but his involvement in the birth of the tour is much more extensive than has been previously known; he laid out all the details for me in an hour-long phone call in November 2021. Mickelson said he had enlisted three other “top players” he declined to name and that they paid for attorneys to write the SGL’s operating agreement, codifying that the players would have control of all the details. He didn’t pretend to be excited about the prospect of making his professional home in Saudi Arabia, admitting the SGL was nothing more than “sportswashing” by a brutally oppressive regime. “They’re scary motherfuckers to get involved with,” he said. “We know they killed [Washington Post reporter and U.S. resident Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates. They’ve been able to get by with manipulative, coercive, strong-arm tactics because we, the players, had no recourse. As nice a guy as [Tour commissioner Jay Monahan] comes across as, unless you have leverage, he won’t do what’s right. And the Saudi money has finally given us that leverage. I’m not sure I even want [the SGL] to succeed, but just the idea of it is allowing us to get things done with the [PGA] Tour.”
Indeed, Monahan quickly treated the SGL—and a less well-capitalized would-be start-up tour, the Premier Golf League—as an existential threat, and he warned that any player who signed on with the competition would be banned for life by the PGA Tour. (This is a legally dubious position but reflected Monahan’s siege mentality.) The Tour quickly began pumping money to the players to try to blunt the Saudi incursion, jacking up the 2021 Players Championship purse to $15 million and introducing the new $40 million Player Impact Program (PIP), which was billed as a bonus pool for the players who had the biggest media reach and best engaged with fans through social media. The Tour alluded to shadowy algorithms and unspecified metrics but refused to make public how the money was distributed, leaving no doubt it was merely a slush fund for Monahan to try to buy the loyalty of his superstars. The day after Mickelson called me, word leaked about the Tour’s continued efforts to purchase its players’ happiness: in 2022, the PIP would be raised to $50 million; the FedEx Cup bonus pool increased from $60 million to $75 million; two spurious season-long bonus programs would hand out a total of $20 million more; and tournament purses increased $60 million to $427 million, with the Players Championship payout rising to $20 million. (Where have we heard that latter number before?)
Mickelson’s machinations with the Saudis had clearly worked, to the benefit of all, but he remained unsatisfied despite the influx of so much funny money. In his mind, two larger battles remained: the players being able to take possession of their media rights and a wholesale restructuring of how the players are governed. The Tour’s draconian policy has long been that they own absolutely the media rights to its members. So Turner Sports has had to pay the Tour a $1 million licensing fee every time Phil teed it up in an iteration of The Match, though Mickelson himself has made upwards of $15 million from the franchise. “I don’t want to say it’s infuriating, but it is definitely more than frustrating,” he says. A bigger deal is that the players don’t own the broadcast highlights of their own shots. Each of these moments could potentially be turned into an NFT and sold to fans or collectors. (Over the last year, more than $600 million of NFTs of NBA players have been sold, with individual NFTs fetching upwards of $200,000. Every player shares equally in the 5 percent transaction fee.) “The Tour is sitting on multiple billions of dollars worth of NFTs,” says Mickelson, his voice rising like a revivalist preacher. “They are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of digital content we could be using for our social media feeds. The players need to own all of that. We played those shots, we created those moments, we should be the ones to profit. The Tour doesn’t need that money. They are already sitting on a eight-hundred-million-dollar cash stockpile. How do you think they’re funding the PIP? Or investing two hundred million dollars in the European Tour? The Tour is supposed to be a nonprofit that distributes money to charity. How the fuck is it legal for them to have that much cash on hand? The answer is, it’s not. But they always want more and more. They have to control everything. Their ego won’t allow them to make the concessions they need to.”
