At a long-ago Masters, when Tiger Woods was just an intriguing amateur prospect and Phil Mickelson a hotshot young pro who was being billed as the Next Nicklaus, Woods sneaked a reporter into the Crow’s Nest, the tiny dormitory perched atop the Augusta National clubhouse. Tiger was monitoring the Masters telecast when Mickelson alighted the screen. Employing a putting stroke that was much too long and loose for the slippery greens, Mickelson characteristically charged a putt past the hole. As the ball trickled farther and farther from the cup, Woods offered only one word of commentary: “Roll.”
The antipathy was born on the playing fields of junior golf. Tiger and Phil grew up in Southern California suburbia, separated by a hundred miles but linked by their talent. Older by five and a half years, Mickelson loomed over Woods’s early golfing life. “Phil was an icon to us,” says Chris Riley, one of Tiger’s good friends from junior golf.
Woods’s father, Earl, received most of the credit for his son’s competitive spirit, but it was his mom, Tida, who sharpened Tiger’s killer instinct. With her it was personal. (Years later, after her son beat Davis Love in a playoff, she famously said, “Tiger took his heart.”) Any player as talented as the young Woods was considered not just a competitor but also an existential threat, so Tiger erased Phil’s numerous junior records with a single-minded disdain. Mickelson won a Junior World at age ten? Woods took his first one when he was eight… and then five more. Phil could claim one U.S. Amateur? Tiger would win three in a row. Mickelson had sixteen NCAA victories across four years? Woods won eleven in two years and then got bored and dropped out of Stanford. In 1996, when Phil was enjoying his banner year on the PGA Tour, Tigermania was launched that autumn when Woods won two of his first seven starts as a pro.
The parrying continued into 1997. Woods won the season opener at La Costa, and then Mickelson struck back with a victory at Bay Hill just three weeks before the Masters. Augusta National, always the sport’s grandest stage, was where these two leading men were supposed to trod the boards. The expectations for Woods had been monumental going back to the previous year’s Masters, when, after he played a practice round with Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, the Golden Bear said, “Arnold and I both agree that you could take his Masters [four victories] and my Masters [six] and add them together and this kid should win more than that.” Mickelson was now battling a war on two fronts when it came to his reputation: Woods was challenging his hegemony as the game’s best young player and there were growing doubts as to whether his freewheeling style of play could succeed in the more exacting conditions of the major championships. Mickelson had been only one shot off the lead going into the final round of the 1995 U.S. Open, but kicked away a chance at victory with a series of ghastly shots and questionable decisions en route to a double bogey on the par-5 sixteenth hole. He opened with a sizzling 65 at the ’96 Masters, but sputtered from there, finishing third. “There was some frustration, for sure,” says Dean Reinmuth. “Phil already knew the major championships were a key to his legacy. He didn’t talk about it the way Tiger did, but he had the same ambitions.”
And then, at the 61st Masters, the ground shifted beneath Mickelson’s feet. He played like a guy trying way too hard, shooting 76-74 to miss the cut by a mile. At twenty-one, Tiger produced a performance for the ages, winning his first green jacket and instantly reshaping the sport in his image. The banner headline across the front page of the Augusta Chronicle said it all: “WOODS LAUNCHES NEW ERA.”
Mickelson wasted no time in trying to reinvent himself. Even as he was winning four times in ’96, he began to feel he needed a fresh perspective on his game; at that point he had been working with Reinmuth for nearly half his life. By year’s end, they had parted ways and Mickelson had hired Rick Smith as a new swing coach. After Woods’s demolition of Augusta National, Smith felt a difference in his pupil. “It was pretty clear the bar had been raised,” says Smith. “Higher than anyone imagined possible, really.”
The rest of ’97 was nightmare fuel for Mickelson. Ernie Els, his old rival from the Junior Worlds, won his second U.S. Open. Justin Leonard, two years younger than Phil, took the Open Championship. When Davis Love prevailed at the PGA Championship, there was no longer any question that Mickelson now owned the dread title of BPNTHWAM (Best Player Never to Have Won a Major). He kept scooping up regular PGA Tour wins—an International here, a Crosby Clambake there—but that began to feel superfluous as he looked increasingly overmatched at the majors. Across the ’97 and ’98 seasons, Mickelson had only one top ten at the game’s most important championships, and just barely: a tie for tenth at the 1998 U.S. Open.
