Amy McBride grew up with parents who stressed the same values as Nunu: family, faith, hard work. Her childhood was split between Northern California and Salt Lake City. She matriculated to the University of Utah, but found the atmosphere stifling and transferred to Arizona State after one year. At a notorious party school, she brought a sobering dedication to her studies, and the former high school cheerleader worked two jobs to put herself through school: teaching dance lessons for kids and firing up the crowd as a member of the Phoenix Suns dance team. The latter gig compelled her to work at a Special Olympics event during the 1993 Phoenix Open. Phil Mickelson was playing in the tournament at the outset of his first full year on the PGA Tour. (Following his sour pro debut at Pebble Beach, he acquitted himself well in ten ensuing events, including a runner-up finish at the New England Classic.) Phil attended the Special Olympics shindig, and when he spotted Amy he locked on to her like a heat-seeking missile. After a half hour of flirting, she agreed to a tennis date a few days later. Their chemistry was instant, and she wound up going to visit him the following week at the Bob Hope Classic. Thus distracted, Mickelson missed the cut.
He has lamented through the years that, when it came to women, he had no game. To woo Amy, he turned to his textbooks. “One thing I learned as a psychology major,” Mickelson says, “is that the physiological response of the human body for fear is the same as it is for arousal. So when you’re afraid, your heart pumps faster and your lungs expand and your nostrils flare and your senses become much more acute. And that’s what happens when you’re aroused. So what I would do is I would take Amy to a suspenseful movie—not a horror movie, a suspenseful movie. And during this suspenseful time, I would grab her hand and I would rub it like this. [He demonstrates a creepy, unctuous rub.] And she would displace her fear as arousal or attraction for me. And that’s how I was able to, when I didn’t have as much to work with, land such a gem.”
The Tour barnstormed into Mickelson’s hometown of San Diego the week after the Hope. He played well enough to earn a spot in Sunday’s final pairing. Even at this early juncture in his pro career, he knew he had something to prove. The previous autumn, at the B.C. Open, Mickelson was in the final group alongside John Daly, but shot 76 and Long John blew him away. (“I still love to give him shit about that,” says Daly.) In his 1993 season debut, defending his title at Tucson, Mickelson again played in the last group, but he shot 75 and got run over. “I could close with a low score to win in college, but I hadn’t proven that at this level,” Mickelson said back at Torrey Pines. “When I didn’t win at Tucson this year, it was hard to swallow.”
Heading to the final nine holes at the San Diego Open, he trailed Dave Rummells by a shot, but Mickelson roared home in 31 strokes to win by four. On the final green, as he was hurrying through his routine, Payne Stewart cracked, “Why don’t you wait? It’s your show. Enjoy the moment.” Turning to the crowd, he added, “Kids—you can’t teach ’em anything.”
Mickelson had hit sixteen greens in regulation and birdied all four par-5s, but Rummells was most dazzled by his work with the flat stick. “Phil Mickelson can roll that golf ball,” he said. “He’s probably the best putter I’ve ever played with. Every one of his putts goes right in the middle of the cup. They’re not falling in the side door.”
In the hours after his victory, Phil called Amy to ask if she had watched his triumphant moment on TV. She had blown it off, preferring to sunbathe by the pool with girlfriends.
Before leaving San Diego, Mickelson stopped by the Santos home to present his biggest fan with a flag from the tournament. For Nunu, he signed it, To Champ, I’ll love you forever. His beaming grandfather pinned the flag to the wall in the kitchen, the beginning of an enduring tradition.
The Mickelson brand already had enough currency that three months after this breakthrough win he was invited to tee it up at the Tournoi Perrier de Paris. A trip to the City of Light was the perfect opportunity to further dazzle Amy… or so he thought. Her very traditional parents were already wary of a romance with a jet-setting professional athlete, so Amy insisted Phil call her father to seek his permission. Gary McBride was unimpressed: “You know, that phone call kind of hit me wrong. Phil was very, very nice, but dads are pretty protective of their daughters. And when he said they would have separate rooms I was thinking, Right—like there are no hallways.” Amy didn’t make the trip. (Phil won the tournament.) She would have to wait until her fortieth birthday to finally visit Paris with her beau.
Amy knew little about golf but was aware that the Phoenix Suns’ star player, Charles Barkley, was falling in love with the game. “She kept saying I needed to play with her boyfriend and I kept blowing that shit off,” says Barkley. “I was at the peak of my situation, coming off the Dream Team. I was always getting invited to play golf, so I kept telling Amy no—I assumed she was dating some old dude who worked at an investment bank or some shit like that. Finally she told me who her boyfriend was and I was like, ‘Sheeeeeee-it, set that shit up for tomorrow.’ That’s how me and Phil first became friends.” Mickelson became a regular sitting courtside at Suns games. The Ken and Barbie vibes were strong: the dreamy young Tour star and the gorgeous cheerleader, making eyes at each other.