Is it about the money or the principle? With Mickelson, you can never be sure. Given the scale of his gambling losses—and we don’t know what we don’t know—it’s possible the Saudi seduction is born of necessity. Mickelson raised eyebrows by selling his Gulfstream in 2019. “He loved that plane so much it was like his fourth child,” says someone very close to him. “I was absolutely shocked that he sold it. The only reason I could possibly imagine him doing that was him feeling serious financial pressure.” The Mickelsons have purchased land on Jupiter Island, in Florida, and have been interviewing architects; Phil may yet get the haven from state income tax he has long lusted after. “I was interviewing him one time,” says John Feinstein, “and he said, apropos of nothing, ‘You always think of me as a right-winger, but I’m actually pretty liberal on social issues like abortion.’ I said, ‘But your number one issue is taxes.’ He said, ‘No, no, no, my number one, two, three, four, and five issues are taxes.’ ”
But Mickelson’s second outstanding issue with the Tour has nothing to do with money. It’s about control. “The Tour likes to pretend it’s a democracy, but it’s really a dictatorship,” he says. “They divide and conquer. The concerns of the top players are very different from the guys who are lower down on the money list, but there’s a lot more of them. They use the top guys to make their own situation better, but the top guys don’t have a say.” Players are also a minority on the all-powerful PGA Tour Policy Board, holding only four of the nine seats, with the other five being filled by luminaries of the business world who, by age and experience, have more in common with the commissioner than the jocks.
Mickelson’s idea for governance is, he says, based on the United States Congress: the Tour’s vast middle class would be like the House, voting on ideas that would then be rejected or tweaked and ultimately ratified by a much smaller Senate-like body comprised of the game’s biggest stars. “That way nothing will get done without the approval of both sides,” Mickelson says. It is an idealistic vision. Phil says he has spent at least a dozen hours on the phone talking through these issues with Monahan, but found him to be unresponsive. Is Mickelson really ready to blow up the PGA Tour if he doesn’t get his way?
“I know twenty guys who want to do this,” he says of the SGL, “and if the Tour doesn’t do the right thing, there is a high likelihood it’s going to happen.” It felt like he was bragging.
Just before Christmas 2021—a month after Mickelson uttered those words—an internal memo leaked with the news that the PGA Tour was creating a new NFT platform for its players to provide them a source of “long-term, incremental revenue.” Once again, Mickelson’s brinkmanship had worked. And then, on December 29, he tweeted that he had received the ultimate Christmas gift: the $8 million bonanza for winning the Player Impact Program. Twitter sleuths immediately pointed out that Mickelson’s declaration of victory was premature, given that the algorithm numbers would continue to be crunched until the ball dropped in Times Square. Golf writer Sean Zak tweeted, “Claiming that you’ve won the PIP before final standings have been tabulated… just to juice your mentions even more. Chess, not checkers from @PhilMickelson.” To which Mickelson replied, with a smirking emoji: “Last minute move. Checkmate.”
Phil loved The Queen’s Gambit—“It fits his obsessive personality,” says Amy—but he is not quite the master strategist he fancies himself. When the official PIP standings were announced in March 2022, Woods was the actual winner, leading him to masterfully troll Phil on Twitter… which got so much engagement from fans it probably guaranteed Tiger will repeat as PIP champ.
The Saudi gambit failed in a much more spectacular fashion. In February 2022, Mickelson blew off Pebble Beach—sorry, Nunu—and returned to the Kingdom for the Saudi International. While over there, he ripped his home tour to writer John Huggan, leading to a provocative GolfDigest.com headline: “Phil Mickelson says PGA Tour’s ‘obnoxious greed’ has him looking elsewhere.” According to multiple sources, Mickelson’s militance caused considerable angst among his endorsement partners, particularly at KPMG and Callaway, which are deeply invested in the PGA Tour in ways that go far beyond sponsoring one aging left-handed Hall of Famer. Mickelson’s deal with Workday was set to expire shortly before the 2022 Masters; in the aftermath of Phil’s comments to Huggan, a top executive at Workday confided that Mickelson’s increasing stridence had made it an easier decision for the company to not renew the deal. Mickelson’s disparaging remarks about the PGA Tour did not play well on Golf Twitter, either. Reporters, fans, and even fellow pros filled his mentions with sharp critiques, leading Phil to go on a well-publicized blocking spree, which further eroded goodwill.