At least there was some happy news off the course. He and Amy had married in November 1996, on Maui. Now she was pregnant with their first child. The baby was due June 30, 1999, two weeks after the U.S. Open at Pinehurst was to conclude.
In the post-Watson era, there was no American golfer more compelling than Payne Stewart. He had the face of a movie star, dressed like Old Tom Morris, and his swing was so delicious that it was often described in culinary terms, syrupy and buttery being the most common. But Stewart was a spicy personality who often rubbed people the wrong way. He could be churlish with the press and caustic with his colleagues. Known for his gamesmanship, Stewart refused to shake Tom Kite’s hand after losing in a playoff at the 1989 Tour Championship. At that year’s PGA Championship, Stewart scorched the final nine in 31 and prevailed when Mike Reid collapsed on the closing holes, but the victor rankled many when he admitted, “I said a prayer in the [scoring] tent: How about some good stuff for Payne Stewart one time?”
But Stewart was also a loving friend and enthusiastic host, a celebrated margarita mixologist who was always the life of the party. He inspired fierce loyalty among a generation of U.S. players as the heart and soul of the Ryder Cup teams during the blood feuds of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Stewart was thirty-four when he won his second major championship, the ’91 U.S. Open. A couple of years later, he cashed in with a blockbuster deal with Spalding that compelled him to play game-improvement clubs ill-suited to his swing. He developed a series of compensating moves that sabotaged him under pressure, and over the next four seasons he racked up twenty-eight top tens but only one win. “We started calling him Avis,” says Peter Jacobsen, who was the lead singer to Stewart’s blues harmonica in the faux-rock band Jake Trout and the Flounders.
Stewart’s on-course struggles led to a period of deep introspection. He devoted more time to his children, Aaron and Chelsea. When his best friend, Azinger, battled cancer throughout 1994, Stewart confronted his own mortality for the first time. His religious faith deepened, and he helped to popularize the WWJD bracelet on Tour. Stewart broke a four-year victory drought in February 1999 at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am and immediately turned his attention to the U.S. Open. The national championship had extra meaning for this adoptive Southerner because it was to be the first Open played at Pinehurst No. 2, Donald Ross’s masterwork in the Sandhills of North Carolina. With its distinctive turtleback greens, Pinehurst puts a premium on shotmaking, and the USGA offered an imaginative setup with less rough, allowing for more artistic expression. A vast canvas of land, Pinehurst accommodated some of the biggest crowds ever at a U.S. Open.
The thunderous cheers were a fitting soundtrack to a sport that was going big time. The 1999 season was the first played under monster TV deals that had been negotiated in the wake of Woods’s game-changing victory at the ’97 Masters. But always the iconoclast, Tiger decided after that triumph to rebuild his swing into a tighter, more repeatable action. He needed two years to master the changes. A month before the ’99 U.S. Open, he called his swing guru, Butch Harmon, from the range at the Byron Nelson Classic and uttered three iconic words: “I got it.” Woods, twenty-three, would win his next two starts, in Germany and at the Memorial, but even then he arrived at Pinehurst as only the co-headliner.
Mickelson was the talk of the Open because of Amy’s precarious condition at home in Scottsdale. She had been on bed rest since her fifth month of pregnancy. It was deeply important to Phil to be there for the birth, but ultimately he couldn’t resist the siren song of a course with which he had fallen in love while attending a golf school there at thirteen. “I didn’t decide I was going to go to Pinehurst until after we went to the doctor on Tuesday morning [of U.S. Open week],” Phil says. “He said it looked like there was at least another week to go, maybe two. Even though I got in only one practice round, I had been working on my game at home, so I was sharp.”
“When Phil left, it was the most emotional goodbye we’ve had,” Amy says. “But he was so determined. He said, ‘I am going to win the U.S. Open, I’m going to come home, we’re going to have the baby, and it’s going to be the best week of our lives.’ ”
“I had no doubt in my mind I was going to win the tournament,” Phil adds.
His caddie, Jim Mackay, carried a beeper in his pocket, and Phil vowed to walk off the course if summoned by Amy, even if he was leading the United States Open. “Oh, gawd, that beeper,” says Bones. “I was stressed about it the whole time. If I would have lost that thing, I’d have been filing for unemployment. I heard plenty of people say after the fact, ‘Oh, he wouldn’t have left, this and that.’ When he showed up in Pinehurst, he got in my grill and said, ‘I don’t care where I am, I want to know ten seconds after this thing goes off.’ He was dead serious.”
