On the Monterey Peninsula last week, the spirit of Bing Crosby’s romanticized clambake hung in the chilled air as another AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am came to life, professional golfers and celebrities from country music to football and other glitter-sprinkled vocations living the dream.
Phil Mickelson should have been there because he belongs there, not just because he won the event five times but because for the better part of three decades he was the thumb-flashing, barb-throwing, don’t-look-away essence of what the PGA Tour can offer.
Extraordinary players come along on a surprisingly consistent timeline, but the special ones – and Phil Mickelson has been a special one – arrive at their own pace and affect the game the way a great chef can turn a plate of food into an experience that transcends eating.
Mickelson has the gift, and the game has been better for it.
But instead of fist-bumping his pro-am partner at Pebble Beach last week, Mickelson was halfway around the world, missing the cut in the Saudi International tournament, officially an Asian Tour event that is, in effect, an extension of LIV Golf.
That’s Mickelson’s world now and, if he never plays another PGA Tour event (which seems likely if not certain), he says he’s made his peace with it and he’s excited about where he is.
What else would Mickelson say?
That he screwed up? That he wishes he hadn’t taken the nine-figure payday from Greg Norman and the Saudi-backed LIV organization? That he sacrificed something all that money can’t buy back?
Maybe Mickelson feels none of that, but the guess is he feels at least some of it. Both things can be true: he can be jazzed about what LIV is doing and there can be a dose of melancholy about what is left behind.
Mickelson spent his career chasing Tiger Woods, and now he finds himself watching Tiger wear the role of elder statesman as easily as he wears a red shirt on Sunday, a role for which Mickelson seemed destined.
This can’t be the way he imagined his professional story playing out even if he’s always seen himself as an outside-the-box kind of guy. Mickelson can grin and tweet and give us the smile that warmed hearts and inspired a rare devotion among fans, but he’s lost the chance to be who he was.
That’s the empty part.
Mickelson didn’t just fill a room. He filled a sport and was one of the rare golfers who could reach outside the game and pull in people who didn’t know a par-5 from a 5-iron. He wasn’t Elvis in blue suede golf shoes, but he’s been close.
Greg Norman may come across as the villain to those who don’t like what he’s selling, but Mickelson is the player who made LIV Golf’s incursion land like a punch in the gut to traditionalists and fans who bought into Mickelson like they were buying into their dream house.
Mickelson says he is committed to his new life and new league and if the golfing public sees him differently, that’s the collateral damage. If he’s getting back to the Phil we’ve watched through the years, he can be a great asset for LIV, which needs him to be the full Phil.
Still, it’s strange to see Mickelson sitting on the far side of golf’s great divide.
Seeing Mickelson in Saudi Arabia last week, 20 pounds lighter and showing the weight loss in his face, also showed he has worked to reinvent himself and, consequently, his golf game. At 52, Mickelson finds it’s not as easy to keep the weight off or keep the clubhead speed where he wants it, but he is willing to do the work.
“I feel rejuvenated,” Mickelson said.
It’s fair to say, Mickelson had a lot going on last year and because of everything, Mickelson, the golfer, was essentially forgotten. It was like a solar eclipse.
Six major championships including that hark-the-herald-angels victory as a near-51-year-old at the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island. Forty-five PGA Tour wins. The sense that every swing might produce magic.
It was as if Mickelson went to sleep one night and woke up the next day as someone else.
“I have to look at last year as an anomaly and just let it go,” Mickelson said last week.
It’s Woods, torched for years for being perceived as selfish and self-centered, whose voice carries the weight while Mickelson bangs the drum for an organization run by a foreign government with a wretched record regarding human rights.
Listen to Mickelson talk and he sounds like he believes LIV Golf will emerge vindicated from its legal challenges and he will have been on the right side of the game’s civil war.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
That’s for the lawyers and judges to sort out.
Regardless, it won’t change what has happened and how Mickelson’s yellow brick road led him to a different place.
Pebble Beach went on without Mickelson last week, and the PGA Tour will sparkle along without him.
But it doesn’t mean Mickelson isn’t missed.
E-MAIL RON
Top: Determined to compete at age 52, Phil Mickelson has trimmed 20 pounds.
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