Phil Mickelson Remains Fascinating and Polarizing, Regardless of Billy Walters's Book Revelations
Phil Mickelson’s legacy is befitting of a man with a wondrous short game. Difficult spots, remarkable shots and yet another dramatic recovery from the land of self-imposed peril. The up and down has always been his hallmark, and in recent years, a double entendre. So goes life on the edge. For Mickelson, the risk is clearly more invigorating than the reward.
Through all the wins and losses, gambling debts and inexplicable causes, the lefthander remains publicly solvent, his image tarnished but hardly in tatters. Anyone with 45 PGA Tour victories and six major titles qualifies as the beneficiary of mass endearment, but Mickelson’s appeal can’t be attributed to performance alone. His enduring popularity is the offspring of the character he plays on TV—the guy with a politician’s smile whose connection with galleries comes naturally, a player who loves the big stage and responds to that vibrant atmosphere with an effortless balance of gratitude and competitive attitude.
It’s a vibe that has resonated with viewers for decades. Tiger Woods was too busy beating everyone to notice that anyone was watching. Vijay Singh suffered from an acute charisma deficiency. Ernie Els was far too down to earth to even think about playing to the crowd. Davis Love III always had that sour look on his face. Nobody received more hero worship than Fred Couples, which only seemed to make him feel uneasy. Jordan Spieth is allergic to grinning on the job, even after he holes a 50-footer.
Jon Rahm runs a bit hot, Rory McIlroy somewhere between detached and preoccupied. Scottie Scheffler is a sweetheart, but sweethearts never solicit attention, and nobody else is really worth a mention. Mickelson rarely appears on television these days, having sacrificed visibility for an estimated $200 million in fiscal stability with his defection to LIV Golf. It’s an absence of little or no consequence to his legion of fans, still large and forever loyal.
If Arnold Palmer was the driving force in the game’s prosperous partnerships with the major networks, if Woods generated weekend audiences nobody could have envisioned, Phil Mickelson has basked in that glow to greater effect than any golfer ever. The dents to his image are substantial, branding him as a pariah not unlike Barry Bonds in the lens of public perception, although a lot of that damage is the result of his frequent denouncements of the PGA Tour—the organization that raised the $96.6 million in prize money Mickelson used to feed his gambling zeal.
An appetite for destruction, so to speak. Having witnessed Mickelson place several dozen bets via cellphone from the East Lake locker room after the third round of a Tour Championship in the early 2000s, it was the emboldened nature of his behavior that struck me, not the unsavoriness or illegality of it. This was a 25-minute stretch of wagers with a journalist sitting no more than five feet away. Reckless? Potentially, sure, but Lefty’s lust for the action had become common knowledge among those who covered the Tour on a regular basis. This was just business as usual.
Twenty years later, the gaming industry has been certified and almost fully legalized—and golf fans have long since decided whether they dig Mickelson or despise him. Individual opinions aren’t going to change now that Billy Walters wrote a book detailing the gluttonous gambling habits of his former buddy, a friendship that dissolved after Mickelson chose not to testify on Walters’s behalf on charges of insider trading.
“When push comes to shove, Phil doesn’t care about anyone but himself,” Walters writes in his just-released autobiography. “Time and time again, he never stood up for a friend.”
You roll the dice, you pay the price. No high-profile player attempted more low-percentage shots than Philly Mick. No contender went down in flames on Sunday afternoon more often, nor did anyone who finished three strokes back question those decisions with less remorse. The go-for-broke mentality has always enthused the crowd, producing a spark of energy similar to when the craziest dude in your crew steals a keg of beer off the loading dock at the local college.
When Mickelson made a mess of Winged Foot’s 18th hole at the 2006 U.S. Open, blowing his best shot at winning the major he still doesn’t have, the masses exited the grounds in utter silence. That driver into the hospitality tents ruined everything. Another poor decision, another wasted chance. Their hero had been busted. No guts, no glory. And still the same old story.
The aggressiveness that seemed to govern Mickelson’s competitive DNA would become the source of rooting interest among many followers. Same goes for John Daly, another household name with a lengthy history of bleep-ups. Twelve years into his pro career, Lefty finally won a major. Then another. Then another. Redemption leaves a heavy impression on those in search of someone to cheer for, so when the underachieving phenom reinvented himself as a big-game conqueror in his mid-30s, the cheers got loud. Very loud.
People seem to forget that Woods basically sabotaged his marriage in full public view back in 2009, a scandal of global proportions but only the first in a series of personal setbacks that didn’t do his career any favors. Tiger emerged on the back end of the 2010s more beloved as a survivor than he’d been as a dominator. Although Mickelson punctuated his own playing days by becoming the oldest major champion ever at the 2021 PGA, his abandonment of the Tour—the vindictive parting words, the wrathful reverberations that ensued—left scars on his tombstone that conventional wisdom has declared permanent.
Conventional wisdom also says you can’t get up and down after missing left into the 10th at Augusta National. Mickelson’s place in history was determined in perpetuity on a hot spring day at Kiawah Island, where his sixth and final major title reminded us that greatness may age, but it never grows old. That a majority of his accomplishments occurred during the Woods Dynasty, when there wasn’t much left for anyone else to claim, and that a man needs to do a lot of things right to win 45 times on the PGA Tour.
He can be impetuous, irrational, irrepressibly narcissistic and downright foolhardy when the situation least demands it, all of which adds up to a headstrong human being whose flaws have always defined a guy we’ve been watching for 30 years. Phil Mickelson gambles? No kidding! That he says a lot of stupid things almost goes without saying. He’ll never captain the U.S. Ryder Cup team, never return to the PGA Tour Champions and, in all likelihood, never get the chance to pursue a post-playing career as a TV analyst.
What’s done is done, and that works both ways. Mickelson will be remembered as one of the 15 best golfers of all time, a player of extraordinary skill whose brilliance was undermined by a quest for attention and a lack of discretion. He turned pars into adventures and molehills into mountains, and if he paid a high price for those mistakes, it wasn’t at a cost he couldn’t afford. As polarizing figures go, Philly Mick takes the cake. If you give him five minutes and a fork, he’ll wipe out the whole thing by himself.