But Amy wasn’t the only foundational relationship in Phil’s life; Steve Loy had resigned from Arizona State to become Mickelson’s agent. All the top management companies put the full-court press on Mickelson during his senior year, but from the beginning Loy took control of the recruiting process. (The sharpies at industry behemoth IMG largely disqualified themselves when they would not agree to hire Loy, who was suddenly part of a package deal.) Remember when Dick Cheney was put in charge of finding a vice president for George W. Bush and he named himself the best candidate? Loy pretty much invented that move. Right off the bat, Mickelson and his agent showed they were going to do things their own way, signing a blockbuster endorsement deal with Yonex, a Japanese company that had almost no presence in the U.S. market. Mickelson had been a gearhead at least as far back as when he employed the extra-long driver shaft that helped him win the U.S. Amateur. Yonex’s lightweight graphite shafts and larger driver heads made of composite materials opened up a world of possibilities for a player already obsessed with chasing distance. But quality was an ongoing issue, signified by the Tour bag Yonex supplied—the shoulder strap routinely broke, leaving Mickelson’s beleaguered looper, Jim Mackay, to carry the bag down the fairway by its handle, as if it were a briefcase. Phil also began playing graphite shafts in his irons, which to that point was unheard-of on the PGA Tour.
Mackay quickly became an indispensable teammate to Mickelson. He was born in England to a Scottish father, but the family immigrated to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, when Jim was eight. The local muni, designed by Donald Ross, let kids play for free after three p.m. and Mackay showed up almost every day. He earned a scholarship to Columbus (Georgia) College, now known as Columbus State. In his senior year, Mackay was a third-team Division II All-American. “We had a match at the University of Florida’s Gator tournament,” says his coach, Earl Bagley. “Jim was playing Gary Nicklaus [of Ohio State] and Jack was in the gallery. I caught up with Jim and he said to me, ‘Coach, I can’t even bring the club back. Greatest golfer in history is here watching.’ I told Jim, ‘He’s not watching you.’ ”
Mackay had dreams of playing professionally until he tangled with Davis Love III in U.S. Amateur qualifying. “I knew I had to get a job,” he says. As an undergrad he had worked at Green Island Country Club, where 1987 Masters champ Larry Mize hung out. “I wound up shagging balls for him before or after class,” Mackay says. Upon graduation, he landed a job at the financial services company Synovus, but before his first day of work Mize offered him a caddie gig. Mackay negotiated a two-year leave of absence from the straight world and then lit out for the 1990 Bob Hope. (“James Blanchard was the [Synovus] CEO,” says Mackay. “He’s a member at Augusta National. Every April at the Masters, he asks me when I’m going to report to work.”) Back then he was six foot four and maybe 150 pounds. Fred Couples took one look at Mackay’s tall, skinny, gangly frame and tagged him with an enduring nickname: Bones.
By 1992, Mackay was on Scott Simpson’s bag, but when the ’87 U.S. Open champ skipped the Tucson Open, Bones moonlighted for Curtis Strange. That tournament week he crossed paths with Steve Loy. The big money had yet to arrive on Tour and caddying was still largely the province of ruffians and scoundrels. The clean-cut Bones had a different vibe, which may be why Loy chatted him up, looking for looper recommendations for when Mickelson turned pro that summer. Phil was already on Bones’s radar screen. Just weeks earlier, he had been driving to his favorite record store in Tempe, Arizona, when, rolling past the driving range where Arizona State practiced, he spied a big left-hander smashing the ball. He noted that it had to be the local phenom he had heard so much about. After buying a handful of CDs, Mackay was driving home and the same lefty was still grinding on the range. The golf nerd in Bones couldn’t resist; he pulled over and introduced himself to Mickelson and watched him hit balls for a while. So, back at the Tucson Open, he was happy to help Loy but stopped midsentence when Strange arrived at the course. Mackay hustled off to perform his duties. Later, he sent Loy a handwritten letter of apology for prematurely ending the conversation. Mickelson saw the note and was deeply impressed. He arranged a practice round with Simpson and Bones at the ensuing Players Championship. They had just shaken hands on their first tee box when Mickelson blurted out, loud enough for Simpson to hear, that he wanted to hire Mackay as his caddie. Bones was mortified, but ultimately couldn’t say no.
