Pre-2004, the golfing community and sports analysts often rated Phil Mickelson among the greatest golfers to never have won a major. Having his share of peaks and valleys, Mickelson learned to triumph through adversity and climb the ranks of the golfing elite.
He’s known for his meticulous approach to the short game; he’s a specialist in short irons, wedges and putting. He’s just as well known for having had some of golf’s most historic meltdowns: his dubious 46-tournament winless streak in majors before winning the Masters in 2004, and many heartbreaking second-place finishes in the majors.
Through it all, Mickelson hasn’t let it change him as a player, person, husband, father or son. He’s never let the low points of his career discourage him, nor have the heights made him overconfident.
For the outsider analyzing Mickelson’s career, he appears to be grounded by the love and support of his family in his wife of 13 years and their three children. Regardless of the PGA Tour event, prestigious or modest, and regardless of his play, a first-place finish or a disappointing cut, he always seems to be the same smiling family man when his wife and children greet him on his way to the scorer’s table after finishing on the 18th green.
Mickelson gained his values as a young man. He’s the product of his upbringing, which included a superlative family environment. He has relied on the strong personal character and faith he developed from a young age to face life’s challenges on and off the course.
THE NATURAL-BORN GOLFER
Born on June 16, 1970, Mickelson was hitting golf balls by January 1972. He had barely learned to stand upright before he was swinging a club as an 18-month-old child. He became a student of the game before most children learn to talk in three-word sentences.
Though he swings left-handed, which is unusual for a golfer, few realize that Mickelson is right-handed at everything but golf. It started when his father, Phil Sr., would take little Phil to the driving range. In an attempt to keep close watch on his son while hitting golf balls, he would place young Phil facing toward him on the adjacent driving mat. Mickelson enjoyed watching his father swing and would eventually become a left-handed player because he tried to “mirror” his father’s righthanded swing. His parents tried to make him switch hands while he was still young, but it was already too late, his mother, Mary, told the Los Angeles Times. “He had such a natural swing, even at that age.”
It turns out Mickelson not only was perfecting his trademark finesse in a left-handed swing; it was the genesis of a gleaming golf career that would start with a golf scholarship at Arizona State University. Here he would win three consecutive NCAA individual golf championships and three Haskins Awards, which is collegiate golf’s equivalent of college football’s Heisman Trophy. Only two collegiate golfers other than Mickelson have won the award multiple times since its inception in 1971, and only one of those two, 2002 Golf Hall of Fame inductee Ben Crenshaw, won it three times as Mickelson did.
This was the start of Mickelson’s rise to stardom. It launched him into the professional ranks as an immediate star with prodigious expectations.
Some golf experts and pundits will argue that Mickelson has made much of his career. Others, though, feel that considering the potential he glowed with as a young and budding golf star, more should have come of his time on the PGA Tour.
THE NURSE AND THE FIGHTER PILOT
Mickelson’s childlike zest for life, flair for the dramatic and ability to entertain a crowd – all while concentrating on his professional golf game – are thanks to his mother.
A half-Italian mom of three, Mary Mickelson, a retired nurse, has always been a nurturer. To enlighten a young Phil on the realities of the world, she once drove him through a poverty-stricken neighborhood and explained to him that not all people were enjoying the upper-middle-class lifestyle he was brought up in. With her caring, thoughtful and philanthropic personality, though, there is also a lighter side. She is a bit of a quipster, which can be seen in Mickelson’s bedeviling smirk at times when he strikes a lucky bounce onto the green on a shot that looked destined for the rough.
It’s in his mother’s altruistic and humanitarian reflection that Mickelson has donated money to college funds for children of American Special-Operations soldiers killed in battle and to Hurricane Katrina victims on the Gulf Coast. And his mother’s gregariousness and joy for life shone through when Mickelson burst into an exuberant vertical jump when he finally captured his first major at the Masters in 2004.
His grit, fortitude and nerves of steel, on the other hand, Mickelson gets from his father, Phil Sr. A fighter pilot specializing in flying the U.S. Chance-Vought F-8 Crusader jet in the Cold War, Phil Sr. once side-winged a Soviet jet and redirected its path away from a U.S. battleship the enemy pilot had intended to bomb. Calm and collected in the face of this attack, he even had the presence to film this interception while it was in process.
Phil Mickelson seems able to mathematically and methodically pick a golf course apart by deciphering shot angles, wind resistance effect on the flight of the ball, optimal club head speed, the degree of loft appropriate for the ball’s flight path, and what kind of softness the surfaces of the greens and fairways have in their conditions. Perhaps his golfing skills are a direct reflection of his father’s technical skills and knowledge of physics. He turns all of those factors into a choreographed unity of swing mechanics that put the ball in places on the green and fairway that make a golfer successful.
Just like his father, Mickelson has a steely reserve not seen until recent years. Many questioned his will to be aggressive in big tournaments for more than a decade of his career. His tournament let-downs made many wonder whether he had sufficient drive. Each year it seemed he would find new ways to choke away sure victories.
He finally showed some of the temerity instilled in him by his father when he extirpated a streak of 46 major tournaments with no wins by capturing the Masters in 2004. Though this event would alleviate him of his critics temporarily, the questions about his mental discipline returned with the worst meltdown of his professional career in the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. Yet this time it was the killer instinct of his father’s ilk to be a fighter pilot that may have failed him.
