Steve Loy played on the football and golf teams at Eastern New Mexico University, a most unusual combination. After graduating in 1974, Loy worked as an oil wildcatter. A year later he drifted back to golf, taking a coaching position at Scottsdale Community College. Over eight seasons, he built a mini-dynasty with the Fighting Artichokes (we’re not making this up), winning two national championships and with Loy twice being named the national junior college coach of the year. In 1984, Loy finally got his big break, getting hired as the head coach at Arkansas. That same year, another golf-football hybrid arrived in Fayetteville. This kid was a punter and placekicker on a championship high school football team in Missouri, as well as the state amateur champion in golf. But John Daly looked like he had swallowed a beach ball whole when he arrived at Arkansas. Loy told him he had to lose sixty pounds if he ever wanted to suit up for the Razorbacks. The coach offered some old-school dieting advice.
“He was a smoker,” Daly says now, “so he told me to start smoking cigarettes because it would kill my appetite. It worked—I lost the weight. And I got addicted to smoking. Great, huh? It’ll probably kill me, but I don’t think I could ever stop, to be honest with you. But I don’t know, if I hadn’t started smoking I would not have lost the weight and gotten to play. I guess it’s a catch-20/20.”
Daly had a drinking problem to go with his nicotine addiction and he clashed often with Loy. But he retains a grudging respect: “He was a helluva coach. He was strict. Very organized, very army-like. It couldn’t have been easy dealing with a bunch of shitheads like us.”
Loy loved to make his players run wind sprints at six a.m., or have them fill their golf bags with rocks and walk eighteen holes as punishment for substandard play. In addressing his team, he channeled Mike Ditka, not Tony Jacklin. “His speeches were crazy,” says Daly. “Eyes poppin’ out, spit flyin’ everywhere. It was like we were goin’ to war, not playing golf against the Texas Fucking Longhorns, you know what I mean?”
Loy was just crazy enough to think he had a shot at recruiting Phil Fucking Mickelson. He first approached him at an AJGA tournament when Mickelson was fifteen. Loy spotted him walking down a fairway and tried to summon all of his oily charm. “Hi, Phil,” he said in his gentle voice. “I’m Steve Loy, the new golf coach at the University of Arkansas.”
Mickelson, the golden boy from the Golden State, couldn’t even pretend to be interested in going to Arkansas. “Riiiiiight,” was all he said in return, without ever breaking stride.
Loy’s kicker to the story: “I guess we both knew that was probably the last time I’d be talking to Phil Mickelson.”
But during the phenom’s senior year of high school, Loy snagged the head coach position at Arizona State. Nearly sixty schools recruited Mickelson, but from the beginning he was intrigued by the notion of taking his talents to the desert. He wanted to get out of the fishbowl of Southern California, but not be too far from home. There was already a pipeline of talent flowing from San Diego to the Arizona schools, including Manny Zerman and Harry Rudolph, both of whom committed to the U of A. They were joined there by a ferocious grinder with a ridiculous swing named Jim Furyk. If Mickelson had gone to Arizona it could have been a team for the ages, but there was a complicating factor: Tana Rey Figueras. She was on her way to Arizona State to play for the women’s team. And so Loy did, in fact, get another conversation with Mickelson. A few of them, and eventually Phil the Thrill committed to the Sun Devils.
College golf would never be the same.
Mickelson joined a talented, eclectic squad in Tempe. The team leader was senior Jim Strickland, a dandy and a dedicated skirt chaser. Per-Ulrik Johansson was another prized freshman but couldn’t have been more different from Mickelson, in both his game and constitution. A native of Sweden, Johansson played with a Scandinavian rectitude, carefully maneuvering around the golf course. While teammates slept in and ate leftover pizza for breakfast, Johansson started every morning with a thousand sit-ups and two hundred push-ups and subsisted on a diet that seemed to consist of twigs and berries. The rest of the roster was brimming with blue-chip talent. (If you can’t recruit at Arizona State, you can’t recruit.) Practice had the energy of stags rutting. “Our version of team spirit was trying to beat each other’s brains in every day,” says Scott Frisch. “We figured if we could beat each other, we could beat every other team out there.”
