Late on Easter Sunday, Phil Mickelson stood over a birdie putt on the eighteenth hole to win the 2004 Masters, and it was as quiet as church. Thousands of fans had encircled the green, glowing from sweat and the most exciting Masters finish since forty-six-year-old Jack Nicklaus turned back the clock in 1986. Ernie Els, the game’s gentle giant, was in the clubhouse after a dazzling 67, having rushed to the lead of the tournament with two eagles in a span of six holes midway through the round. Mickelson chased him down with a back-nine charge for the ages, and now, having endured countless heartbreaks in his decade-plus pursuit of a first major championship, Mickelson was facing the most important putt of his career, eighteen feet that meant so much to so many.
Behind the green, Amy Mickelson had been blinking back tears since the fifteenth hole, so overwhelming was the emotion of the day. Nearby, two sets of grandparents were passing around Phil and Amy’s three young children, including Evan, who had just turned a year old and showed no aftereffects of his fraught arrival into the world. Standing sentry behind Amy was Steve Loy, Mickelson’s college coach turned consigliere. On the edge of the green, fidgeting nervously, was Jim Mackay. He is part of what Amy calls “our gang.” She said that week, “We joke that Phil is the only player in golf history to have the same wife, caddie, agent, and nanny his whole career.” Shades of Pinehurst, Bones had a beeper in his pocket, but this time it was for his wife, Jennifer, a college friend to Amy, who served as matchmaker. Jen was about to burst and had spent much of Masters Sunday on a raft in their backyard pool in Scottsdale. “The doctors said the weightlessness makes the baby not want to come out,” Bones explained. This Masters would be defined by life and death: on the morning of the first round, Bruce Edwards lost his long battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Known as the “Arnold Palmer of caddies,” Edwards had long been a mentor to Bones. As his boss eyed his birdie putt, Mackay’s mind wandered to Edwards. “I had a strong feeling he was looking down on us and smiling,” he said.
Back in San Diego, Mickelson’s ninety-two-year-old grandmother, Jennie Santos, rested comfortably in front of the TV. Nunu’s widow had been getting ready to leave for Augusta when she suffered a mild stroke.
All of this feeling and personal history was distilled into one downhill right-to-lefter. Making a putt like this has very little to do with technical proficiency. It is an X-ray of the soul, revealing the unseen parts of a golfer that cannot be measured on a launch monitor: heart, guts, balls. At last, Mickelson nudged his golf ball toward the cup. Moments earlier he had studied playing partner Chris DiMarco’s unsuccessful effort from virtually the same spot. “Chris’s ball was hanging on that left lip, and when it got to the hole, it just fell off,” Mickelson said. “And my putt was almost on the identical line. Instead of falling off, it caught that lip and circled around and went in. I can’t help but think [Nunu] may have had a little something to do with that.”
The crowd exploded, a release of emotion years in the making. Mickelson did a low-flying jumping jack and screamed, “I did it!” He hugged Bones and then kissed his golf ball and threw it into the crowd. (It would later be returned by the fan who caught it and then mounted next to the eighteenth-hole flag and displayed in the Santos kitchen.) Behind the green, Mickelson scooped up Sophia and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Daddy won! Can you believe it?” he shouted. He wrapped Amy in a long, tearful hug. The eighteenth green at the Masters has seen some of golf’s most memorable displays of emotion. Phil and Amy were in almost the same spot where Eldrick Woods and his father, Earl, embraced after Tiger’s victory in 1997. The final green is where Ben Crenshaw was doubled over in agony and ecstasy after having been guided to victory in ’95 by the unseen hand of his teacher Harvey Penick, who died two days before the tournament began. Now Mickelson had joined the pantheon of Masters winners. After seventeen career top tens in the majors, including three straight third-place finishes at Augusta, he had proved himself in the most audacious fashion imaginable. On a course that is far tougher than it was in ’86, when Nicklaus shot a back-nine 30 to surge to victory, Mickelson birdied five of the last seven holes to finish with a 31 on the final nine on Sunday. He became only the sixth player to snatch the Masters with a birdie on the seventy-second hole, a list that includes Palmer, who had a birdie-birdie finish in 1960.
