Heading into the 1999 PGA Championship, Phil Mickelson spied a newspaper headline that rankled so much he talked about it for years afterward: “Last Chance for Phil Mickelson to Win a Major Tournament Before the Millennium Ends.” His inability to win the big one was already a thing, clearly, but it was about to get much worse: Tiger Woods took the ’99 PGA and then in 2000 had the greatest season in golf history, winning the U.S. and British Opens by a combined twenty-three shots and then prevailing at the PGA Championship in a thrilling playoff versus Bob May. The 2000 campaign was Mickelson’s finest to date, with four wins, twelve top-ten finishes, and a career-best $4.7 million in earnings to finish second on the money list (a mere $4.5 million from the top spot). Amid Tiger’s dominance, Mickelson’s career year barely registered. But he had put in place important building blocks. “What Tiger was doing lit a fire under Phil,” says Rick Smith. “Of course it did. He always worked harder than people gave him credit for, but he definitely kicked it up a couple of notches. He wasn’t just going to give in to Tiger. He wanted to challenge him.”
Mickelson’s game was razor-sharp in the run-up to the 2001 Masters: another victory at Torrey Pines, runner-up at Bay Hill, third place in Atlanta. Per the new norm, Woods was simply better, with back-to-back wins at Bay Hill and the Players Championship. Tiger arrived in Augusta chasing the tantalizing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hold all four major championship trophies at the same time. Since this feat would bleed across two seasons, it was not a traditional Grand Slam, and thus demanded a new moniker: the Tiger Slam.
Inevitably, Woods and Mickelson collided at the Masters. Standing in the fourteenth fairway during the third round, Phil was one shot off Ángel Cabrera’s lead and one stroke ahead of Tiger. Mickelson’s approach shot came up short to a back flag and trickled down the vertiginous slope to just off the front of the green. Every other golfer in the field would have putted the next shot or played a bump and run. Not sexy, but either play would eliminate the monumental screwup. Mickelson, ever the adrenaline junkie, couldn’t resist pulling out his 60-degree wedge and trying to fly his ball all the way to the flag. He was dancing on a knife’s edge. With the Masters hanging in the balance, it was the kind of shot that could make him a folk hero, but he caught it heavy and his ball expired well short of the target and then slowly, agonizingly, rolled back down the green. It took Mickelson three putts from there, a galling double bogey that allowed Woods to race past him and take the lead. They would play together in the final pairing on Sunday, surely the most important round of Mickelson’s career, and maybe Woods’s, too. Saturday night in the press tent, Mickelson didn’t shrink from the magnitude of the moment. “I desperately want this,” he said.
And what made him think he could somehow beat the great Woods despite a one-stroke deficit, after years of having fallen short? “I’m a different player,” he said. “Not only mentally but physically. You could attribute it to mental toughness or you could attribute it to improved ball-striking, improved putting. I think I would attribute it to the latter. I feel very confident tomorrow, because I’ve been playing well this last year and a half, and the swing changes that I have made, I feel like a much more consistent ball striker day in and day out and I feel like I have become a more consistent putter as well. So the anxiety that I would have between rounds on whether or not [my game] would be there tomorrow, is really no longer there. I feel very comfortable that when I get on the tee tomorrow, it will be there.”
When Tiger bogeyed the first hole on Sunday, they were tied for the lead. It stayed that way until Phil clanked a three-footer for par on the sixth hole and then Woods birdied the next two. He was still one stroke ahead of Mickelson when they reached the brutal par-4 eleventh hole. Trying to play a big slinging hook around the corner, Mickelson overcooked it and nailed a tree. He fought hard to leave himself an eight-foot putt for par, but missed it on the low side. Woods birdied the hole, thanks to a pinpoint approach, a two-shot swing that dropped Mickelson to third place, a stroke behind a streaking David Duval, who had birdied seven of the first ten holes. To have any chance at victory, Mickelson needed to light up the back nine par-5s. On thirteen, with his driver, he smoked a hard fade around the corner. Woods stepped up and, with his 3-wood, ripped a towering draw twenty yards past his would-be rival.