Money games in practice were common, and a standard bet was a $20 Nassau with one-down automatic presses. Birdies paid out $5, eagles $25, hole outs $50. “Press when pissed” was the team rule. The betting could get so out of hand that after one player lost $500—a monumental sum for a college kid—a team meeting had to be called to turn down the temperature. Little wonder that Mickelson thrived in this hypercompetitve environment. In his first college tournament, at LSU, he shot 71-69-72 to finish second.
“I was so proud of him,” says Strickland. “What an accomplishment for an eighteen-year-old kid playing in his very first college tournament. I went up to him and said congratulations and I’ll never forget the look he gave me. It was piercing. He practically growled at me: ‘How could you possibly think that second place is good?’ He was just a complete outlier from the rest of us.”
Mickelson still possessed his all-world short game, but now he was maturing physically. “Phil’s swing was so long and flowing and his ball just stayed in the air forever, like a Frisbee,” says teammate John Bizik. “He generated effortless speed.”
Over the final three tournaments of the fall season, Mickelson went third-second-third. As they did at the end of every semester, the Sun Devils gathered for what they called the Beer Bash Scramble. They would travel to an out-of-the-way public course and pay the greens fees, like regular customers. To avoid getting busted, ASU logos were verboten. (Most players wound up shirtless anyway.) The roster was split into two-man teams to play better ball, and the rules were simple: each player had to drink one beer per hole. A team bogey meant each player had to take an additional shot of Jose Cuervo. Mickelson, the high school square, had yet to acquire a taste for alcohol. He was paired with the clean-living Johansson, a future Ryder Cupper and six-time winner on the European Tour. “They were already two of the best players in college golf,” says Frisch, “but they were going up against professional drinkers.” No one can remember exactly how many holes it took for Mickelson to puke, but it wasn’t many. He never played in another Beer Bash. “You can’t be good at everything,” Frisch says. At least one player wound up walking through the desert barefoot. Somehow the winning score was a 59 or 60; which team actually took possession of the oversized trophy has been lost to the sands of time.
Amid all these hijinks there was a larger culture clash brewing between Loy and his players. He had imported some of his hard-ass coaching techniques from Arkansas; sometimes in practice matches, if a player lost a hole he was made to carry his teammate’s bag down the next fairway. On a squad of freewheelers, Loy tried to institute a rigid course management system in which he ordained how certain holes were to be played. This went over like a fart in church, especially because as the season wore on players at the bottom of the roster began to notice that Mickelson was given more latitude in how he attacked a golf course. “Yeah, Phil was treated different,” says Strickland, “because he is different.”
This extended to his wardrobe. Thanks to John Ashworth and others, golf fashion had begun to evolve; even Oklahoma State was now rocking Ralph Lauren for its team uniforms. But Mickelson was stuck in a different sartorial era. “He dressed like Ed Fiori,” says Rob Mangini. On a campus in which the unofficial uniform was shorts and a T-shirt, Mickelson was still strutting around in Sansabelt slacks and hard-collared polos in colors so garish Liberace would have blushed. Strickland begged Mickelson to loosen up. “He was hurting the reputation of the entire team!” he says.
But on the golf course, Mickelson was in full flight. At the 1989 natty, he was the only player to break par on a brutal setup at Oak Tree Country Club, becoming one of only five freshmen to win the individual NCAA Championship. It had been a helluva season and his teammates were in the mood to celebrate. Led by Strickland, a few of them broke into Mickelson’s dorm room and nabbed the most offensive garments in his wardrobe. They marched down to a fire pit near the volleyball courts and set them all ablaze.
Mickelson came out smoking for his sophomore year, winning two of the first four tournaments. He was still dating Figueras, but his teammates began to discern a pattern. “Every time Phil won a tournament he would dump poor Tana Rey,” says Frisch. “There are a lot of fish in the sea at ASU. I guess he wanted to see if the golf success would translate. It must not have, because he always wound up back with her.” The ASU women’s team was stacked, with a roster that included future LPGA winners Brandie Burton and Pearl Sinn. In part because of the Mickelson-Figueras union, there was a strong connection between the teams. They would occasionally have coed competitions in practice and host joint parties on the weekend.
