The putting green in the Mickelson backyard was an oval maybe a dozen steps across at its widest point, garnished with a shallow bunker. On the merits, it was not particularly special. Then again, neither was Bobby Fischer’s chessboard or the piano in the Mozart living room in Salzburg. This little practice green, built and lovingly maintained by Phil’s dad, is where genius was made, not born. It is fashionable to call Mickelson one of the most naturally talented players ever to pick up a golf club, but that misses the point. “Ah, talent,” says Bryson DeChambeau, placing a finger on his temple and pretending to blow his brains out. “I hate that word. No one is born with an intrinsic talent for anything. What people call talent is just a skill that has been mastered through hard work.”
It’s true that Mickelson came from athletic stock. Perhaps as a child his hand-eye coordination was better than most. Being tall for his age (he would top out at six feet, three inches) certainly conferred certain advantages. But the magical chipping and pitching skills that would come to define Mickelson—a monumental advantage around which he built his swashbuckling style of play—was the product of repetition, not some ephemeral gift handed out by the golf gods.
Mickelson was nine when his dad built the putting green in the backyard of their nice-but-not-flashy house in the Del Cerro neighborhood of San Diego. He already had a love affair with the game. It is a treasured piece of family lore that at age three, after being told he couldn’t accompany his father to the golf course, Phil ran away from home, carrying his golf bag and a suitcase crammed with golf balls, his favorite blanket, and a stuffed animal named Flopsy. A neighbor spied his escape and instructed him to make four left turns to find the golf course; Mickelson wound up back at his house, where his mom, having been tipped off, was waiting in the driveway. Just shy of his fifth birthday, Phil attended a weeklong junior clinic. On the last day, he won the putting contest against much older kids. That earned Mickelson his first trophy, which he slept with that night. (Having already inculcated how golfers were supposed to look, he insisted on wearing plaid pants and a striped shirt so he looked extra snazzy when his photo was printed in the San Diego Union-Tribune.) By the time Mickelson was six, he was spending long days at Presidio Hills, a par-3 course. The owners of the facility were family friends and they watched out for him. It was a user-friendly layout, which gave Mickelson an early taste for going low; he thinks he was seven the first time he broke par. A year later, he was picking the range two or three nights a week at Navajo Canyon so he could have unlimited access to the course. (It would later be renamed Mission Trails.) Mickelson has a favorite story from those days: “Rainy days were my favorite time because nobody else would be there. So I’d put on my rain gear, grab a bucket of balls, and go out under a palm tree. I’d have the entire place as my private driving range—free to hit the ball wherever I wanted. One time, it really started to pour and one of my friends who worked in the pro shop came out and asked me what I was doing. ‘This extra practice right here is going to help me win a couple of Masters someday.’ That’s a true story.”
But it was the creation of the backyard green that changed everything. Mickelson would spend hours on end hitting chip after pitch, usually alone, sometimes with his dad. He was so obsessive that eventually his parents installed floodlights so he could practice into the night. There was no swing analysis, no computer spitting out spin rates, just a very curious boy digging the game’s secrets out of the dirt: “After a while, I began to notice that the ball would react different ways depending on how my club struck it. So I started to experiment. If I hit it just right, I could make [the ball] back up, or bounce right, or bounce left. I could de-loft the club and watch it roll along the ground. I’d hit it below the equator of the ball and above the equator just to see what would happen. Sometimes my dad and I would try some crazy shots and then talk about why the ball did what it did. It was just fascinating to me.” This echoes the naturalistic way another golfing genius, Seve Ballesteros, taught himself the game, as a boy in Spain, by sneaking out of his humble home under the moonlight and onto the grand course across the street where he caddied, Royal Pedreña. “It was a very strange experience to walk around a golf course at night, because all the reference points that help estimate distances vanished,” Ballesteros wrote in his autobiography. “I knew where the shot was heading from the way my hands felt the hit and from the sound the ball made when it hit the ground. By practicing at night I learned to feel the grass under my feet, to measure distances intuitively and adjust the power of the strokes I wanted to make.”