“I could sort of sense that Mickelson was feeling a bit dejected,” says Steve Williams, Woods’s caddie at the time. “He’s just hit the best drive that he can, and then Tiger’s hit a 3-wood and whipped it by him. And then Phil says to Tiger, ‘Do you always hit your 3-wood that long?’ And Tiger says, ‘Normally further than that.’ It’s amazing the little games within the game Tiger would play. That shot just deflated Phil’s ego, and he couldn’t bounce back.”
That’s not entirely true: Mickelson birdied the thirteenth hole and then hit a daring slicing long iron from behind the trees on fifteen to set up another birdie and pull within one of Woods. If you were a golf fan, you could barely breathe.
At the par-3 sixteenth hole, the pin was in its traditional Sunday spot, back-left, seducing players into feeding their tee shots off the sloping green toward the hole. Mickelson had honors and a chance to send the crowd to the moon, but he hooked his 7-iron well right of the flag and his ball died up on the slope, leaving a nearly impossible putt down the hill. The best he could do was trickle it to five feet past the hole. He pushed the must-make par putt and his bid was over. In victory, Woods was so overwhelmed he covered his face with his cap so the world wouldn’t see his tears. He owned the Tiger Slam, while Mickelson was once again left to dissect where it all went wrong.
“I feel as though my game is to a point where I feel like I can finally win these tournaments and contend in them regularly,” Mickelson said, following the final round. “I really do have that confidence. When I look back on this week, though, if I’m going to win with Tiger in the field, I cannot make the mistakes that I have been making. I’ve got to eliminate those somehow. I may be able to make one or two, but I can’t make as many as I’ve made all the week, from double bogeys on twelve and fourteen earlier in the week, to four bogeys today that were really not tough pars. So, I just can’t afford to keep throwing away shot after shot. But all in all, I don’t feel as though I’m that far off. I just think that mentally, I’m not there for all seventy-two holes. I feel like I’m just slacking off on two or three holes and just kind of letting momentum take over and not really thinking through each shot, and it’s cost me some vital strokes.”
More tests awaited. At the ensuing U.S. Open, Mickelson was only two strokes back heading into the final round, but he self-immolated with a 75. “I don’t know exactly what I learned today,” he said dejectedly afterward. “I think that it was a difficult day for me, in that I did not play the way I would have liked, obviously. I’m not going to beat myself up over today’s round. It’s certainly not the finish I would have liked, but out of playing forty-five majors or so now, and not winning any, I’m tired of beating myself up time after time.”
But Mickelson has always been able to take a punch; two months later he came back for more at the PGA Championship. He opened with three straight 66s at Atlanta Country Club, but the golf gods were not on his side, as late in the third round, moments after Mickelson claimed a two-stroke lead, David Toms made an ace to close the gap. Phil’s game was clearly tighter and he’d proven he could contend at any given major, but questions remained about his mental toughness. That turned into a low roar after the events on the sixteenth hole on Sunday. Mickelson was tied for the lead when he played a mediocre approach shot to forty-five feet. At every golf tournament there are always a few hardos who camp out by a particular green and, after watching putt after putt, feel like they know the break better than the pros. As the crowd hushed for Mickelson to survey his birdie, a couple of these well-lubricated fans shouted advice. “They’re telling me how slow it is and I tried to block it out of my mind, but it hit my subconscious,” Mickelson said. “I just gave [my putt] a little bit extra, and it’s disappointing that I was not able to block that out, because I’ve been focusing very well all week. I’ve been able to not let distractions interfere with my train of thought, and on that putt, what was said kind of crept in and I just gave it a little extra, and sure enough ran it eight feet by and now I’ve got a downhill breaking putt that was pretty quick that I didn’t have the chance to be aggressive with.” It was a shocking (but human) admission. Mickelson missed the comebacker to tumble out of the lead. On the seventy-second hole, he had a twenty-five-footer for birdie that could have altered the outcome, but he committed the cardinal sin of leaving it six inches short, dead on-line. Toms, having driven into the rough and laid up short of the watery green, pulled a Payne Stewart and gutted a ten-footer to break Mickelson’s heart yet again. Phil shot a four-round total of 266, what would have been the lowest in major championship history if Toms wasn’t one stroke better.