The men’s team further embraced the rituals of male bonding. Late-night gin games were common, usually instigated by Mickelson. They played many different sports together. “We had some sneaky-good athletes on that team,” says Mangini. Pickup games of “two-hand shove” football were common, and Mangini offers this scouting report on Mickelson: “Elite thrower of the football, but can’t run for shit.” There were sand volleyball courts on campus and the golf team regularly haunted them. Mickelson had a jump serve that was almost impossible to return, but he only got about one-in-five in play, which is extremely on-brand. Mangini and Dave Cunningham had been decorated high school basketball players, so the pickup hoop was cutthroat. Mickelson towered over most of his teammates, but it should come as no surprise that he liked to hang out around the arc and hoist three-pointers. He could do damage on the rare occasions he ventured into the paint. “I don’t think you can use this expression anymore, but he’s what we used to call ‘retard strong,’ ” says Mangini. “Look at Phil’s hands. They look like DeMarcus Ware’s—he can grab you like a defensive end and just envelop you.”
On the golf course, ASU was emerging as a powerhouse. At the Sun Devil Thunderbird Invitational, the host school entered two different squads… and the B-team won the event. At the Pac-10 Championship, ASU won by a whopping fifty-four shots, with Mickelson taking individual honors. By the spring of 1990, Tempe was the center of the college golf universe, as both ASU’s men’s and women’s teams were at the summit of the top-20 polls. The women came through first, winning the first golf national championship in school history. “The energy was amazing,” says Mangini. “The whole place was on fire. You couldn’t have had a better college experience.” Two weeks later, the men brought home their own national title, though it wasn’t without a little controversy: the team got busted for hitting golf balls off the balcony of their tenth-story hotel rooms into the parking lot below. (Perhaps they should not have used ASU logo balls?) Mickelson tamed Innisbrook, site of the PGA Tour’s annual Valspar Championship, to join Ben Crenshaw as the only players to win the NCAA individual crown as a freshman and sophomore. He was already on the short list of the greatest college golfers ever. But there was still a gaping hole in Mickelson’s résumé that needed to be filled.
The 1990 U.S. Amateur was played at Cherry Hills in Denver, famous as the venue where Arnold Palmer—Mickelson’s spiritual forebear in both style of play and fan interaction—won his only U.S. Open, in 1960. That Phil had never claimed a USGA event to that point in his career was a head-scratcher, given the scale of his success. For amateurs, USGA events were, and remain, far and away the most prestigious championships. (In 1991, Tiger Woods—five and a half years younger than Mickelson—would win the first of three straight U.S. Juniors, which would be followed by three straight U.S. Amateurs, a match play winning streak that might be the single most impressive accomplishment of a legendary career.) Mickelson was the overwhelming favorite at Cherry Hills, and during the second round of thirty-six-hole stroke-play qualifying, he shot a then-record 64, adding to the feeling of inevitability. “If I play the way I’ve been playing, I don’t think I’ll get beat,” Mickelson woofed. “I’m playing as good as I’ve ever played. Every facet of my game is one hundred percent right now. Whoever I play, I’d be intimidated (if I were them). Why shouldn’t they be?”
