DORAL, FLORIDA | Sitting on a LIV Golf stage last Wednesday with former Masters champions Bubba Watson and Jon Rahm, Phil Mickelson was asked what comes to mind when his breakthrough victory in the 2004 Masters is mentioned.
Twenty years ago, Mickelson had not won a major championship and the burden of carrying an 0-for-46 record in the biggest events was draped on his shoulders like an X-ray vest.
When Mickelson paused to answer the question, Watson offered a thought.
“The jump?” Watson said with a smile, referencing Mickelson’s modest spread-eagled leap on the 18th green when his downhill birdie putt fell into the hole, giving him a one-stroke victory over Ernie Els.
Mickelson flashed a half-smile.
“I think that first of all, the photographer did not get me at the apex and didn’t do it justice,” Mickelson said.
It wasn’t the vertical jump that mattered. It was where the moment took Mickelson, instantly vanquishing the narrative that had begun to haunt him – that he couldn’t win major championships.
On a week when Arnold Palmer played his 50th and final Masters, Mickelson shot 5-under par 31 on the second nine that warm Sunday, chasing down Els and then slipping past him with birdies at the 16th and 18th holes.
Knowing that a birdie at the last would earn him a green jacket, Mickelson carved a 3-wood tee shot into the middle of the fairway, then hit an 8-iron to 18 feet above the hole. After seeing playing competitor Chris DiMarco putt from almost the same line, Mickelson curled in a putt that changed the arc of his career as he became just the sixth player to birdie the 72nd hole to win by one shot.
Wearing gray pants, a black shirt and black visor, Mickelson exploded with a rainbow of emotions upon winning.
“I played as good as I could. I guess Phil deserved this one,” a somber Els would later say.
For Mickelson, it was like stepping through the looking glass.
“It was a relief. I had said for a while going in that if I win – once I win one – I’ll win a bunch,” said Mickelson, who would win five more major titles in the next two decades. “I don’t know if six is a bunch, but it’s more than one, and that win validated kind of what I was doing as being right.”
Twenty years later, the first of Mickelson’s three Masters victories still has a special glow. It was joyful, one year since his wife, Amy, had struggled through a difficult pregnancy with their son, Evan, and the questions immediately changed from why not to why then.
He shot 80 in the first round of the LIV event in Hong Kong, and he ranks outside the top 25 players in the 54-player league thus far. The man who won the PGA Championship as a 50-year-old finally may have been caught by Father Time.
Mickelson returns to Augusta National this week as a 53-year-old six-time major champion with a complicated and compromised legacy.
He chose to sit out the 2022 Masters as his own controversial comments about the human-rights violations in Saudi Arabia created a firestorm started by the match he struck with his words.
Last year, Mickelson returned to Augusta and what could have felt awkward instead felt almost timeless. Having shown little form before Augusta, Mickelson played as if he turned off the noise and turned back the clock. He finished second to Rahm. This time, it wasn’t about why he hadn’t won but how he had come so close.
“This doesn’t feel like a fluke,” Mickelson said.
It turned out to be his best week of an otherwise forgettable season. It was – for one charmed week, anyway – refreshing to talk about Mickelson’s golf rather than his golf politics.
This year, Mickelson’s golf has been discouraging. He shot 80 in the first round of the LIV event in Hong Kong, and he ranks outside the top 25 players in the 54-player league thus far. The man who won the PGA Championship as a 50-year-old finally may have been caught by Father Time.
No matter what happens from here, it will be difficult for Mickelson to shake the perception that, pick a word – arrogance, hubris, greed, ego – led him down a path that disrupted the game and, despite the millions the Saudis paid him, damaged him.
As much as any single golfer, Mickelson, by his embrace of LIV Golf and its Saudi Arabian backing, helped wrench the game apart, creating a chasm that still seems both deep and wide.
“I think Phil could have done a lot of good for the game of golf. Instead, he’s really hurt the game,” analyst Brandel Chamblee, a frequent and strong critic of LIV Golf’s financial backers, said in a recent Golfweek interview.