The notion that Woods and Mickelson might be buddies died at the 1998 Los Angeles Open, when Phil goaded the young master into a practice round. A money game ensued, of course, and Mickelson hustled Woods—a notorious tightwad—for $500, which Tiger paid off with five crisp hundred-dollar bills, each emblazoned with the dour mugshot of Ben Franklin. Phil being Phil, he made photocopies of one of the greenbacks and taped it in Woods’s locker along with a note: Just wanted you to know Benji and his friends are very happy in their new home. Woods was not amused; it would be two decades before he deigned to play another practice round with Mickelson.
The relationship only grew frostier as Woods serially crushed Mickelson’s spirit, including beating him again at the 2002 Masters, Tiger’s third green jacket in the space of six years. A month after Augusta, at the Byron Nelson, John Hawkins of Golf World magazine wangled a lunchtime interview with Woods in the player dining area. They had just settled into a corner booth when Mickelson padded up, carrying an overstuffed tray of food.
“Mind if I join you guys?”
Says Hawkins, “I look at Tiger, he looks at me, and his expression is like, Are you fucking kidding me?”
Oblivious, Mickelson sat down and turned off Hawkins’s tape recorder and proceeded to dominate the conversation. He is an extrovert while Woods is an introvert, and a lot of their awkwardness with each other flowed from there. The Lakers and underdog Nets had just secured their spots in the NBA Finals, so Mickelson, while wolfing down his lunch, said to Woods, “I know you love the Lakers, so I’ll take the Nets for a hundred dollars.”
Says Hawkins, “Phil gets up and leaves and the first thing out of Tiger’s mouth is ‘Can you fucking believe that guy?’ It was so obvious to both of us that Phil was willing to pay a hundred dollars just to earn a little love from Tiger.”
Mickelson had never been in a worse headspace than the spring of 2002. At Bay Hill, he led Woods by a shot with six holes to play on Sunday, but gave away the tournament on the par-5 sixteenth hole, which has a green protected by water. Mickelson hooked his drive into the trees, but instead of punching out and giving himself a solid birdie chance from the fairway, he tried to play a crazy-ass low slice under branches, over a pond, and between three deep bunkers. As he stood over the ball, Johnny Miller on the NBC telecast called it a “one in a hundred” shot, and when Mickelson inevitably plunked his ball in the water, a baffled Dan Hicks said on the telecast, “It’s almost like he’s addicted to high stakes and he just can’t help himself.” Mickelson bogeyed the final three holes to hand the trophy to Tiger. (The Orlando Sentinel headline said it all: “Mickelson Gambles and Woods Collects.”)
“The difference between them is that Phil wants to hit an amazing shot, but all Tiger wants to do is hit the right shot,” says Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee. “Phil is a gambler. Tiger is the house, and he knows the house always wins. Phil thinks he knows more than the house.”
The next time Mickelson showed his face on Tour, at the Players Championship, the press room bards were all over him, and he launched into what sounded like a well-rehearsed manifesto. “I won’t ever change my style of play,” Mickelson said. “I get criticized for it, but the fact is that I play my best when I play aggressive, when I attack, when I create shots. That’s what I enjoy about the game, that challenge. And if I were to change my style of play, I won’t perform at the same level, nor would I enjoy the game as much. So to win twenty tournaments the way I have, I have had to do it the way that brings out my best golf, and my best golf comes out when I play aggressive and play with creativity. Now, I may never win a major playing that way. I don’t know, I believe that if I’m patient, I will. But the fact is that if I change the way I play golf, one, I won’t enjoy the game as much and, two, I won’t play to the level I have been playing. So I won’t ever change. Not tomorrow, Sunday, or at Augusta or the U.S. Open, or any tournament.”