In the second round of match play, Mickelson faced Jeff Thomas, a New Jersey legend. Thomas was a brawler and a boozer, and his had been a hard-knock life. His mom died when he was young and he had to scrape to survive; he got fired from a caddie job at Plainfield Country Club while in high school for having stolen a member’s Ping putter. Thomas grew into a rebel in pleated pants. A victory in the U.S. Mid-Am got him invited to the Masters, where he snuck groupies into his accommodations within the Augusta National clubhouse for dangerous liaisons and sold his caddying job to the highest bidder. On the thirteenth hole of the first round, he left himself a fifteen-footer for eagle but had to putt with his 2-iron because his clueless looper had abandoned his putter next to the twelfth green. By the time Thomas roared down Magnolia Lane in his beat-up old Cadillac after missing the cut, the green jackets had made it clear he would never be invited back, no matter which tournaments he won. Thomas had enough of an edge that he didn’t fear a pretty boy like Mickelson, regardless of how outsized his reputation might be. “Jeff was brash and fiery and he loved the mental aspect of match play,” says John Doherty, his caddie at the 1990 U.S. Amateur. “He was always angling for an advantage. He would try to get underneath your skin, push the rules, whatever he could get away with. He loved the gamesmanship.” Doherty recalls standing on the range with Thomas, watching Mickelson warm up. “He had the collar up, his college coach was on the bag, he carried himself like a Tour player,” Doherty says. “I could see in Jeff’s face he knew he was going to have to play his best. He was fired up for the challenge.” But on the very first hole, a short par-4 that Palmer famously drove in the final round to begin his comeback at the Open, Thomas left himself a very long par putt, while Mickelson had stuffed his approach shot to four feet for birdie. In an all-time alpha move, Phil conceded Thomas’s putt. “I’ll never forget the look he gave me,” Mickelson says. “It was just funny. Why did I do that? Well, he took like two minutes to hit the chip shot and hit it forty feet by the hole. Then he started the process again, and I just thought, Pick it up.”
Mickelson had chosen psychology as his major at ASU, and he had to know the concession would have a larger effect than just speeding up play. He poured in his birdie putt to win the hole and went on to thrash Thomas, 6 & 5.
“That was the biggest dose of mental intimidation I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Doherty, who would go on to caddie in more than seventy USGA events. “Jeff was never the same after that. Talk about confidence. Talk about backing it up. What Jeff always strived to do to other players, Phil did it to him.”
“There has always been gamesmanship in match play, but this was something else,” says John Garrity, who covered that Amateur for Sports Illustrated. “This was emasculation. Phil psychologically destroyed his opponent on the first hole, and at that point the match was essentially over. Word of what happened traveled very quickly among the other competitors. There was a mixed reaction. Some thought it was kind of a snotty thing to do, that Phil was a show-off. But there was also total admiration that any player could have the confidence, or you might say the balls, to pull it off.”
Thirteen years later, Thomas’s body was found in the cheap hotel room he had been living in on the outskirts of Palm Beach, Florida; he died from a drug overdose. No one is suggesting Mickelson bears any responsibility, but the humiliation at Cherry Hills shadowed Thomas until his dying breath. “Everybody always asked him about it,” says Doherty, who remained Thomas’s close friend. “He would be berated and battered about it. He tried to blow it off, but it always bothered him. It became part of his identity. It was just one more bad thing in a life that had a lot of dark spots.”
Mickelson faced Mike Swingle in the third round of the Amateur. He was a steady, fairways-and-greens kind of player, and Swingle led 1-up through fifteen holes. Number sixteen is a long par-4 with a creek that cuts across the fairway and then meanders left of the green. Mickelson hooked his tee shot into the gnarly rough, and his path to the putting surface was stymied by a tree. So he aimed at the creek left of the green and, with a 7-iron, played what he called a sixty-yard hook, leaving his ball twenty feet from the hole. “It was crazy how much that ball curved,” Swingle says. “For a long time Phil called it the best shot he ever hit in competition. I was in the middle of the fairway and he put his ball inside of mine.” Then Mickelson made the putt to win the hole.
On the tee of the par-5 seventeenth hole—where Ben Hogan lost the 1960 U.S. Open by spinning his third shot back into the fronting pond—Mickelson unsheathed his secret weapon. In shades of things to come, he had put in play a forty-five-inch driver, which was a full inch and a half longer than most other competitors’ of that era. His logic was simple: “I could reach that par-5 [seventeenth] and no one else could and I needed to take advantage of that.” Swingle elected to lay up with a 1-iron off the tee. “That fairway was so narrow and I didn’t think it was reachable anyway,” he says. “Phil was taking a big risk late in the match.” But Mickelson smashed a perfect drive and then got home with a 3-wood, setting up an easy two-putt birdie that won the hole; he closed out the match on eighteen. “Bottom line, he hit three incredible shots in a row when he had to,” says Swingle, who today is the owner of Issaquah Coffee Company, a popular café on the outskirts of Seattle. “Any of those go sideways, he’s in trouble. I played the smart shots and it didn’t work out. That’s probably why he’s Phil Mickelson and I’m selling coffee.”