A WASH AT WINGED FOOT
Leading by one stroke at the 72nd and final hole of the U.S. Open, Mickelson, who had hit only two of his last 13 fairways from the tee-box during the tournament, decided to use his longest but least accurate club, his driver, for the tee shot on the 18th hole. His tee shot went far left and into a wooded area. Apparently not having learned his lesson on being overly aggressive, Mickelson decided to shoot for the green from a bad lie instead of safely chipping out onto the fairway. This shot ended up in a sand trap.
After being unable to chip the ball into the hole from the sand trap, Mickelson’s double-bogey cost him the tournament. Even a bogey would have forced a playoff with the beneficiary of Mickelson’s mental collapse, Geoff Ogilvy. “I still am in shock that I did that,” Mickelson said after the tournament. “I just can’t believe that I did that. I am such an idiot.”
Mickelson has experienced huge success and agonizing failure on the golf course in his years as a pro. He’s had the elation of three wins in major tournaments and 37 PGA victories – and the heartbreak of 22 second-place finishes and the disappointment of being cut in two of the four majors in 2007.
In some ways, his personal life has paralleled those highs and lows.
A FAMILY MADE AND NEARLY LOST
From his pro debut in 1992 and through the ’90s, Mickelson enjoyed a prosperous time in his personal life. He met and married his wife, Amy, in November 1996, and they celebrated the birth of their first child, Amanda, in 1999. Just two years later, they welcomed another daughter, Sophia.
But adversity struck when the Mickelsons were expecting their third child, Evan, in March 2003. When Evan was delivered, he was stillborn and not breathing. Doctors and nurses scrambled to revive the baby. What’s more, Amy had ruptured an artery while giving birth and was badly hemorrhaging. Fortunately, Amy and Evan made full recoveries.
Less than two weeks later Mickelson was back on the golf course for the Bellsouth Classic. The emotional trauma apparently had stuck with him: He shot an uncharacteristic eight-over in the first two rounds and missed the cut. Just a week later, however, he made an admirable mental comeback for the Masters, finishing in third place.
The success was temporary, though. 2003 would be Mickelson’s least successful year of his pro golf career and the only year in his 18 years on the tour that he would finish with neither a first- nor a second-place finish.
Mickelson came roaring back the following year. Tired of his winless streak in the majors, he sought the help of his friend and former NASA physicist Dave Pelz. Pelz helped Mickelson readjust his short game by getting him to dial up his aggressiveness on the course. Mickelson also sought the knowledge of a golf teaching pro, Rick Smith, to work on his mechanics.
The combo, in collaboration with Tiger Woods’ former swing instructor, Butch Harmon, in 2007, worked to perfection. Mickelson enjoyed the most career success he had seen in any five-year span starting in 2004. In that time he accumulated 13 wins, three of which were major tournaments. He finished in the top three 25 times and amassed $26.8 million in earnings.
FOR EVERY PEAKTHERE’S A VALLEY
Mickelson’s dominance would continue into the 2009 season. He recorded two wins in just the first six tournaments of the year and would follow that with a respectable fifth place finish at the 2009 Masters. But after his participation in the Quail Hollow Championship the week following the Masters, the Mickelson family was blindsided with dejecting news: Amy was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Upon the media release of his wife’s diagnosis, Mickelson vowed an indefinite suspension of his tour-play. Though a cancer diagnosis is always a potentially life-threatening situation, Amy’s cancer was caught in its early stages and was found only in her breast tissue – not in her lymph nodes, where the cancer could have spread to other organs and been more difficult to treat. Within a couple of weeks of the diagnosis doctors gave the Mickelsons the good news that they would need only to perform surgery to remove the cancerous cells; Amy would not have to endure chemotherapy.
With the positive news on his wife’s condition, Mickelson returned to the tour three weeks after the diagnosis was discovered, playing in the St. Jude Classic and, the following week, in the U.S. Open. Once again, he tied for second place, for the fifth time – a record for the U.S. Open. It was yet another disappointing near-win in a major, losing to Lucas Glover by two strokes.
That disappointment paled in comparison with the news he received the next week. In July 2009, just seven weeks after receiving the terrifying news that his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer, Mickelson’s mother was diagnosed with the disease.
LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE
On July 10, 2009, Mickelson’s mother underwent the same surgery that had been performed days earlier on his wife. Like Amy’s cancer, Mary’s was in its early stages and was not immediately life-threatening.
“As great a situation as you might have dealing with cancer, it’s a lifelong disease, and it’s something that’s never easy. Both my mom and Amy have caught it early. We feel lucky to be, for a bad situation, in as good a situation as it can be,” Mickelson wrote on his Web site days after his mother’s surgery. Both Amy and Mary have made full recoveries from their cancer scares.
FROM UNDERDOG TO ALPHA DOG
When Mickelson got back to golf after a tumultuous several months focusing on the health of his wife and mother, the return was rocky. He failed to finish in the top 25 in any of his next five events. But the following week he recaptured his magical swing, posting a win at THE TOUR Championship, followed by a stellar performance for the U.S. team in their coveted victory in the Presidents Cup.
In his final tournament of the year, he carried his hot streak into the World Golf Championships and finished with yet another win, shooting an astounding 17 under par for the tourney. Mickelson’s game was back.
Looking ahead, 2010 is shaping up as another landmark year in Mickelson’s career. He’s got a healthy family, and his golf game appears to be better than ever. With such great play come great expectations and many, including PGA Tour veteran Ernie Els, say Mickelson is poised to supplant Tiger Woods as the world’s No. 1 golfer this year.
“The way he is hitting the ball, Phil is hitting it as long or longer than anybody out there. He has really been working hard. Now his putting is coming around,” Els – formerly the world’s top-ranked golfer – told a reporter at the Sony Open in Hawaii. “I think Phil is probably the man to beat now.”
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