BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS | For one brief and breezy moment around lunchtime Friday, Phil Mickelson found a measure of his lost magic at this U.S. Open.
On The Country Club’s par-3 sixth with the hole cut in a spot that a safecracker couldn’t access, Mickelson watched his 57-foot birdie putt roll off a plateau on the back half of the green, through a Biarritz-like valley and back up another slope before diving into the hole the way he used to do it.
The gallery cheered as expected – there have been precious few roars but plenty of appreciative applause through two days of this national championship – and Mickelson flashed a smile that his now familiar stubble and sunglasses couldn’t hide.
As he walked off the green to climb the hill to the seventh tee, Mickelson gave a white-gloved thumbs-up to the crowd then handed his golf ball to a young girl on the ropes.
Phil being Phil.
You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
From his tentative, evasive and uneasy press conference Monday until he hopped into a Lexus SUV to leave disappointed from another U.S. Open, Mickelson projected a weariness that he wore like his all-black outfit in Thursday’s disastrous first round.
Phil Mickelson flashes his white-gloved thumb at the U.S. Open, but more often he appeared winded. (Click on images to enlarge.)
In the player parking lot a few minutes after signing for a second-round 73 that left him 11-over par and near the bottom of the 156-player field, Mickelson was asked what had been more difficult, playing the golf course or just getting there.
“Hmmm, I don’t know,” Mickelson said, looking at the asphalt. “I enjoyed the week. Wish I had played better.”
If last week in the LIV Golf curtain-raiser near London had an element of excitement to go with the uncertainty that surrounded it, Mickelson’s appearance at The Country Club felt freighted with melancholy.
What’s gone isn’t coming back, and that almost certainly includes one of the most popular players of any generation coming back to play the PGA Tour. Whether it’s the reported $200 million that the Saudi-backed LIV Golf group is said to be paying him or something beyond that, Mickelson is forever changed in the eyes of many.
Watching him at The Country Club, Mickelson looked like a man coming to grips with his new life and not entirely pleased with where he finds himself.
Mickelson is many things – charismatic, wondrously talented, imaginative – but he’s not sympathetic. Not yet, anyway, and probably never, considering that much of what has led him to this place has been self-inflicted and it’s tough to gin up much sympathy for someone collecting a nine-figure payday, especially given the source.
The game that once seemed to come so easily to Mickelson looks like moving furniture now. He four-putted from 12 feet in the first round. He scored better in the second round but looked like a man who wanted the day and the week to be over.
It’s no surprise that Mickelson’s game was as scruffy as old shingles. Since his legend-polishing victory in the PGA Championship 13 months ago on Kiawah Island, Mickelson has been chasing the ghost of his old game.
It happens, and for all of Mickelson’s athleticism and artistry, there’s always been a seat-of-the-pants foundation to how he played. Hitting bombs doesn’t help when they’re going sideways, and he hit just 12 of 28 fairways this week, even as he tried to rein in his tee shots at times.
In the first round, Mickelson pulled his tee shot right on the 468-yard par-4 12th and it clattered around the trees and rocks, finishing closer to the tee than the green. As Mickelson tromped through the rugged New England hillside, a wild turkey walked nearby, spreading its wings for a moment as if Mickelson were intruding.
The image lingered after Mickelson’s double bogey there.
The game that once seemed to come so easily to Mickelson looks like moving furniture now. He four-putted from 12 feet in the first round. He scored better in the second round but looked like a man who wanted the day and the week to be over.
“It was OK. I had a good day,” Mickelson said in a two-minute interview session after his round.
He was doing his best to be polite.
Aside from a handful of knuckleheads, Mickelson was treated warmly by the fans. He made eye contact and flashed his famous thumb their way, but Mickelson isn’t Elvis anymore. He is a 52-year-old guy (his birthday was Thursday but some fans sang “Happy Birthday” to him on the fifth green Friday) who seems uncomfortable in public.
Two weeks from now, the second LIV Golf event will take place, this time outside Portland, Oregon, giving it a different dynamic because it’s on American soil and, if there is some truth to rumors running around, more PGA Tour players are set to bolt to the cash-flush new league.
That’s Mickelson’s world now. He’s the Saudi’s show pony and an ambassador for what’s new and different and disruptive in the game.
Six times, Mickelson has finished runner-up in the one major championship he hasn’t won. Though he never has won the U.S. Open, his passionate pursuit of it has been endearing. He has carried us along with him all those years.
At The Country Club this week, Mickelson carried something else: the weight of his own choices, and it looked like a heavy burden.