In the quarterfinals, Mickelson fought off a game Bob May—who ten years later would engage Woods in an unforgettable tussle at the 2000 PGA Championship—and then in the semis he overwhelmed David Eger, 5 & 3. That set up a juicy thirty-six-hole final versus Manny Zerman, his onetime high school teammate and now archrival at the University of Arizona. Mickelson was not exactly collegial: he won four holes in a row starting at number two to put a ton of pressure on Zerman. But the gritty South African fought back in the afternoon round, and after coming within inches of an ace on the sixth hole, Zerman was only 1-down. Two holes later, he was poised to square the match after chipping in for birdie. But Mickelson topped him with a twenty-footer that was good as soon as it left the putter blade. Looking back, Zerman offers a succinct play-by-play: “Fuckin’ A, same shit as always.” An ensuing burst of birdies by Mickelson ended the match, 5 & 4. The 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills was where Jack Nicklaus announced himself to the golf world, pushing Palmer to the brink as a chubby twenty-year-old amateur. Now Mickelson had joined Big Jack as the only players in golf history to win the NCAA Championship and U.S. Amateur in the same year. He was the Bear apparent.
Mickelson won the first tournament of his junior year, assuaging any concern around Arizona State that he might grow complacent. But even as he continued to dominate college golf, he had his eye on a bigger prize: the PGA Tour’s Tucson Open. As a sophomore, in 1990, Mickelson had been given a sponsor’s exemption and he finished a very solid nineteenth. His game had gone to another level since then. “Phil had that tournament circled on his calendar for a long time,” says Dean Reinmuth. “He knew in his heart he was good enough to win it.”
The Tucson Open was a sleepy event played at the tail end of the Tour’s West Coast swing, but it had a rich history dating to 1945. In a twelve-year stretch beginning in 1967, the champions included Palmer, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino twice, and Johnny Miller three times, including a signature nine-stroke blowout in ’75. Mickelson became obsessed with joining the ranks of these champions and, in the months before the ’91 tournament, often made the hour-and-a-half drive from Tempe to learn the nuances of the host venues, Starr Pass and Tucson National.
“A few months before the tournament I went out for a quick twilight round at Starr Pass,” says Gary McCord, who was then winding down his long and unfruitful playing career. “I’m on the fifteenth green and this tall, skinny kid walks up. It’s Phil. I knew who he was, of course, but we’d never met. He says, ‘I’ve been out here all day working on my game, but since it’s getting dark, why don’t we have some fun?’ He proposed that we play the last three holes with him using my clubs and me using his. For a hundred dollars a hole. I should’ve known right then it was a bad bet, because what college kid can afford to play for a hundred dollars a hole? But I had been working with Mac O’Grady”—the famously ambidextrous (and eccentric) Tour pro turned teacher—“and I was pretty good left-handed, so I took the bet. Well, Phil won the sixteenth hole, the seventeenth hole, and the eighteenth hole. He cleaned me out, shook my hand, and disappeared, probably to have a nice dinner with my money. It wasn’t until later that I learned he’s naturally right-handed.”
When the tournament proper began, Mickelson roared to the top of the leaderboard with an opening 65. He wobbled a bit in the second round, with a 71, but caught fire on Saturday, playing the front nine in a mere twenty-nine strokes. After Mickelson drove the green of the par-4 sixth hole, Hal Sutton whispered to the omnipresent Steve Loy, who was serving as a caddie, “You know, Coach, I’ll sure be glad when he grows up and gets a little fear in his blood.” Mickelson’s 65 staked him to a two-stroke lead.