In the days after Mickelson returned home from Saudi Arabia, two longtime agents whispered to me that the SGL had signed its twentieth player, reaching the threshold its leadership had set to publicly announce the creation of the tour. A splashy kick-off press conference was purportedly being organized for the week of the Players Championship in mid-March. With the Saudi question coming to a boil, Mickelson’s role in helping to organize the SGL, and his true feelings about it, felt too important to the future of professional golf to leave buried in the pages of this book, Woodward-style. For over a year, one of the biggest questions in the sport had been: What does Phil want? Among professional typists, only I knew. In mid-February—three months before the release date for this book—Mickelson’s comments to me about Saudi Arabia and the PGA Tour were excerpted on the website of the Fire Pit Collective, at which I am a partner.
His sneakiness and callous indifference to Saudi atrocities ignited a firestorm. Nearly 300 websites linked to Phil’s incendiary quotes, including many across Europe and the Middle East. Golf’s chattering class savaged him for being a rapacious mercenary. The blowback was so extreme that the two other most prominent players linked to the SGL in press reports, Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, immediately ran for the hills, releasing carefully worded statements pledging their fealty to the PGA Tour. Mickelson was holed up at the Yellowstone Club skiing with Amy—“The snow is just too good,” he had told me—but various players blasted him in absentia, led by McIlroy, who didn’t try to disguise his disdain while speaking to reporters at the L.A. Open. “I don’t want to kick someone while he’s down,” McIlroy said, nevertheless winding up like Pelé, “but I thought they were naïve, selfish, egotistical, ignorant—a lot of words to describe that interaction he had with Shipnuck. It was just very surprising and disappointing. Sad. I’m sure he’s sitting at home sort of rethinking his position and where he goes from here.”
Indeed, Mickelson released a statement five days after his comments were published, claiming they were off-the-record. I will go to my grave knowing that’s not true. The backstory is telling: our phone call had been more than a year in the making. I first told Mickelson I would be writing this book at the PGA Championship at Harding Park in August 2020. “Cool!” was his very first reaction, and it almost sounded like he meant it. I asked if he would be willing to sit for interviews. Edging away, Mickelson added, “Let’s talk more about it soon.” I approached him at Torrey Pines, in January 2021, and asked again if we could sit down to discuss his life and times. Now he was more circumspect, saying, “I’m flattered you’re doing it, but I’m nervous because it’s you.” He again demurred about doing interviews. I made another run at Mickelson a few weeks later at Pebble Beach, and this time he said he wouldn’t do any interviews because he didn’t want it to appear as if this biography was “authorized.” (The cover of the book should clear that up.) I let it go, but just before Thanksgiving, Phil texted me out of the blue, asking if we could have a conversation about media rights and his battles with the Tour. “I believe it could be a deciding factor on a decision I need to make,” he wrote. That seemed highly unlikely—Mickelson had access to people far better versed than me on these subjects. But I was happy to humor him.
When we spoke, Mickelson inquired about my kids, the high school girls basketball team I coach, and the new golf media company I am helping to build. I was impressed and amused by the effort. At one point he couldn’t resist his version of flattery, saying, “As much as you scare the shit out of me, I think you’re one of the most talented writers ever. You’re really good at getting shit out of people and creating interesting story lines. So that’s scary as fuck for me.” Mickelson did indeed ask for my thoughts regarding the Tour’s position on NFTs and media rights, which inevitably led to his provocative thoughts about Saudi Arabia. Not once in our texts or when we spoke on the phone did Mickelson request to go off-the-record, and I never consented to it; had he asked, I would have pushed back hard, as this was my one chance to speak with him for this book.