On the Wednesday of Open week, Amy went to see her doctor. She says, “He checks me out and he goes, ‘Wow, things have changed. If you had looked like this yesterday, I wouldn’t have told your husband he should go.’ My heart just sank.”
Paired with David Duval—the red-hot world number one who had inexplicably burned the fingers on his right hand in a mishap with a scalding kettle the week before the Open—Mickelson shot a three-under 67 to share the first-round lead with his playing partner on a rain-softened course. Woods and Stewart were a stroke back. In the second round, Mickelson and Duval posted matching 70s, while Stewart fired a 69 to join them in a three-way tie for the lead. With a 71, Woods was tied for fourth, two back.
“Amy saw the doctor today,” Mickelson said after his round. “It looks like it’s still going to be another week and a half. I’m really not overly concerned.”
“On Friday, I started to have contractions,” Amy says. “Phil and I are talking all the time on the phone, but I’m not saying what is going on, which was really stressful because we share everything. So we’d have these conversations, and as soon as he hung up I’d burst into tears.”
For moving day, Stewart and Duval were in the final group, immediately behind the dream pairing of Woods and Mickelson. There was an electricity in the air and even the players were feeling frisky. “Before the third round, Tiger and Payne were on the putting green,” says Chuck Cook, Stewart’s swing coach, “and Tiger says to him, ‘When I start designing golf courses, I’m going to make them nine thousand yards long, and then you old guys won’t stand a chance.’ Payne comes right back at him, ‘Well, if it’s the U.S. Open, you’ll still have to drive it in the fairway.’ Tiger didn’t have an answer for that one.”
After two days of baking in the sun, Pinehurst turned into a firm, fiery test for the third round. Afterward, Lee Janzen said, “I’ve been asked many times what’s the hardest golf course I’ve ever played. Now I have the answer.” Duval bogeyed four of the first eight holes. Woods started double bogey–bogey. When Stewart bogeyed three straight holes beginning on number eight, Mickelson suddenly had a three-shot lead. But Phil bogeyed eleven, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, to fall one stroke off Stewart’s lead. “Phil’s cut shot wasn’t working that week,” says Mackay. “He could only hit draws. So he drove it in eighteen fairway, and the pin was way left, and he hadn’t hit a cut shot in fifty-three holes, but he says, ‘I want to birdie this hole and get in the last group, so I’m going to have to try and cut an 8-iron.’ And he cut an 8-iron to five feet, made it, and got in the last group for Sunday.” Standing in the eighteenth fairway, Stewart waited for Mickelson’s extended standing ovation to subside and then stuffed a 7-iron to twelve feet and made a birdie of his own to retake sole possession of the lead.
“Big brass ones,” says Azinger.
Despite putting problems, Stewart ground out a 72, and at one under was the only player in the field below par. Mickelson’s 73 left him alone in second. With a 72, Woods was two behind, tied for third with Tim Herron. Back in Scottsdale, things were getting dicey. “Saturday night my contractions started coming really fast,” Amy says, “so we decided to go to the hospital. Phil happened to call right about then, but I didn’t say anything. At the hospital they put me on a monitor and gave me terbutaline to slow the contractions. Eventually Dr. Webb comes and stays with me. I’m asking him every five minutes, ‘Should I call Phil?’ He keeps saying not yet. This went on for a few hours. Finally the contractions slowed enough to where he felt comfortable sending me home.”
Following custom, the final round of the Open fell on Father’s Day. Stewart was ironing his clothes at his rental house while watching the early finishers when NBC played a tribute to Payne and his father, Bill, an accomplished amateur competitor. Bill signed up his son for his first Open qualifier when Payne was fifteen and even played alongside him. “Payne had tears in his eyes watching that feature,” says Tracey Stewart of her husband. “He was an emotional person, an emotional player, and I believe that thinking of his father [who died of cancer in 1985] gave him that extra motivation to go out and win the tournament.”
The Mickelsons shared their own emotional moment. “On Sunday morning, Phil calls and I don’t tell him a thing about the night before,” says Amy. “My lip is quivering. That was probably the most difficult moment of the whole thing.”