“Now we can finally stamp him APPROVED,” said Davis Love III, a friend of Mickelson’s. “It’s like a… what’s the right word?… It’s like a coronation.”
You can’t have a coronation without the King, and over the first two rounds Mickelson and every other competitor had to take a backseat to Palmer, who was saying goodbye to Augusta after fifty years of mythmaking. Palmer was the first player to win four green jackets, between 1958 and ’64; the Masters is where his Army first marched. As he said goodbye on Friday, the pines echoed with the roars from the standing ovations he received on every hole. At eighteen, in a golden twilight, Palmer tapped in for a final bogey. Behind the green, he kissed a pretty girl—his then fiancée, Kit Gawthrop—and then he was gone. At that moment, on the seventeenth hole, Mickelson was charging. Something in his strut looked familiar during a week in which so much footage of the vintage Palmer was unreeled. As Mickelson walked toward the green, where a frighteningly fast thirty-footer for birdie awaited, his swing coach, Rick Smith, whispered to Amy, “Look how fast he’s going. He knows he’s going to make this putt. He’s dying to hit it!” Sure enough, Mickelson poured in the putt, the exclamation point on a solid 69 that vaulted him into a tie for fourth place, three shots back of Justin Rose, the young Englishman.
Phil the Thrill had put himself in contention with admirable restraint. In the previous three Masters, Mickelson had made sixty birdies, while the respective champions combined for fifty-eight; to win he would have to make fewer big numbers. Augusta National’s dangerous par-5s were the battlefield where the war played out between the old and new Phil. When, instead of boldly firing at the flag on thirteen during the first round, he conservatively aimed thirty-five feet left, it was clear that Mickelson was playing a different game than in years past. And when you don’t tempt the golf gods, you are rewarded. At thirteen on Friday, Mickelson pulled his approach, and it rolled off the green toward Rae’s Creek before stopping inches above the hazard, the most momentous Velcro job since Fred Couples’s ball stayed up on the twelfth hole in 1992. Mickelson turned a would-be 6 into a 4, the key break of the tournament.
For this Masters, Mickelson throttled back in another way, abandoning his trademark flop shot on Augusta National’s tight lies and using his putter from off the greens. This wasn’t glamorous, but it got the job done. At the eighteenth on Saturday, he got up and down from behind the green with a deft putt off a mound, preserving a bogeyless 69 that gave him his first fifty-four-hole lead in a major. Relying on his new fade off the tee over the first three rounds, Mickelson played the most controlled, disciplined golf of his career, hitting 73.6 percent of his fairways and leading the tournament in greens in regulation. In fact, on Saturday, after Mickelson had spent the day hitting all but four fairways, Amy greeted him by saying, “Honey, I miss you lately. You never hit it over by the ropes anymore.”
Still, Sunday loomed as the ultimate test. That Woods, his nemesis, was in twentieth place at three over par, surely helped. “Well, it doesn’t suck,” Mickelson said, breaking up a loosey-goosey press conference. However relaxed Mickelson seemed, you just knew he wouldn’t make it easy on Sunday. Early on, he came down with a case of the yips (missing a three-and-a-half-footer for par on three) and then the fluffs (leaving a sand shot in a bunker on five for another bogey). Mickelson was three down to a relentless Els when he reached the heart of Amen Corner. He might have played Nicklaus’s brand of percentage golf to get this far, but now it was time to get after it like Arnie. On the par-3 twelfth, the scariest little hole in golf, Mickelson attacked the flag, sticking an 8-iron to twelve feet for the birdie that began his comeback. At thirteen, he ripped a high fade around the corner and then rifled a 7-iron to twenty feet, setting up a two-putt birdie. He was one back, but only for a moment, as Els played a superb chip at the par-5 fifteenth, capping a run in which he went six under in a nine-hole stretch. On the CBS telecast, David Feherty enthused, “He’s got the green jacket by the collar!”
