For the longest time, there were whispers that Phil Mickelson’s grandfather Al Santos had killed a man. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Santos was as tough as a two-dollar steak, a man’s man with big calloused hands and the briny demeanor that came from having been at sea for weeks at a time. Only recently did his daughter Mary—Phil’s mom—set the record straight: “Pirates were shooting at his boat, trying to steal his catch, and he shot back at them. He might have killed one of them. He didn’t want to stick around and find out.”
So, maybe Santos killed a man, maybe he didn’t. Either way, it’s an instructive story. When the young Mickelson began winning tournaments with an upturned collar and rakish grin, there was befuddlement at how this pretty boy could harbor such a ferocious killer instinct. That was Santos’s DNA.
He was born in 1906 in Monterey, California, the son of a Cannery Row fisherman who had emigrated from Portugal. John Steinbeck, born four years earlier, would memorialize that grimy world with the greatest opening paragraph in the English language:
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.
Santos harbored ambitions of transcending his grubby circumstances. He had a head for numbers and fancied a career as an engineer. But Santos was the third of eleven children, and when he reached the eighth grade, his father informed him that it was time to get a job and help support the family. To avoid the pungent canneries, he began caddying at the Hotel Del Monte golf course in Monterey, in 1919. But Santos couldn’t resist the siren song of the open road—he ran away from home at sixteen and spent six months riding freight trains, panning for gold, and exploring the West. Not long after he returned home, Pebble Beach Golf Links opened and he joined the caddie corps. A photo from that era shows Santos in a newsboy cap, a collared shirt, and a blazer and trousers that look like they’re made of burlap.
He earned thirty-five cents a loop, often going around twice in a day. For his efforts, one appreciative golfer gave Santos a Morgan silver dollar, circa 1900. It became a talisman he refused to spend, no matter how much his belly ached from hunger. Santos would rub the coin in his pocket for good luck. He came to think of it as a tangible sign that better days were ahead. For the rest of his life he had a simple mantra about the value of saving money: “As long as you have a silver dollar in your pocket, you’ll never be poor.” (Shortly before his death, Santos gave his prized silver dollar—rubbed as smooth as a marble countertop—to his grandson, who uses it as a ball marker whenever he competes at Pebble Beach; this may or may not account for Phil’s record-tying five victories at the Crosby Clambake.)
Santos married a dark-eyed beauty of Portuguese descent named Jennie. They had three daughters, with Mary being the eldest. In the early years of the Great Depression, the Santos family moved down the coast to San Diego. Al became what was known locally as a “tunaman.” He worked long hours and saved his money and eventually bought his own boat, the Sacramento. His brothers toiled alongside him in the vastness of the sea. When they pulled into the harbor after their long expeditions they would be hauling as much as 150 tons of tuna. Santos later bought a second boat, the Julia B. The Santoses owned and lived in a two-bedroom house near the commercial piers, at the bottom of what was Grape Street. Later they moved to a bigger home in the Mission Hills neighborhood. That was every fisherman’s dream, to live on higher ground, far from the stinky air of the harbor that was redolent of Cannery Row.
To Santos, family was everything. He doted on Jennie and the girls. When they were teenagers, he took a graveyard shift on the assembly line at Convair, a division of General Dynamics. He didn’t love the job but he wanted to be home more.
Mary inherited her father’s warmth and big laugh and ability to spin a yarn. She was an athlete, excelling at any sport she tried, though options for girls were limited in those days. She married a navy pilot named Philip Anthony Mickelson. (Their son isn’t a Jr. because his middle name is Alfred.) Mickelson grew up in tiny lumber towns in the Sierra. He was a gymnast and competitive water-skier who went on to captain the downhill ski team at Chico (California) State. After serving his country in Vietnam, he became a commercial airline pilot and channeled his athletic passion into golf. He often teed it up with his father-in-law around the public courses in San Diego.
There was no doubt that the Mickelsons’ first son was going to be a golfer. (Same goes for their firstborn, Tina, who is now a teaching pro, and their youngest, Tim, would later join the family business, too.) Phil’s parents sent out a birth announcement that had a sketch of a baby with a golf bag slung over his shoulder and this cheeky write-up:
Introducing the Mickelsons’ ‘fourth.’ Phil Alfred hurried to join the Mickelson threesome on the first tee at Mercy Hospital for a 3:45 p.m. starting time on June 16, 1970. Using all of his 8 lbs., 13 ounces in a powerful swing, Philip proudly equaled his height with a tee shot of 21 inches. Philip’s first message: “Let’s play golf at my new home in San Diego.”
As a toddler, Mickelson loved to sit in the backyard and watch his dad hit chips on the lawn. (This is eerily similar to the young Tiger Woods being parked in a high chair to stare at his father, Earl, as he pounded balls into a net in their garage.) Around the time of Phil’s second birthday, his dad cut down a fairway wood and handed it to him to test. Phil was right-hand dominant, but in that moment he swung the club lefty, perhaps to mirror what he had been watching from his dad. The elder Mickelson tried to correct his son, but Phil kept swinging left-handed and his old man was impressed by the smoothness and soundness of the action.
“We’ll just change the golf club instead,” he told Mary.
He returned to his workbench, did some sawing and grinding, and—voilà!—a left-handed club was born. Phil never looked back. Much later, he would explain what he considers to be the advantages of this happy accident: “I’m right-handed in everything else I do, so it’s very easy for me to play golf left-handed and especially chip because my right hand is dominant and just leads the shot. But when you’re a right-handed golfer and that right hand is flipping over, I think it’s very difficult to control the club. I actually think it’s easier to play left-handed if you’re right-handed in everything else. It’s like the backhand in tennis. Especially short-game, where you’re essentially creating a slice backhand, it’s much easier to chip when your dominant hand is leading the stroke.” Ben Hogan would agree. So would Jordan Spieth, who as a kid had a sweet lefty jump shot and a nasty curveball as a left-handed pitcher.
Around Christmastime of 1973, when Phil was three and a half, he tagged along to Balboa Park Golf Course for a tee time with his dad and grandfather, whom he called Nunu. Santos was slightly peeved. “This won’t last,” he grumbled.
But Phil powered through the first seventeen holes, swinging with abandon. Walking up the steep fairway of the home hole, the kid whined, “Do we have to play this hole?”
Feeling vindicated at last, Nunu said, “See?”
“If we play it, that means we’ll be done.”
Little Phil didn’t want the round to end. Surely Santos, of all people, could appreciate that kind of grit.