Privately, several prominent players on the PGA Tour, including some in position to help determine what happens next, have said they would welcome some LIV players back to the tour but not necessarily Mickelson.
Mickelson has said often that he warned the PGA Tour that something like LIV’s threat could happen and he suggested aggressive change that he says was either ignored or rejected.
By the time the PGA Tour reacted, Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and others were gone.
Given what’s happened on the tour side, does that make Mickelson right?
“If you look at all the changes that have taken place with equity for the players, elevated events, increased purse revenue, none of that was an option for the guys that left. Had LIV not happened and had we not done what we did, none of that would have happened now,” Mickelson said at Doral.
“I know the first two years were going to be difficult, but in the end, where it ends up, I think the game is going to be a lot more global and appeal to a lot more people, appeal to a lot younger crowd, and it’s going to be in a much healthier place in the end. But during the disruption phase which we are in, sometimes not everybody sees that far ahead.”
“I have a pretty good idea, without knowing the specifics, of where it’s going to end up ... It could be quick and easy, or it could be long and painful. I’m not a part of that either way.”
Phil Mickelson
That’s where Mickelson sounds like himself, confident that he has figured out what others were slow to acknowledge. Privately, Mickelson will offer withering evaluations of how some people on the tour side have reacted to the game’s changed landscape, though he has tried to strike a more diplomatic tone in public as negotiations have ground onward.
Asked what he could share regarding the recent meeting between tour leaders, player directors on the PGA Tour Policy Board and PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan in the Bahamas, Mickelson said he didn’t know much because he had not been there.
He has ideas, plenty of them, but he’s not sharing them publicly at the moment.
“For me, I’m just taking a back seat and letting it play out,” he said. “I have a pretty good idea, without knowing the specifics, of where it’s going to end up and the process of how we get there, I don’t need to be a part of. Let them figure it out.
“It could be quick and easy, or it could be long and painful. I’m not a part of that either way.”
When Mickelson drives down Magnolia Lane this week, he knows what will happen.
He might look different than he did 20 years ago, thinner with flecks of gray filtering into his shorter hair which he has cut himself since the pandemic, but he knows Augusta National like few others.
Asked to share a tidbit of knowledge that he can pass along to others, Mickelson last week launched into a mini-dissertation about playing from the right greenside bunker on the 10th hole when the flag is cut in the middle or back of the green and the challenge it creates for right-handed players versus left-handers.
It was graduate-level golf knowledge, and Mickelson is a professor emeritus at Augusta National, even if he sometimes sounds impressed with himself. That’s always been a part of who Mickelson is, the smartest guy in whatever room he finds himself. Sometimes he may be. Sometimes not.
He has won at Augusta with two drivers in the bag. He has threaded a 6-iron between two trees on the 13th hole in a shot so spectacular that few remember that he missed the ensuing short eagle putt. Three times, he’s walked off 18 as champion, which makes him a part of the place that cherishes its champions.
If he felt uncomfortable last year, Mickelson didn’t show it and insists he didn’t feel that way. His wife, Amy, said the same thing to an acquaintance as they walked the 10th hole together last April. Augusta, she said, felt warm and welcoming.
“I’m not [uncomfortable]. Not at all. No,” Mickelson said. “I relax.”
Mickelson made his choice more than two years ago, and he has shown no remorse. He understands the role he has played in the chaos that has consumed professional golf, but Mickelson has always been a big-picture guy.
Whether he sees the realistic path forward or he sees what he wants to see, it’s too soon to know.
What the world sees is viewed through a different filter now. Mickelson has been crass, bullish and bloviating at times. He’s also been humbled, reflective and an almost bigger-than-life personality in a game that needs oversized figures.
Mickelson’s career is framed in no small part by Augusta and what he’s done there.
It’s complicated but compelling. At the moment, the sport may not be better for what Mickelson, along with others, has done to it, but narrow the focus and one of the reasons the Masters occupies imaginations the way it does is because of what Mickelson and others have done there.
The Masters and Phil Mickelson are bound to each other.
For better or worse.
E-MAIL RON
Top: Mickelson says he is comfortable with the decisions he has made.
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