Mickelson and his dad would play a game in which each had twenty balls and they amassed one point for every shot that settled within a flagstick’s length of the hole and two points for a hole out. To make it more challenging, they often threw their balls behind bushes, under trees, or hard against the fence. (The backyard was long enough to accommodate forty-yard pitches.) When his parents weren’t around, Mickelson began trying to hit shots over the house, or bend them around corners, which inevitably led to the neighbors having a window and then a sliding door smashed by errant shots; the Peters family took it in stride because they understood the depth of the kid’s obsession. Though chipping was Mickelson’s favorite activity, he spent a ton of time putting, too. He could also work on his iron game, launching balls over the back fence into the canyon beyond. (Mickelson is careful to point out that these were beat-up range balls that otherwise would have been discarded.)
When the young Phil ventured out of his backyard, he stepped into the best competitive scene imaginable. San Diego had a long history of supporting junior golf, with an engaged community of organizers and financial help from the Century Club, the charitable arm of the annual PGA Tour stop. While the nearby megatropolis of Los Angeles has produced only two players of note (Anthony Kim and Collin Morikawa, though Max Homa is on the verge), San Diego golf’s excellence is passed down from generation to generation. “What Phil was doing at a young age, that drove me to be a better player,” says Chris Riley, the future Ryder Cupper, who was three and a half years younger than Mickelson. “He pushed a lot of people. But that’s what’s amazing about this place. I can promise you Phil was chasing Craig Stadler and Scott Simpson, just as they were chasing Billy Casper and Gene Littler. Then Charley Hoffman and me and Pat Perez were chasing Phil. Just like Xander [Schauffele] is chasing those guys now. It just feeds on itself.”
From the very beginning, Mickelson had an intense rivalry with Harry Rudolph, a ball-striking savant who a lot of local folks thought had the brighter future of the two. Phil also got to test himself against top international talent: the Junior World Golf Championship, played every summer in San Diego, was without question the premier tournament on the planet for young golfers. It was also a prime opportunity to catch the eye of the college coaches who made up a substantial portion of the gallery. “In those days, you’d get off the plane in San Diego and it felt like you were arriving at the Masters,” says Ernie Els, who made an annual pilgrimage from South Africa.
The oldest age division (fifteen to seventeen) competed at Torrey Pines, but younger kids were scattered to different courses around the city. Mickelson’s last year to compete in the ten-and-under division was 1980. It was contested at Presidio Hills, a short course with a long history: future Masters champions Casper and Stadler learned to play there, and the first time Tiger Woods competed in the Junior Worlds, at age six, he signed an incorrect scorecard and was disqualified. Presidio is comprised of eighteen par-3 holes, none longer than seventy-nine yards, which was right in Mickelson’s wheelhouse. He won his age group in 1980, what he once joked was his first major championship victory. Surprisingly, Mickelson never won another Junior World title. (In a clash of future titans, he finished runner-up to Els in 1984 in the Boys 13–14 division. Other age-group winners that year included Woods, David Toms, and future LPGA winners Leta Lindley and Joan Pitcock.)
Mickelson loved baseball and still brags about his Little League no-hitter. When he was eleven, he made a local all-star team, which would have entailed a lot of summertime travel, cutting into his planned slate of junior golf tournaments. That was the end of his baseball career… at least for a couple of decades. (More on that later.)
By the time Mickelson was a tween, he had already established the contours of an enduring persona. On the golf course he had serious swag—gold chain, popped collar, putter twirls. But he was also noted for his sportsmanship. His father, a taciturn Swede with the discipline of a navy man, didn’t brook profanity or displays of ill temper. In the Mickelson family, golf was the carrot and the stick for the young Phil: when he was eleven, he was supposed to play in three junior events across a long Easter weekend, but his parents yanked him out of all of them when he slacked off on his household chores. After that, the Mickelsons rarely had any problems with their son.