For the final round, Woods and Herron were in the second-to-last pairing, ahead of Stewart and Mickelson. It was an unseasonably cool and damp day. Stewart, wearing a navy rain jacket, took a pair of scissors to the sleeves to free up his swing, unwittingly creating a new fashion trend.
“The biggest bleachers I have ever seen at a tournament in the U.S. were at that event, to the left of eighteen green, and when you left the range to go to the first tee, you had to walk across eighteen fairway pretty close to the green,” says Mackay. “To this day, one of the coolest memories of my caddying life came when Phil and Payne were walking to the tee. The whole grandstand stood up and cheered. It was almost like two gladiators going into the Colosseum.”
Woods set the tone for the day with a birdie on the first hole, but Stewart answered with one of his own, pushing his lead to two. Mickelson cut the deficit in half with a curling twenty-five-footer on the seventh hole, which would be his only birdie of the day. When Stewart bogeyed ten and twelve, Mickelson stood alone at the top of the leaderboard.
At number fourteen, Woods drained a big-breaking thirty-footer for birdie. He dropped to one knee and pumped his fist, sending the gallery into a frenzy. “You could feel the energy building,” Mickelson says. “You knew Tiger was going to keep coming.”
Stewart rallied on the thirteenth hole to bury a fifteen-footer for birdie to reclaim a share of the lead. “I wasn’t going to just hand the trophy over to [Mickelson],” he says after the round.
At 489 yards, the sixteenth hole was, to that point, the longest par-4 in U.S. Open history, and for the final round it played into the wind. From 210 yards out, Woods reached the green with a laser-like 4-iron and then made a twelve-foot birdie putt, uncorking a vintage uppercut. He was a stroke off the lead. “It was football-game loud,” says Herron. “It would give you chills up and down your arms to hear it.”
Back at the par-3 fifteenth hole, Stewart pulled a 4-iron left of the green and missed an eight-footer for par, falling into a tie for second with Woods. “I felt like I was in control of the tournament,” Mickelson says. “I was leading, and it’s a very difficult course to make birdies on. All I needed was three pars.”
At sixteen, Mickelson tugged his approach from 226 yards into the rough, short and right of the green. Stewart mis-hit his 2-iron, and his ball died ten yards short of the green. He ran the next shot thirty feet past the hole. “When he bladed his chip shot, I didn’t really consider him the number one threat,” says Mickelson. “I thought Tiger was.”
On the downhill 196-yard par-3 seventeenth, the pin was back-left. Woods overcooked a drawing 7-iron into the greenside bunker. A decent recovery shot left him a crucial five-footer to save par. “He had played an incredible back nine, and he had all the momentum from the crowd,” says Herron. “I was thinking there’s no way he misses the putt.”
He misses the putt.
“That’s the last important putt Tiger missed for a decade,” says Azinger.
Back at sixteen, Mickelson had what he calls a “very easy” chip, but he left it eight feet short. His one-of-a-kind Yonex wedges had a razor-sharp leading edge, and Mickelson would later confide that in certain conditions he could not be certain how the club would interact with the turf. It had been bugging him for a long while, but by the next year he had walked away from Yonex, largely because of that one shot.
Stewart followed Mickelson’s chip by ramming in his thirty-footer for an unlikely par. “If that ball doesn’t go in, it runs fifteen to twenty feet by,” Mickelson says. “It had the potential to go off the green.”
As the leaders played toward twilight, the conditions became dark and misty, highly unusual for a tournament that always heralds the start of summer. “There was an almost eerie feeling,” says Rick Smith. “And you know, there’s this church across the street from Pinehurst. Seconds after Payne made that putt on sixteen, the bells started ringing, and that beautiful sound went out across the course. It felt like some kind of a sign.”
Back at sixteen, Mickelson faced a do-or-die eight-footer. “That’s when I realized, If I don’t make this putt, we’re tied. I thought I was going to have a two-stroke lead with two to go.”
On the NBC telecast, Johnny Miller intoned gravely, “Biggest putt of his life.”
Mickelson pulled it, his first bogey of the round. With honors at the par-3 seventeenth hole, Stewart played a gorgeous drawing 6-iron to four feet. Mickelson answered with a high fade to six feet. “When Phil’s ball hit and got close to the hole, that was a smell-the-roses moment for me,” says Mackay. “The place went crazy.”