On Sunday he would have to tangle with seasoned veterans. Mickelson was paired with future U.S. Open champion Corey Pavin. Also in the mix was Bob Tway, winner of the 1989 PGA Championship, and Tom Purtzer, whom the cognoscenti considered to have one of the sweetest swings in the game. Mickelson was clinging to a one-stroke lead when he arrived at the par-5 fourteenth tee. His ASU teammates had driven over and were part of a large, raucous gallery trying to carry him home. But Phil is Phil and it was never going to be a boring stroll to victory. On the fourteenth tee, he uncorked a wild hook that sent his ball into the recesses of a deep, dark canyon. It was playing as a lateral hazard, so he took a penalty drop… and then smothered a 3-iron into another unplayable lie. When the hole mercifully ended, Mickelson had taken an 8, pretty much the only way to make a snowman in the desert. He tumbled into a tie for fifth, two shots behind Purtzer. But Mickelson rallied to make a birdie at sixteen to stay in the fight. Up ahead on the eighteenth hole, Purtzer hit a perfect tee shot, but was left between a pitching wedge and a three-quarter 9-iron. “I shoulda hit the wedge,” he says now with a sigh. He took too much off the 9 and his ball fluttered into the front bunker. Purtzer tried to get too cute with the ensuing shot and left it in the sand. Double bogey. Tie ball game.
The crowd was in full throat when Mickelson arrived at the home hole. He hit a good drive and then rifled a wedge at the flag, leaving himself ten feet for the win. Otherwise, a playoff with Purtzer and Tway loomed. Loy lumbered over to ask his man if he needed help with the read.
“No thanks, Coach,” Mickelson said. “I’ve got this. Just get out of the way.”
Purtzer and Tway gathered by the green for their denouement. “Back then he putted like a god,” says Purtzer, one of many to invoke the almighty in describing the young Mickelson’s supernatural gifts. “It was a big moment for an amateur, sure, but I would’ve been shocked if he missed it. Well, he rolled it in like it was nothing. Me and Tway looked at each other, shook hands, and said, ‘We’ll get him next time.’ But I think both of us knew that wasn’t going to be easy.”
Pavin, rightfully celebrated as one of the game’s grittiest, guttiest grinders, was dazzled by the kid’s perseverance after the brutal triple bogey. “I’ve never seen anyone come back from something like that,” he said.
Three decades later, as various tributes to the win were popping up on social media, I asked Mickelson what emotions they stirred. He focused not on any particular shot, but on the cringey nature of his post-round interviews. “I can’t believe how babyish I sounded,” he said.
As an avowed amateur, Mickelson had to forfeit the $180,000 winner’s check, but he kept the coveted three-year exemption onto the PGA Tour, securing his place in the firmament. A couple of months after Tucson, he made his Masters debut, cashing in the invitation that came with winning the U.S. Amateur. Mickelson shot 69 in his first competitive round at Augusta National, which left him tied for ninth, one shot behind a fella named Nicklaus. The audacious debut only added to the feeling that Mickelson was born to play that golf course. In the ensuing months, he would also make the cut at the U.S. Open and Open Championship, further cranking up the hype machine. Mickelson was building a solid-gold brand and he knew it was about a persona that was as flashy as his game. “A golfer is an entertainer, much like an actor,” he said at the time. “People pay money to go out and watch you play, and I don’t think they pay just to watch you hit a drive down the middle, hit a shot on the green, and two-putt. That’s why Lee Trevino and Fuzzy Zoeller are so popular. They are entertainers as well as golfers.” Mickelson’s future was unlimited… as long as he could avoid saying something stupid.