Mickelson was reminded that, for all of his power, Jack Nicklaus—maybe the greatest winner in all of sports, ever—was a plodding tactician at heart. “I enjoy watching Jack Nicklaus play, I just don’t enjoy playing that way myself,” Mickelson snorted.
A month later, the U.S. Open arrived at Bethpage, a retrofitted muni outside of New York City. It was a beastly test, and in practice rounds, players were widely forecasting carnage. Then Woods opened with rounds of 67-68, and only one player, Padraig Harrington, was within seven strokes of him. It was déjà vu all over again, but the teeming gallery of Noo Yawkers were bored by Woods’s relentless excellence and perhaps put off by his imperious manner. They turned their lonely eyes to the only player who didn’t seem cowed by Tiger’s very presence: a flashy lifelong Californian with a stiff perma-grin. It wasn’t a natural kinship, but Mickelson would have to do for the Bethpage crazies. On Saturday he channeled the energy of the crowd into a 67, the second-lowest round of the day, moving into a tie for third. Hunter Mahan would play with Mickelson at the ensuing Bethpage Open, and he says of the lovefest with the fans, “You never know about people and what they’re gonna like. In a weird way, Phil kind of looks like the Bethpage fans. He doesn’t have Tiger’s physique, he definitely doesn’t have his intensity or tunnel vision. [Mickelson] works with the fans and interacts with them and enjoys them. Not many golfers do—we tend to be more internal. But he gives them a lot of himself and they enjoy and appreciate it.”
Heading into the final round, Mickelson was five shots back of Woods, who had already proven to be a ruthless closer. It seemed like an impossible ask. But Mickelson made an admirable charge in the final round, eagling the ninth hole and then birdying eleven and twelve to move within two strokes of Woods’s lead. Bethpage was bonkers. But Tiger birdied thirteen, Phil bogeyed fourteen, and the dream was dead. Woods had won his seventh of the last eleven majors; only Ben Hogan from 1948 to ’53 had ever enjoyed a stretch as dominant.
Mickelson was again left to ponder what might have been. Forty-two years earlier, as Arnold Palmer was relaxing in the locker room at Cherry Hills between rounds of the thirty-six-hole finale to the U.S. Open, he mused to a nearby newspaperman, “What if I shoot 65? 280 always wins the Open.”
Not anymore. Across four days at Bethpage, Mickelson had taken exactly 280 strokes, even par. But Woods was three shots better.
“Heading in, I thought even par would be an incredible score for four rounds,” Mickelson said Sunday night at Bethpage. “I was able to accomplish that. I have to lower that number if I’m going to win tournaments with Tiger in the field. I’m starting to realize that, and I’ve got to continue to work harder in all areas of my game to compete at the highest level.”
Along with reconfiguring the record books, Woods was reshaping popular opinion: turns out golfers could look like athletes, too. With his obsessive workouts, Tiger’s upper body was increasingly the shape of a martini glass. Mickelson, meanwhile, was doughier than ever. He had put on a lot of weight in 2001, when Amy was pregnant with their daughter Sophia. His explanation? “You know how it is—she would eat, I would eat.”
In fact, he had always been a legendary chowhound. In the player dining tent at a long-ago PGA Championship, Mickelson hit the dessert buffet with such a vengeance that one fellow competitor reported, “He appears to be trying to commit suicide by chocolate éclair.” Gary McCord loves to tell the story of a young Mickelson, while en route to the course for a casual game, calling to offer to pick up Taco Bell for the rest of the foursome. They instructed him to order a dozen tacos. When Mickelson arrived at the course, the huge bag was full of discarded wrappers. McCord dug around and found three remaining tacos at the bottom; Mickelson had eaten the other nine. “It was maybe a ten-minute drive,” McCord says. “He averaged a taco a minute.”