After blowing me off for more than a year, why was Mickelson suddenly so eager to tell all? He inquired when this book was coming out and I told him May 2022—by then the Saudi question was sure to be settled. My take is that he wanted his true feelings to be known but, as always, was working both sides of the street. If he wound up signing with the SGL, at least his quotes to me would serve as a signal to American golf fans that he knows the Saudis are bad actors and that it’s strictly a business decision. If he remained in the fold with the PGA Tour—what could have been perceived as a political defeat for Mickelson—he would have preemptively made it clear that he did so only after extracting many of the concessions he wanted, thus fulfilling his need to always been seen as the smartest guy in the room. Of course, Mickelson could have revealed his inner self to any number of reporters. Why on earth did he ring up the one person he knew was writing a biography about him, after having previously refused to talk? It remains baffling, even to me. But Mickelson has spent his career charming, and manipulating, the media. If he was going to make the Saudi Golf League his home, shaping public perception was going to be almost as important as the size of the checks.
Mickelson’s blunt words to Huggan and to me—and the ensuing sharp criticism from his peers and most of the golf press—gave cover to the corporate overlords who were already unnerved by his dalliance with the Saudis: KPMG and Amstel Light abruptly ended their relationships with him, and Callaway put their deal on “pause.” In his public statement, Mickelson allowed that his comments were “reckless” but couldn’t resist making himself both the victim and the hero of his narrative, writing, “Golf desperately needs change, and real change is always preceded by disruption. I have always known that criticism would come with exploring anything new. I still chose to put myself at the forefront of this to inspire change, taking the hits publicly to do the work behind the scenes.”
The most interesting part of his press release was when Mickelson wrote, “… I have often failed myself and others too. The past 10 years I have felt the pressure and stress slowly affecting me at a deeper level. I know I have not been my best and desperately need some time away to prioritize the ones I love most and work on being the man I want to be.” To me, this last bit had little or nothing to do with Saudi Arabia—it sounded like a cry for help. As this book goes to print in early-March, Mickelson remains out of sight. A variety of players, caddies, agents, Tour wives and reporters have reached out to me with tips and speculation (and wild gossip) about why exactly Phil might be trying to better himself. More revelations may be forthcoming. Or maybe it’s just noise, which often envelops Mickelson.
Plenty of commentators have already opined that he tarnished his legacy with his craven flirtation with the Saudis, and perhaps even compromised his chances at being a future Ryder Cup captain or TV commentator. That shows a very short collective memory. Woods, while married and hawking family cars on TV, became entwined in the most salacious of sex scandals, and later his addled mugshot and damning dashcam video went around the world after he was arrested for a DUI. Yet Tiger is now more beloved than ever. Mickelson has often been engulfed in controversy but somehow always emerges with his vast fanbase intact. Sports fans love a comeback and a redemption story. A more humble, more human, less cartoonish Mickelson figures to be more popular than ever. Come what may, he will survive, because he survives everything.
Only Phil Mickelson could dominate a Ryder Cup without hitting a single shot. In September 2021, the United States beat Europe 19–9. It was a blowout seven years in the making, dating back to Mickelson’s rebellion at Gleneagles. After two decades of utter futility, the U.S. has now won two of the last three Cups. With a squad full of young superstars, compared to Europe’s aging core, the Americans are poised for a long run of dominance. Everything Mickelson had pushed for at the dawn of the Task Force era played out at Whistling Straits: cohesive leadership, empowered players, and more institutional support. The formerly stingy PGA of America had kicked down for a team of statisticians to run models on potential pairings, sprung for private jets to ferry the U.S. team to Wisconsin for two days of practice rounds, and even built a special gym on-site so the Yanks could stay in fighting shape during Ryder Cup week. In the glow of victory, Vice Captain Davis Love hailed the changes that Mickelson had set in motion: “The Phil thing [with Tom Watson] was the boiling-over point. It had been simmering for a while. Phil was the only one with enough nerve to say it. Now, he could have said it in the [private] debriefing, but it wouldn’t have been as impactful.”