He was an extrovert like his mom and had Nunu’s gift for gab. Phil delighted in the attention that his early golf success brought. “I still laugh thinking about those San Diego Junior Golf Association awards banquets,” says Riley. “Phil won player of the year every time. The other kids who got awards would get up and barely say a word—they were so awkward and shy. Phil worked the room. He would give these three- or four-minute speeches thanking the organizers, the corporate sponsors, the other parents. He was like a little CEO, so polished. He was just different from everybody else his age.”
That was especially true on the course. American golf in the 1980s was the epoch of the grinder. The biggest stars—Hale Irwin, Tom Kite, Curtis Strange, Mark O’Meara—plodded their way from point to point, with an emphasis on control and precision. Mickelson, even as a youngster, played a very different game, inspired in part by his hero Ballesteros, whose hot-blooded, imaginative style tipped golf’s balance of power to Europe, away from the anodyne Americans. Mickelson was entranced by Ballesteros’s victory at the 1980 Masters and used his VCR to watch Seve’s swing over and over. This charismatic champion didn’t seem bothered by missing fairways, so why should he? Long before ShotLink data and math nerds would confirm it, Mickelson intuited that the best strategy was to smash a driver on every hole. If he was in the fairway he could pin seek. If he drove it off-line, he could still escape with a short game that was already more Harry Houdini than Harry Vardon. The recovery shots that would become his trademark, and which were often ascribed to God-given talent, were actually the product of intensive trial and error. By thirteen, Mickelson was working at Stardust Country Club. (It would later be renamed Riverwalk.) His parents were members, but the attached driving range was open to the public, so Phil took a job there to have access to free practice balls. “We would hit four or five or six large buckets a day, even when we were supposed to be working,” says Jason Peterie, a fellow range-picker and future high school golf rival. “We never tried to do the same robotic swings over and over—we were obsessed with hitting creative shots, weird shots. We spent a solid month hitting 5-irons at the same time, trying to get our balls to collide at their apex. People used to sit there and watch us do it. We came close so many times, and when we finally did it we went absolutely crazy.” He remembers sitting in the Mickelson living room watching the 1985 U.S. Open. (As a diversion they would stack golf balls on top of each other; Mickelson, as dexterous as a neurosurgeon, could make a tower of five balls.) When T. C. Chen suffered his infamous double chip, “Phil and I just looked at each other,” Peterie says, “and automatically it was like, ‘Ohmygawd, we gotta go out there and try that.’ It was pouring rain, but we didn’t care, we just stood out there getting soaked trying to figure out how to double-hit a chip.” Every year they attended the San Diego Open, but they rarely lasted very long at Torrey Pines. “We just wanted to run home and try to hit the shots we had just seen,” says Peterie. He is now a teaching pro and he always makes a point to watch when his old friend is in contention on the PGA Tour. He says, “I love how when Phil pulls off some crazy shot and the announcers always say, ‘That was one in a million!’ They make it sound like luck. But Phil has spent his whole life practicing and preparing for that exact shot.”
As a middle school graduation present, Mickelson traveled to Pinehurst, North Carolina, for a weeklong golf camp. When celebrated instructor Jim McLean gave a bunker clinic, he asked a couple of kids to step into the sand for a demonstration. After their timid efforts, Mickelson volunteered. McLean was beginning to smooth the sand when young Phil dropped a ball into the remnants of a footprint. “That’s okay, Mr. McLean, it doesn’t matter,” he said, and then proceeded to hit his shot stone dead.
“I guess you’re right, it doesn’t matter,” said an amused McLean.
Mickelson also caught the eye of another of the featured instructors, Dean Reinmuth. This wasn’t an accident. Already a schmoozer and a networker at fourteen, Mickelson wanted to attend the camp in part so he could get an audience with Reinmuth, who was based in San Diego. “He walked up to me and said, ‘When we get back I’d like you to work with me,’ ” recalls Reinmuth. “I didn’t know anything about him, but he carried himself with so much confidence I was intrigued.”