Els finished with three pars, including a bailout tee shot on the par-3 sixteenth and then a drive on eighteen that bounded into a bunker. Looking back now he says, “What an unbelievable Sunday. The frustrating thing for me is I felt I had more to give [on the last three holes], but I played it too safe. I didn’t want to make a mistake coming in, knowing Phil’s record in the majors to that point and that seventeen and eighteen are tough driving holes. I thought I’d be okay.”
Mickelson was still one down when he arrived at sixteen, the hole that had cost him dearly in 2001, when his hooked 7-iron put him above the hole, resulting in the three-putt that killed his chances. On Thursday of this Masters, he had double-bogeyed the hole, but Mickelson is nothing if not fearless: he played another draw, but this time started it out over the water, leaving himself eighteen feet below the hole. Off-air, Feherty had this reaction when seeing Mickelson’s hyperaggressive start line: “Holy shit!” Phil buried the birdie putt to finally draw even with Els. “Oh, baby,” he shouted. “Wow.” Walking off the green, he nudged Bones and said, “Let’s get one more.” A par at seventeen set up the drama of the seventy-second hole.
Mickelson’s breakthrough brilliance made it clear this Masters would be not the culmination of a career but the beginning of a wondrous second act. One of the game’s greats, Ben Hogan, didn’t win his first major championship until he was thirty-four. By the time he was forty-one, he had eight more. Mickelson was only thirty-three. For years, golf fans had been pining for someone to play Palmer to Woods’s Nicklaus. Now Mickelson had arrived. The King was gone. Long live the new king.
When you win the Masters, the green jacket ceremony is the beginning of the festivities, not the end. Long-standing tradition compels the new champ to have dinner with the entire Augusta National membership, in a ballroom that is constructed annually just for that purpose. “It’s amazing when you walk in the room and see all those green jackets,” says Patrick Reed, the 2018 champ. “Mine, I get to go out and play for it and try to earn it on the golf course, and for them to be invited and be the very few select around the world that have the opportunity to be a member here and to come to such a coveted place and to play such an amazing golf course and be a part of such a small group and to get them all together is really special.” This is part of the reflexive awe so many players have for Augusta National: it is rare for them to be the poorest person in a room.
Unlike the Tuesday night Champions Dinner, the club handles the menu—lobster macaroni and cheese is a perennial favorite—and covers the cost. But after his life-altering victory, Mickelson pulled aside then-chairman Hootie Johnson. “He was so overjoyed to have won, he really wanted to celebrate,” says Amy, “so he tells Hootie, ‘Go deep in the wine cellar and pull out your best stuff.’ ” Augusta National’s cellar is legendary and has been widely described as among the best in the world. A particular favorite among certain green jackets is Château Lafite Rothschild, a Bordeaux of which some vintages can retail for up to $15,000 a bottle. Says Amy, “Phil got pulled away, and after he was gone I heard Hootie say to another club official, ‘Do be sure that Mr. Mickelson is presented the bill for the wine.’ ”
Cell phones are verboten even in this private setting, so just as the Mickelson coterie was arriving for dinner, he was summoned to an old-fashioned landline within the clubhouse. “Now I know why you play golf instead of basketball,” President George W. Bush told the new champ. “You can’t dunk!”
Later that night—much later—the party moved to a private house the Mickelsons had rented for the week. A phone kept ringing, but nobody answered it. “Tell them we went to the moon,” Amy said dreamily.
Her husband was strutting around in black shorts, black T-shirt, white socks, an Arizona State cap… and his new green jacket. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” Phil said with a rakish grin, “but I just can’t take it off!” No kidding. Guess what he slept in that night?