KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. – It is in the cauldron of major championships where a player’s greatest strengths and frailties are revealed. The stress of winning majors drove Bobby Jones to retire at 28. The stress of losing majors gave Doug Sanders haunted sleep. Both sides of that coin can come at a heavy cost.
This week in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Phil Mickelson arrived at the Ocean Course on Kiawah Island with his dust-covered major championship resume, not to mention his game stuck in a sort of middle-aged purgatory.
Wooed by his buddies on the PGA Tour Champions, reported to be a target of a proposed (and deep-pocketed) rival golf league, and splashed onto our television screens hawking everything from beer to enterprise software, Phil Mickelson was everywhere and nowhere.
Bereft of a major since 2013, absent from PGA Tour leaderboards for nearly a year (he had no top-20s in his previous 17 starts before Kiawah), he blamed a lack of focus while others pondered the inevitability of Father Time.
The weight loss and the CHiPS-era motorcycle sunglasses seemed like golf’s version of the midlife crisis, though far cheaper than a little red Corvette.
When the 50-year-old Mickelson stuck a peg into Pete Dye’s seaside masterpiece on Thursday, hardly anybody noticed, but for those wanting to enjoy the nostalgia of seeing him grouped with the 49-year-old, three-time major champion Padraig Harrington and the 33-year-old Jason Day, the former world No. 1 whose formidable talents have been chipped away by an ailing back.
While Day swung for the fences, Mickelson and Harrington mixed their pitches artfully, peppering the Ocean Course with length off the tee when necessary but also the guile and imagination that led them to split eight majors between 2004-13.
On walks from the tee boxes to the greens, over sandy paths and emerald fairways, they talked shop and they talked trash. Still, the crowning of an elder major champion seemed far-fetched in this era of Trackman.
“Unfortunately, as you gain experience, you lose innocence,” said Harrington, 49, explaining what he and Mickelson were facing in trying to become the oldest major champion in history. “There is a sweet spot on the way up when you’re gaining a bit of experience and yet you still have that innocence. Myself and Phil, yeah, we have experience, but we have some scar tissue in there and we can overthink things at times.”
While Harrington’s major championship clip came in a brilliant burst over the 2007 and 2008 seasons, Mickelson spent his early career as the can’t-miss kid who could do everything but win majors. He won the U.S. Amateur. He won on the PGA Tour as an amateur. He finished tied for sixth in his first PGA Championship in 1993 and solo third the next year. He logged six top-10s in majors through 1996, before most of the world had ever even heard of Tiger Woods.
His turned-up collar, rainbow flop shots and booming draw made him a kick to watch, but the risk-taking took its toll. Many in the golf cognoscenti believed Mickelson’s style of play was too flashy to win majors, that it wasn’t dependable or patient enough. Many others believed that he wasn’t treating the task of winning majors soberly enough, that he was frittering away his gifts.
At the 2002 Players Championship, two years shy of his first Masters win, Mickelson held a contentious back-and-forth with golf writers that many scribes still talk about to this day. He was asked why he didn’t hit a few more fairways and why he didn’t have a little more Jack and a little less Arnie in his arsenal?
Phil dug in his heels.
“I won’t ever change my style of play,” he 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. I have had a number of chances to win majors, and I wouldn’t have had those chances had I played any other way. 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. I won’t ever change. Not tomorrow, Sunday or at Augusta, or the U.S. Open, or any tournament.”
Through all of those media scrums and close calls on the golf course, through Payne Stewart in 1999 and David Toms in 2001 and Tiger Woods 24/7/365, Mickelson kept firing at flags, of course, but he also modified his game, adding a safer, more dependable cut shot off the tee, incorporating some strategies that worked (two drivers at the 2006 Masters? Win!) and some that didn’t (no drivers at the 2008 U.S. Open? T-18).
Has there ever been a player who has experienced the kaleidoscope of emotions in major championships like Mickelson? The breathtaking back nines like Nicklaus, the Van de Velde-level heartbreak, the Seve magic, the Norman tough luck.
All of those major Sundays, from Muirfield to Merion to Winged Foot, proved vital in what would be his toughest and most unlikely run to a sixth major title, standing across from the PGA Tour’s resident bully in Brooks Koepka.
Built like a Brinks Truck – though slowed by an ever-growing list of ailments – Koepka gamely put himself in position for a fifth major on Sunday through gritted teeth and hours of unseen rehab.
Leading up to the Masters, he logged seven-hour-a-day sessions that included treadmill work, physical therapy and ice treatments. When he missed the cut at the Masters, his entire summer looked like a question mark, but he burnished his tough-guy bonafides, briefly taking the lead over Mickelson on Sunday with an opening birdie.
But Mickelson is old enough to have played golf with Nicklaus and Watson and Ballesteros. He has jousted with Tiger and not only lived to tell about it but become better for it.
Mickelson said earlier this week that he, too, had been clocking some overtime hours, playing 36 and 45 holes a day to better steel his mental game for the grind of tournament golf.
“I’m trying to use my mind like a muscle and just expand it,” he said. “As I’ve gotten older it’s been more difficult for me to maintain a sharp focus, a good visualization and see the shot.”
When a water-logged double bogey came calling on the 13th hole Saturday it looked as though Mickelson’s mind games had been for naught, but he bounced back on Sunday, carving his irons, feathering his chips, and holding off Koepka and Louis Oosthuizen by two strokes.
He led the field with 22 birdies, his timeless short game and behemoth drives helping him play the par 5s in 11 under. He also uncorked the longest drive on the par 5 16th – of any player all week – on Sunday at 366 yards.
As he marched up the 18th fairway, the sun-drenched (and well-served) gallery broke through the ropes and nearly toppled Mickelson before he regained his footing with the help of law enforcement and local volunteers.
The scene evoked images of The Open Championship, which Mickelson had won against all odds on a blustery week in Scotland.
Eight years later, he’d somehow topped that performance on a warm, windy afternoon in South Carolina, the Wanamaker Trophy in his hands, the golf world dizzy about what it had witnessed, all the while wondering what Phil might do next.