They made their debut at the 1992 U.S. Open. From the very beginning, there was no denying Bones’s love for the game or dedication to his job. Mickelson didn’t qualify for the 1992 Open Championship but Mackay traveled to Muirfield anyway, to soak up the experience and prepare for Mickelson’s future assaults on the auld sod. “We ended up with seven or eight caddies in a tiny apartment,” says Mackay. “I remember guys were sleeping in the kitchen, and things along those lines.” Somehow, it could have been worse. “There’s a great story about a caddie in the same spot we were in, who couldn’t find a place to stay,” says Bones. “He literally went to a guy who had a farm with a little metal caravan out on the property and he asked the guy if he could stay in the metal caravan. The guy goes, ‘Well, yeah, sure.’ And there was no electricity in there. None of us could figure out how he could wake up in the morning and make his early tee times. This caddie went down to the local store and bought some birdseed and put it on the roof of the caravan. In the morning, the birds would land on the roof of the caravan, peck the roof, and it would wake him up. And he would go to work.”
In those early days, before he was a brand unto himself, Bones took to heart the old-school mandate for caddies to “show up, keep up, and shut up.” Especially the last bit. If you were a reporter, a typical conversation would go like this: “Hey, Bones, how’s Phil hitting it?”
“Is this off the record?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
“He’s hitting it good.”
But Bones brought a boiler room intensity to crunching the numbers, filling his yardage guides with detailed notes and minutiae. This proved particularly useful at the 1993 International, a Tour event played at a course built on the side of a mountain outside of Denver. The constant elevation changes and the differing yardage the ball flies in the mile-high air bedeviled many players and caddies, but Mickelson was locked in all week and won going away. For American golf, this was an era of parity and diminished expectations, so two wins counted as a banner year. Then Mickelson kicked off the 1994 season with a victory at the Tournament of Champions, defeating Couples in a playoff. The hype began to crest, and Mickelson just kept coming: top tens at Tucson and Phoenix and a near miss at Torrey Pines. “It felt like every time you looked at a leaderboard, his name was near the top,” says Davis Love. “The way Phil came out of the box [to start his career], you just felt like the sky was the limit.” Nothing could break his momentum, or so it seemed.
Mickelson grew up on the ski slopes, learning at the knee of a father who once harbored ambitions of competing in the Olympics. Justin Leonard, who now lives full-time in Aspen, has carved up a few mountains with Mickelson through the years, and he says, “He’s a good skier, I can vouch for that.”
If skiing had a handicap system like golf, what would Phil’s index be?
“He’s single digits,” says Leonard. “Probably a four or five…”
Pause.
“… who thinks he’s a plus-two.”
Shortly after the rousing final-round 64 that propelled him to third place at Torrey Pines, Mickelson went skiing with his old college teammate Jim Strickland. They drove Phil’s 4Runner to Snowbowl in Flagstaff, Arizona. Conditions were a little icy. On their last run before lunch—it’s always the last run—Mickelson and Strickland stood at the very top of the mountain and pointed to a warming hut far down below. They decided to race to it and the loser had to buy lunch. “Classic Phil, he says, ‘Okay, you’re five seven with 185s [length skis], I’m six three with 235s, so I’ll give you a twenty-five-yard head start,’ ” says Strickland. “I tuck and go and I’m flying down the mountain. Down near the bottom there was a lot of ice. I started to break up and then just yard-saled it.”
It took Strickland a while to collect his skis, poles, sunglasses, hat, and gloves. He assumed that while he was supine, Mickelson had raced past to win the bet. Strickland wandered around the chalet but couldn’t find his friend. He went back outside and that’s when he glimpsed a couple of ski patrolmen whoosh by to join a group of their colleagues who had gathered in a grove of trees a little down the mountain. With a pit in his stomach, Strickland hustled over. Mickelson was at the center of the circle of ski patrolmen, his left leg twisted into an awkward angle. He had lost control and blown past the lodge and careened down an embankment at high speed. His ski got wedged between two trees, creating enough shock and tension to snap in half his femur, the largest bone in the human body. “Think about the amount of force it takes to break that bone,” Mickelson says in what sounds like a perverse boast. He had narrowly missed colliding with a tall tree that, says Strickland, “certainly could have killed him.” He adds, “Seeing Phil’s face, I got nauseous. I tried to say something positive, but he leaned in and said, in a really sad voice, ‘I’m not gonna be able to play the Masters.’ ” That hurt as much as the leg.
Mickelson would miss three months of tournament play. Inspired by his dad, the onetime Top Gun, Phil decided to work toward his pilot’s license. (This is not unlike Tiger Woods’s cosplay with Navy SEALs in an attempt to feel closer to his late father, a onetime Green Beret.) Mickelson earned his license, but upon returning to the course he appeared rudderless, failing to cop a victory for the rest of the season.