The 1991 Walker Cup was always going to be overheated. It was being played for the first time in Ireland, at Portmarnock, a stern links outside of Dublin. Three Irish lads led the team, headlined by future major champion Padraig Harrington and Paul McGinley, who would go on to be a Ryder Cup hero as a player and captain. In the previous playing, Great Britain & Ireland had claimed the Cup for the first time since 1971. The Americans were hell-bent on revenge, most especially Mickelson, who had gone a disappointing 1-1-2 in ’89. The U.S. team touched down in Ireland with maybe its best team ever: Mickelson, David Duval, Bob May, future PGA Tour winner Tom Scherrer, Allen Doyle (who would go on to win eleven tournaments on the Senior Tour), and cocktail circuit legend Jay Sigel, who was playing in his record-tying eighth Walker Cup. “We knew it was going to be a war,” says Paul McGinley, but no one expected it would play out in the tabloids. Then, following a practice round, Mickelson was asked by a TV reporter about having hit an errant drive into the gallery. He replied, “That’s not a place I want to be. The Irish women are not that attractive.”
Hooo boy.
“That comment went ripping through the press tent like a virus,” says Garrity, once again the man on the ground for Sports Illustrated. “It was like a scene in the movies, with everyone in the press room rushing to their phones to call back to their paper.” The Irish headline writers pounced: “BAD BOY PHIL!” screamed one. Another blared, “MASTERFUL MICKELSON DRAWS IRISH IRE.” It became an actual international incident; as the U.S. team was leaving the course, their bus ground to a halt and Mickelson had to disembark to film an apology being demanded by the Irish consulate. “He was very, very distraught about the whole thing,” says May. “He didn’t mean to hurt people. It was just Phil being Phil, but obviously this time it didn’t work out very well.” Among the tweedy golf officials at Portmarnock, only David Fay of the USGA had any sense of humor about the incident, as he spent the week humming the Beach Boys: “I wish they all could be California girllllllls….”
Never a shrinking violet, Mickelson created more of a stir during a first-day singles match against Andrew Coltart, a future European Tour winner whose on-course visage evoked Ebenezer Scrooge. On the ninth hole, Coltart didn’t concede a putt of around eighteen inches. With a typically rakish grin, Mickelson held his putter parallel to the ground to make clear that his ball was “inside the leather.” Unmoved, Coltart made him putt the putative gimme and afterward went off on Mickelson, calling him an “arrogant so-and-so.” But Mickelson had the last word, winning 4 & 3. “To this day we kid Coltart about that,” says McGinley. “If someone has a short putt, a fellow in the group will invariably say, ‘That wouldn’t be a gimme if you’re playing with Mickelson, would it?’ Thirty years later he’s still sore about it.”
At the Walker Cup there are twenty-four points up for grabs. The U.S. led 8–4 heading into the second of two days of competition, but GB&I mounted a spirited rally, taking three of the four points in the morning foursomes. In the ensuing singles session, Mickelson was sent out first to blunt the opposition’s momentum, and his point became crucial with the U.S. losing three of the four matches immediately behind him. Playing the eighteenth hole, he was clinging to a 1-up lead over Jim Milligan, who had been the hero of GB&I’s upset two years earlier. Mickelson missed the final green on the short-side left, his ball settling in a recessed collection area. The pin was cut just a few paces beyond a swale he would have to negotiate. He had a slightly downhill lie on firm, closely cropped turf. “At that stage, pretty much every other player who has ever lived would have reached for the putter,” says McGinley. That was the smart play. Mickelson snatched his 60-degree wedge and a murmur went through the Irish women, and men, in the gallery. If he didn’t clip his ball absolutely perfect, it would likely roll back to his feet, a titanic embarrassment that could also cost his country the Walker Cup. “It was madness, really,” says McGinley. “But that’s the kind of balls he had.” Mickelson took an almighty swing, sending his Titleist toward the heavens. It landed gently two feet from the hole. Game over. Mickelson won the match and the U.S. wrested back the Walker Cup.
“You can’t imagine the pressure he was under, because of the accumulated strain of being portrayed as the Ugly American for the whole week,” says Garrity. “Inevitably, his became the crucial match. You think about the reputation he brought into that event, the scrutiny he had put himself under, the degree of difficulty of the shot he was facing with the whole Walker Cup potentially riding on it…. Goodness, that flop shot has to rank as the greatest pressure shot I’ve ever witnessed.”