Mickelson watched this legacy play out from the sidelines, as his post-PGA swoon cost him a spot on the U.S. team, the first time he wouldn’t be competing in a Ryder Cup since 1993(!). But as vice captain, he still had a big voice, including the nonstop profane chatter he spewed into his walkie-talkie for the enjoyment of the rest of Team USA. “Anything Phil said during this whole competition I cannot repeat,” said Captain Steve Stricker. “No, he was really wonderful to have around. His lightness, his demeanor with the guys made the whole atmosphere in our team room that much better.”
Mickelson paid particular attention to DeChambeau, a finicky personality who bloomed in the team setting. “He has been instrumental to my whole experience,” DeChambeau said. “He is the most positive human being you could ever be around. He always says the right thing at the right time. It’s had a big effect on me, for sure.”
Ryder rookie Scottie Scheffler recalled a quintessential Mickelson moment during the Saturday afternoon better-ball matches. He and DeChambeau had lost the twelfth hole to go one-down, and Mickelson was waiting for them when they arrived on the thirteenth tee. Said Scheffler, “He just smiled and looked at us and goes, ‘Man, this is great, isn’t it?’ And in my head I was like, Phil, get the F away from me, this isn’t great—we just bogeyed number 12. But it was exactly what we needed at the time.” They rallied to win the match.
Everywhere Mickelson went, he was hailed by the swollen crowds, even as he tried to hide behind his aviators. He would respond with a trademark thumbs-up, but more often than not wound up shushing the gallery. He didn’t want to be a distraction, and that included going the entire week without being part of a single press conference.
Amy was by his side every step of the way. They were only a couple of months away from celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, but they seemed as smitten as newlyweds. There had been some chatter about Amy not being on hand for her hubby’s triumph at the PGA Championship. In fact, their son, Evan, had been on the verge of his high school graduation and she was back in California tending to all the details. Throughout Ryder Cup week, Phil could be seen draping an arm around Amy, whispering in her ear, squeezing her shoulder, and rubbing her back. He was practically petting her. If it was for show, Phil is a better actor than the young Marlon Brando.
On Saturday evening, as play was ending and the members of Team USA were scrambling to get back to the clubhouse, I bumped into the Mickelsons. I asked how their week was going. “It’s different, but I’m enjoying it,” Phil said.
“Oh, this is great!” Amy interjected. “All the fun but none of the stress.”
They were standing near the eighteenth tee, and suddenly a big, thick, fuzzy caterpillar materialized in the long grass. The Mickelsons inspected it with childlike wonder. It was a sweet stolen moment, but for some reason I thought of something Bones had recently told a friend, which was relayed to me during Ryder Cup week: “Nobody knows Phil Mickelson. Nobody. I spent twenty-five years standing next to the guy and he’s still a total mystery to me.” It has been a singular life, yet after three decades in the spotlight, Mickelson remains enigmatic. A low roar always follows him, going all the way back to his conceding Jeff Thomas’s forty-footer at the U.S. Amateur or the dissing of the Irish lasses at the 1991 Walker Cup. So much tumult has followed—the Black Baby rumors, talking trash about Tiger’s golf clubs, calling out the PGA Tour commissioner on live TV, cancer scares, very public gambling debts, shady Mob-adjacent associates, throwing Tom Watson under a Greyhound, an insider-trading escapade, the bust-up with Bones, losing his mind at Shinnecock Hills, Dandy Don, the Saudi self-immolation, and God knows what else. No doubt more controversies await, and probably more triumphs, too. Mickelson has already given us some of the most iconic moments of the last quarter century in golf: receiving Payne Stewart’s tender embrace at Pinehurst; a walk-off birdie putt to win the Masters; tapping the Nicklaus plaque at Baltusrol and then the exquisite chip that followed; an impossible 6-iron out of the trees in Amen Corner; the tearful hug with Amy behind the final green at Augusta National; the curling putt on the final green at Muirfield to clinch the Claret Jug; a win for the ages on the Ocean Course. But all of that felt very far away on Saturday evening at the Ryder Cup. There was Phil, holding hands with his sweetheart. The applause had died down and it was just the two of them, strolling down the final fairway and straight into the sunset.