Mickelson returned to his winning ways in his second start of the 1995 season, at Tucson, which was fast becoming an annual annuity. Amy had now graduated Arizona State and the cameras always found her in the gallery. They would be engaged before the end of the year. Mickelson also possessed what was already one of the most recognizable shots in the game, his famous flop. In describing how to play it, he made it sound almost routine: “I want the club to go underneath the ball. The bounce kicks the club into the ball and that’s how I get it to pop up. I open up the face almost flat, so the toe is almost touching the ground. And I put my weight forward, which helps me drive the club into the ground and keep it underneath the ball. Now, if I stop my arms and let my wrists flip, the leading edge starts coming off the ground and I blade it. So I have to make sure my arms and club are accelerating through impact. It’s not a high-percentage shot, but because I’ve hit it so many times I do feel comfortable with it to hit it in pressure situations.” Years later, a launch monitor would be aimed at Mickelson while he was practicing his flop shot, and the clubhead speed for his lob wedge touched 102 miles per hour, a fantastical number given that Brendon Todd, a three-time winner on Tour, swings his much longer, much lighter driver only a couple of miles per hour faster.
The young Mickelson was earning respect on Tour not just with victories but also his performance in practice-round money games. “Man, Phil was so hard to beat,” says Paul Azinger. “He just cleaned us out.” At Bay Hill one year, he and Payne Stewart took on Mickelson and Ben Crenshaw. It all came down to the eighteenth hole. The other three players missed birdie putts, leaving Mickelson with a do-or-die fifteen-footer. If he were to make it, Stewart and Azinger would be out $1,600 apiece. Stewart was so confident Mickelson would hole the putt, he negotiated a buyout for $400. Azinger eyed the downhill, right-to-left slider and decided to take his chances, telling Mickelson, “Putt it, bitch.” He drilled it dead center. Says Azinger with a sigh, “He had big ol’ balls. Even as a new guy on Tour, he had no fear. When someone puts it on you like that, it tells you a lot about them.”
The on-course highlight of Mickelson’s ’95 season was his first Ryder Cup, at Oak Hill. The biennial grudge match between the U.S. and Europe had reached a fever pitch. Four years earlier, the Americans prevailed in “The War by the Shore,” inarguably the most overheated golf event of all time. In ’93, this core of battle-hardened Yanks went to England and retained the Cup against a European squad that boasted six future Hall of Famers. Mickelson, twenty-five, was by far the youngest U.S. player in ’95, but he thrived in the combative atmosphere. In the first match of his Ryder Cup career, he and Pavin destroyed Bernhard Langer and former Sun Devil Per-Ulrik Johansson, 6 & 4. The next day, Mickelson stared down his hero Seve Ballesteros in a taut four-ball victory. The U.S. led 9–7 as the team gathered that night to hammer out the singles lineup. Mickelson stood up and looked around the room at all of the crusty veterans, among them Curtis Strange, Tom Lehman, Ben Crenshaw, Fred Couples, Davis Love, and Peter Jacobsen. He addressed his glowering captain, Lanny Wadkins.
“I want to be in the last group,” Mickelson said, and it got so quiet you could’ve heard a pat of butter drop. “I want to be there at the end if you need me, because I’m gonna win my match.”
The room erupted.
“Wow, that was ballsy,” Jacobsen says now. “We had some tough characters on that team and none of them were volunteering for the anchor match. To do it as a rookie? That’s a stud move.”
Mickelson got his wish and was sent out last. But in what came to be known as Choke Hill, the Americans lost six of the first eight matches and halved another. By the time Mickelson closed out Johansson 2 & 1 to remain undefeated, it was too late; the Cup had been lost. Still, it was one helluva debut, and the U.S. appeared to have found a Ryder Cup cornerstone for the next couple of decades.
The accrued confidence carried Mickelson into the 1996 season. He won back-to-back at Tucson and Phoenix and then finished second at Torrey Pines. He shot an opening 65 at the Masters en route to third place and then won the Byron Nelson. He was playing a very different game from most of his peers. “Phil doesn’t get credit for it, but he might be the guy who invented bomb ’n’ gouge,” says Jacobsen, referring to the modern Tour template of smashing the ball as far as possible off the tee and not really worrying if it winds up in the rough. “It was such a different era then. The balls were spinny, the driver heads were tiny, and there were still guys using persimmon! We had all been taught to swing under control and hit it straight. And here comes Phil with that Yonex driver, just swinging out of his shoes. He attacked relentlessly and he played with no fear because he knew he could always bail himself out with his wedge and his putter. He had the imagination and creativity to make it work.”
In August 1996, Mickelson took the biggest tournament of his career, the World Series of Golf. It was his fourth victory of the year. Couples never won that many in a season. Neither did Love, Crenshaw, Strange, Wadkins, Lehman, Pavin, or Jacobsen. Or Tom Kite, Payne Stewart, Mark O’Meara, Hal Sutton, Paul Azinger, or Mark Calcavecchia. (More than half of these players are in the Hall of Fame.) All of the predictions had come true: Mickelson was the most prolific winner in the game. The world was his oyster. Nothing could could stop him now.
Four days after the World Series of Golf, Tiger Woods made his pro debut.