After the camp, they jumped right in, focusing on the wild child’s long game. Mickelson’s handsy swing was highly reliant on timing. He made it work with his irons, but the flaws were magnified when wielding his driver. Reinmuth reshaped his action so it was shorter and more on plane. (Tightening the swing was made more challenging because Mickelson is “the most naturally flexible player I’ve ever seen,” Reinmuth says. “His arms, shoulders, elbows, wrists—he is freakishly flexible.”) They also worked extensively on learning how to play a fade off the tee. Mickelson had always favored a hard draw, trying to squeeze out every extra yard. Of course, a draw can easily turn into a fatal hook, which is why Ben Hogan once said of drawing a driver, “It’s like a rattlesnake in your pocket.” A favored venue for San Diego junior events was Chula Vista Municipal Golf Course, which has a creek that runs down the right side of many of the holes. “We always knew Phil was going to hook two or three balls into that creek every round,” says Peterie. “That was the only thing that gave the rest of us a chance. I’ll never forget when he started playing that fade. It was like, Oh crap, it’s all over now.”
But Mickelson didn’t have the discipline to employ the safe, conservative shot over and over. It didn’t help that another of Reinmuth’s teenage pupils, Keith Sbarbaro, was more mature physically than Mickelson and crazy long for his age. Not for the last time, Phil became obsessed with chasing distance. On the golf course a battle raged within, and this tension was often expressed when he stepped to the tee. “Phil has always had beautiful rhythm with his irons,” Reinmuth says. “The great drivers of the golf ball, they have a rhythm that never changes. Think about a long tennis rally—what breaks the rhythm is usually one player taking a chance. Phil was capable of hitting fairways, but then he’d go after it and try to hit the equivalent of a winner in tennis. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It’s just a different mentality of how to play the game.”
Mickelson matriculated to the University of San Diego High School in La Jolla. Uni, as it was always called before being renamed Cathedral Catholic, had more than a passing resemblance to the fictitious Ridgemont High that alighted silver screens a couple years before Mickelson reached high school. Amid the flip-flopped surfers and beach bums, the cut of Mickelson’s jib was unforgettable: Sansabelt slacks, stiff-collared polo, belts with ostentatious buckles, visor. Every day right after school, Mickelson proceeded directly to the golf course, so he figured he might as well save time and dress like a PGA Tour player on school mornings. Throw in his perennially good grades, his predilection for brownnosing teachers, and the fact that he didn’t drink alcohol or go to parties (his father is a teetotaler), and the conclusion is inescapable: “I hate to say this,” says Peterie, “but he was kind of a nerd.”
Mickelson’s single-minded devotion—he was already fond of quoting the Ben Hogan maxim “Every day that you don’t practice is one day longer before you achieve greatness”—was already paying big dividends. In 1985, when he was fifteen, Mickelson won his first AJGA tournament, announcing that he was a national and not just a provincial talent. Mary had gone back to work as a marketing director at a retirement home to help subsidize her son’s golf dreams. Phil was able to fly for free to the out-of-state tournaments on account of his dad being a commercial pilot, but, he says, “Problem was, you could always get bumped. If I called ahead to see whether a flight was open, by the time I got to the airport, maybe it wasn’t open. If the flight before was canceled because of weather or whatever, all the overflow would go on the flight I wanted, so I was out. I spent a lot of nights sleeping in those hub cities like Detroit, Minneapolis, and Memphis. I was big in the Memphis airport.”
Even the teenage Phil’s love life had a golf angle, as he began dating Tana Rey Figueras, who was good enough to play on the Uni boys’ team. She would go on to represent California in the Junior America’s Cup and twice compete in the U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship. They would often practice together, and Mickelson delighted in breaking down her game in granular detail. Says Reinmuth, “Phil once said to me, ‘Tana asked me how to hit a shot, so I told her you have to do this, this, this, and this. And she said, Oh, I can’t think of all of those things during the swing. So I showed her how to hit it and explained it a different way, but she didn’t get it. I kept trying, but I don’t think she ever got it.’ ” This was his version of flirting.