Now Mickelson faced another defining putt, but was uncertain about the break. He called in his caddie for a second look. “I thought it was pretty straight,” Bones says. “But [the putt] certainly turned a little right, and it missed. In hindsight it was probably left edge. In my [twenty-five] years as a caddie, if I could have one do-over, it would be reading that putt, by a million miles.”
Stewart brushed in his birdie putt, and in the span of twenty minutes, went from one down to one up. He hit a pretty good drive down the right side of the eighteenth fairway, but his ball kicked into the rough by one foot. “Worst lie of the week,” Cook says. “There was no way he could get to the green.” Stewart hacked out, leaving himself seventy-seven yards from the flag. Mickelson split the fairway—for the round he missed only two—and from 178 yards followed with what he called an “average” 7-iron that stopped thirty feet right of the hole. Stewart knocked a lob wedge eighteen feet below the cup. Putting first, Mickelson played a tad too much break and missed by an inch or two. The situation facing Stewart was now breathtaking in its simplicity: Make the putt and he’s the United States Open champion. Miss it and he’s headed to an eighteen-hole Monday playoff.
“I kept my head still on that putt,” Stewart said afterward. “And when I looked up, it was about two feet from the hole and it was breaking right in the center and I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I’d accomplished another dream of mine.”
Says Cook, “I don’t know if there is an outside force directing all of it, but the environment created in situations like that tournament pushes a certain outcome. It was such a great moment, the only outcome that made sense was for Payne to make that putt.”
Stewart loosed a guttural scream and two lusty fist pumps, and his caddie, Mike Hicks, jumped into his arms and wrapped his legs around his boss. Stewart then walked to Mickelson, cupped Phil’s face in his hands, and said, “Good luck with the baby. There’s nothing like being a father!”
Says Azinger, “When you talk about the greatest showings of sportsmanship in golf history, you have to say number one is Nicklaus’s concession to Tony Jacklin at the Ryder Cup. But that right there is probably second. Payne could immediately empathize with Mickelson. Payne knows the agony of defeat. Who knew it more than him?”
Mickelson bolted for the airport and arrived home at midnight. Amy went into labor the next morning, about the time Phil would have been warming up for a playoff. Amanda was born that evening.
“Here we are fifteen years later,” Phil told me in 2014, “and I can tell her with all sincerity that her birth is the most emotional moment of our lives. It’s something I would never want to miss, and I’m so glad I was able to be there, because it really is one of the greatest experiences in the world. I loved her even before I knew her.”
Two months later, Woods won the PGA Championship, touching off a historic run. “What happened at Pinehurst hardened Tiger,” says Jacobsen. “It proved to him that just showing up wasn’t enough—if he wanted to win more majors, he would have to find another gear. And he found a gear no one else had. Payne showed him the way.”
The anguish/exhilaration of losing the Open but welcoming a daughter also had a profound effect on Mickelson. “I believe one of the greatest influences Payne had was in how he helped change Phil as a man,” says Azinger. “Payne was a great example of a guy who had found perfect balance in life. Phil had always done the right thing, he’d always been a good guy, but golf was everything to him. What happened at Pinehurst bonded them forever, and it set priorities for Phil.”
Four months after Pinehurst, at the contentious Brookline Ryder Cup, Stewart was the team leader on the golf course and at the victory party after the U.S. regained the Cup. “Payne gave those teams so much fire,” says Amy. “He loved playing for his country. I remember him one time at the team hotel running down the hall in these red, white, and blue pants, carrying a boom box that was playing ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ At Brookline he was the last one standing at the party. I still have this image of him on top of a piano drinking out of a champagne bottle.”
Four weeks later Stewart, forty-two, was flying from Orlando to Houston for the Tour Championship when the Learjet he was traveling on depressurized, incapacitating the pilots and passengers and sending the plane on a ghostly four-hour flight across the U.S. When it ran out of fuel it crashed into a field in South Dakota, killing all six aboard. “To lose Payne so soon after Pinehurst, it gave that tournament a kind of mythical quality,” says Jacobsen. “I don’t think there’s any question it’s the greatest U.S. Open of all time. All the elements came together: an iconic venue, two generations of stars battling on Sunday, a historic putt on the last hole. That alone would make it a classic. But Payne’s death guaranteed that what happened there would live on forever.”