Mickelson would have instantly been among the biggest stars in the game if he had turned pro after the Walker Cup, but he returned to Arizona State for his senior year. He had promised his parents he would earn a degree. He was also influenced by a chat he’d had with Nicklaus, who left Ohio State at the age of twenty. For decades, the PGA Tour printed phone book–sized media guides that listed a player’s basic data, including their college affiliation. Those who earned a degree had it noted next to the school name. Nicklaus had always been nettled that he didn’t have a bachelor of arts to display in the media guide. The schoolwork wasn’t onerous because Mickelson has what he likes to call a photographic memory. “He would take my notebook,” says Mangini, “and study it for a while and then get a 100 on the test. Then he’d look at all the questions I missed and, without ever looking at the notebook again, tell me exactly where I could find the right answer: ‘You dumbass, it’s in your notes midway down the third page. It’s right there in your own handwriting, dickhead.’ ”
Anyway, Mickelson was having too much fun in Tempe to think about leaving it behind prematurely.
“After he won Tucson I asked him if he was gonna drop out of school and go play the [PGA Tour’s] Florida swing,” says Strickland. “He said, ‘Hell, no. All I won is a hundred and eighty grand—who cares? I’m going to have plenty of money. But you can never get back your college years.’ ”
Mickelson was also juiced by the growing rivalry with Arizona. In the spring of his junior year, the Wildcats and Sun Devils were locked in a shootout at the Golf Digest Collegiate Invitational, at the Woodlands outside of Houston. On the last hole, Mickelson drove it down the middle of a rain-saturated fairway. Matched against Zerman, per usual, he asked for a free drop from casual water. “What he really wanted was to wipe the mud off the back of his ball when taking the drop,” Zerman says. He didn’t see any puddles and denied the drop. Mickelson took his stance and, pressing down with his size 13 clodhoppers, was able to get some water to ooze out of the turf. Zerman said that Mickelson’s squatting and bouncing did not constitute his normal stance and reiterated that no drop was forthcoming. Pissed, Mickelson whipped out his 7-iron, calculated the effects of the glob of mud on his ball, and promptly holed out his approach shot from 160 yards. Arizona coach Rick LaRose sidled up to Zerman and said, “The next time Phil Mickelson wants a drop, give it to him. Don’t make him mad.” Aided by the mic-drop eagle, Mickelson won the individual crown, but Arizona nabbed the team title.
The Wildcats and Sun Devils went at it again at the 1992 NCAAs, the swan song to Mickelson’s college career. He was a first-team All-American for the fourth straight season and about to win his third straight Haskins Award as the male college player of the year. He shot a career-low 63 in the first round, pretty much ending any suspense as to whether or not he would join Ben Crenshaw as the only three-time NCAA individual champ. (The sixteenth career win was a collegiate record.) But on the final day, Mickelson stumbled to a closing 74 and Arizona raced by ASU to steal the national championship, a bittersweet end to an incomparable undergraduate career.
Mickelson turned pro for the 1992 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. In the opening round, he shot a smooth 68 to surge into a tie for third. With the previous two Opens at Pebble having been won by Nicklaus and Watson, many of the Friday papers trumpeted the arrival of American golf’s next generational talent. But Mickelson went out and shot 80 to miss the cut, the perfect beginning to his star-crossed, love-hate relationship with the national championship.
Mickelson was still living in the desert, and not long after the U.S. Open he ventured to a Guns N’ Roses concert in a remote location in West Phoenix. A freak flash flood turned the dirt parking lots and egress roads into quagmires, so Mickelson and his buddies slept in their car. They pulled into his friend’s apartment complex the next morning, looking a little rough. Bounding down the stairs was a perky blonde who lived above the friend’s apartment. Mickelson had heard a lot about this ASU coed—the romance with Tana Rey was finally kaput—but they had not met. (Phil’s excuse: “I never took the time because I wasn’t into going to parties and, besides, I was always too busy playing golf.”) She introduced herself and Mickelson, rendered nearly mute by her beauty, could squeeze out only one syllable: “Hi.”
Amy McBride continued on her way to class. Their paths would cross again.