Among San Diego high school golfers of a certain age, Figueras still stirs feelings. “Ah, Tana Rey,” says Michael Zucchet, who played for crosstown La Jolla High School. “She had an otherwise normal body, but absolutely gigantic breasts. You take a bunch of teenaged boys and we were just mesmerized how she could swing a club around them.” That Tana Rey was Mickelson’s girlfriend only added to his aura as he dominated the local high school scene. “Think about the Phil that won the Phoenix Open when he was in college,” says Zucchet. “You know that tan, smart-ass, cocky, putter-twirling, shirt-collar-up fucker who won a Tour event in college? That was Phil Mickelson in high school. He had so much swagger but, unfortunately, he could back it up. He would show up at matches holding hands with Tana Rey and with a big, cheesy grin, and that just added to the annoyance of it all when he went out and beat us.”
The summer before his senior year, in 1987, Mickelson cemented his standing as the best junior golfer in the country, tying the AJGA record by winning four tournaments in a season. (Woods would match the feat in 1991 and ’92.) He had already crushed the spirit of his putative crosstown rival, Rudolph, who much later would say, “You don’t realize at the time the guy’s going to be a Hall of Fame player. I was constantly being compared to him and that got old. I’d play some pretty good golf. I’d shoot a 69 and he’d shoot a 65, and people would say, ‘You got beat by the Mickelson kid again.’ I wish I could go back in time and tell those people, ‘See, I was losing to the Jack Nicklaus of my era.’ ”
Mickelson’s senior season was turbocharged by the arrival of Manny Zerman, a squat, intense South African who enrolled at Uni for his final year of high school. In the preceding four Junior Worlds, Zerman had two third-place finishes and a pair of runner-ups. Along the way he became close with his host family and they invited him to live with them full-time as a senior to facilitate the college recruiting process. Zerman had none of Mickelson’s flair, but he brought a monk-like dedication to practicing, often going to the range at six a.m. before school. “That’s going to help the team immensely,” Mickelson said at the time about his new teammate’s fervor. “It was easy for me to slack off on easy matches, but he’ll push me. To beat him, I’ll have to play as well as I can. He inspires me. He practices all the time. If I’m not, I know I’m losing ground.”
So Mickelson’s game was razor-sharp when the PGA Tour rolled into town for the 1988 San Diego Open. (Aficionados of over-the-top corporate names will be delighted to hear that the tournament was officially known as the Shearson Lehman Hutton Andy Williams Open.) To the surprise of no one, Mickelson played his way into the field through open qualifying. He would be making his Tour debut, at seventeen.
Ever the maneuverer, Mickelson lined up a practice round with the great Ballesteros, who recognized the kid’s duende. “I was impressed with him,” Ballesteros said. “If somebody hadn’t told me he was seventeen, I would have thought he was twenty-one or twenty-two.” But in what sounded like a self-referential critique, he added, “So often, a young golfer will do the difficult things good and do the easy things bad.”
Figueras served as Mickelson’s caddie for the first round. His gallery included his parents, Reinmuth, and various cousins and neighbors. Riley was there, too. He says, “Phil was standing on the [practice] putting green and he looked so confident. He wanted people to notice him. He wanted to be great. That’s a big part of it. I didn’t have that at all.”
On Torrey’s challenging South Course, Mickelson buried a thirty-five-footer on the second hole and stood two under par through ten holes. But he wobbled coming home, missing a three-footer on sixteen and then a two-foot tap-in on the next hole, leading to a double bogey. After his 74, Mickelson said, “I don’t really know what happened on those short putts. I do know that I was getting a little tired at the end. I didn’t feel nervous, but…”
The next day he shot 71 to miss the cut. His first brush with the big time hadn’t gone exactly as he’d imagined, but the young master left Torrey Pines feeling undeterred. “The takeaway for Phil wasn’t that he missed the cut,” says Reinmuth. “It was how comfortable he felt out there. He felt like he belonged.”