In the Woods-Mickelson polarity, Phil’s pudge was a metaphor for his lack of discipline, on and off the course. Tida Woods took to referring to him as “the fat boy” and “Hefty,” a play on the Lefty nickname. Her son could be even more brutal. “One time in the Bay Hill locker room,” says Hawkins, “Tiger summoned me over. His manner was very serious. I got this feeling like he was pissed off, and I was wracking my brain trying to think of what I had written that would have set him off. He was tying his shoes and then he stood up slowly and leaned into me, to the point where he was violating my personal space. And he says, ‘Hey, Hawk, do you think Phil lactates?’ ”
In February 2003, Mickelson finally clapped back, telling one of the golf magazines, “In my mind, Tiger and I don’t have issues between us. Well, maybe one. He hates that I can fly it past him now [off the tee]. He has a faster swing speed than I do, but he has inferior equipment.”
Strictly speaking, Mickelson wasn’t wrong: Woods had chosen not to max out the latest space-age technology, using a ball that spun more (and thus didn’t carry as far) and a 43.5-inch, steel-shafted driver when most of his peers had embraced longer, lighter graphite shafts. This setup cost Woods distance but gave him more control and allowed him to shape the ball more effectively, a good trade in his eyes. “What Phil said was funny because it was true,” says Nick Faldo. “That Nike driver Tiger was using was horrendous.” But that’s nuance. Mickelson got barbecued in the press and the locker room for being so uppity, given that at the time Woods led him 8–0 in career major championship victories. Tiger relished every second of the backlash. “That was just Phil being Phil,” he said, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. “He was trying to be a smart aleck, and in this case it didn’t work.”
On March 26, 2003, Evan Mickelson was born. It was a harrowing delivery. Before being swept into the hallway by the nurses, Phil stood over his son and pleaded, “Breathe, Evan, breathe.” The little boy went seven minutes before taking his first breath, and only the quick work of the nurses and modern technology prevented catastrophe. Meanwhile, Amy was fighting for her life. She had sustained a six-inch tear in a major artery and was bleeding profusely, necessitating emergency surgery. “We were two or three minutes away from losing her,” Phil says.
Two weeks later he blew into the Masters and somehow finished third, two shots out of the Mike Weir–Len Mattiace playoff. But in the months that followed, Mickelson was understandably focused on caring for his family and he suffered only the second winless season of his career.
And yet, near the end of that summer, strange rumors began to waft out of Toledo: not unlike Michael Jordan a decade earlier, Mickelson had decided to chase his boyhood baseball dreams. The Mud Hens, a AAA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, were granting him a tryout as a pitcher. There was loose talk that if Mickelson excelled, he might get a one-day call-up in the season’s final week as a publicity stunt with the woebegone Tigers, who were on their way to losing 119 games. It seemed like fantasy camp for dilettantes, but Mickelson was quite serious, hiring renowned pitching coach Tom House to guide him. They spent months working in secret, sometimes on a mound Mickelson had built in his backyard. Hefty also began working with a functional fitness trainer named Sean Cochran to get in better shape. “He busted his hump,” says House. “His work ethic is off the charts.”
According to House, Mickelson was occasionally touching eighty-four miles per hour with his fastball. Asked whose delivery Mickelson’s evoked, House cites Justin Verlander, but quickly adds, “By no stretch of the imagination was he Justin Verlander. But same action, same basic delivery. He had a decent breaking ball and he was really proud of his split finger. He kept saying that was his money pitch he’d use to get guys out in the big leagues. Typical Phil, after two days he knew everything there is to know about pitching. He didn’t lack for confidence, that’s for sure.”
Mickelson’s tryout with the Mud Hens came in late August, the day after the World Series of Golf ended in Akron. Paul Azinger, Fred Couples, Justin Leonard, and Jay Haas were among the golfers who came along to lend support and/or talk trash. Mud Hens manager Larry Parrish didn’t want Mickelson to get killed by a line drive so he didn’t let him throw to any position players, just the pitchers, among them Fernando Rodney and Steve Avery. Mickelson wedged three Benjis to the batting cage and said the first player to hit a home run off of him could claim the money. He loosened up and then fired his best fastball. Mickelson asked what it registered on the speed gun.
68.
Incredulous, he reared back and uncorked another heater.
68.
His splitter was clocked in the 50s. No wonder none of the hitters could take him deep. Says Azinger, “A reporter later asked me how he did and I said they couldn’t touch him because those guys ain’t seen 68 since Little League. He printed it and Phil got mad at me.”
House attributes Mickelson’s embarrassing lack of velocity to a golfer’s mentality. “He told me that when he was working on swing changes he might hit five hundred balls in a day,” says House. “That’s not how it works with a pitcher. Leading up to the tryout he was throwing a hundred pitches a day in his backyard. There isn’t a big leaguer alive who can throw seven hundred pitches a week. When he went back [to Toledo] he was at a deficit. His arm was dead.”
After pitching batting practice, Mickelson stuck around for the game that followed, sitting in the dugout with the Mud Hens. “He was way into it,” says A. J. Hinch, the future Tigers manager who was then rehabbing an injury at the end of his playing career. “He asked a ton of good questions. A bunch of us were serious golfers, so we were peppering him with questions, too. It was fun. I give him credit for trying. You could tell he was coached, that he had put in the work. It wasn’t a gimmick. The effort was sincere.”
From what he saw, could Mickelson have been even a single-A prospect?
“No, not even close,” says Hinch, who carries a 6.6 handicap index. “That’s like asking if someone who hits their driver two hundred yards can compete on the Korn Ferry Tour. There’s just no way.”
Mickelson’s baseball cameo may have been a swing and a miss but there was an unexpected benefit: he hired Cochran full-time and got into the best shape of his life, aided by a no-fun diet that included a ban on sugar and six small, healthy meals a day (and no buns for his cheat days at In-N-Out). The off-season of 2003 was a time of reinvention for Mickelson. He gathered his intimates and took stock of where he was in his life and career. Earlier that year, while Evan and Amy had been battling to live, he sat in a lonely hospital hallway and made a covenant to lead a more impactful life. Now he and his wife founded the Phil and Amy Mickelson Foundation and they pledged to use their growing fortune for large-scale philanthropy. Looking ahead to the coming season, Mickelson instructed his swing coach, Rick Smith, and short-game specialist, Dave Pelz, to come up with detailed game plans for improvement and then put in man-hours implementing their suggestions. With Smith, who ministered to the long game, Mickelson focused on quieting his lower body during the swing and committing to mastering a fade with his driver, which would help rein in the big miss. With Pelz, Mickelson focused on controlling the spin and carry distances with his short irons and wedges. He began putting towels on his practice areas at five-yard increments so he could more precisely dial in his carry distances.
This period of personal growth was bittersweet for one reason: Nunu’s health was failing. Every year, a couple days after Christmas, Grandchildren’s Day was held at the Santos home. Al and Jennie would host their seven grandkids to share a big meal, tell stories, and dispense old-world advice. It was a treasured tradition for all of them. By Christmas 2003, Nunu was ninety-seven and his kitchen was festooned with twenty-one flags, one for each of his grandson’s Tour victories. Knowing this would be their last such gathering with Al, each of the grandkids went around the room and offered heartfelt words about their relationship. Phil broke down in tears reminiscing about their fishing trips and many rounds of golf together. As the evening was ending, Nunu motioned for Mickelson to come over to him. “Philip, this is your year,” he whispered. “You’re going to win the Masters.” Al Santos died ten days later. Those were the last words he ever spoke to his grandson.