Once, Phil Mickelson seemed to be a lock to someday become an honorary starter at the Masters (circa 2040) and, much more immediately, a Ryder Cup captain. Now, it’s harder to say.
Mickelson is at a crossroads. He can continue down the path he is on, aligning himself with an upstart golf league financed by the Saudi ruling class, about which nothing has been said publicly.
That’s not easy to do, when you’ve called the mouth that seeks to feed you “scary mother****ers.” And when you don’t know if the league is even going to be up and running.
Or Mickelson could drop his link to Greg Norman’s LIV Golf Investments and its Saudi backers and the world golf tour it envisions, and try to resume his big life on the PGA Tour, the Champions tour (where it’s hard to have a big life) and as a living legend of the game. It was only nine months ago that Mickelson became the oldest golfer to win a major championship!
But retreating is not Mickelson’s style, his legal entanglements with LIV Golf are possibly far more involved than we could know, and he has already scorched the earth — the majors, the PGA Tour, corporate America — where he plied his trade for so long, and so effectively.
His mouth and his ambition, to say nothing of his talent and his work ethic, got him to where he was in May, when he won the PGA at Kiawah, in coastal South Carolina, and was swarmed by fans as he marched to the 18th green.
His mouth and his ambition got him to where he is right now. Mickelson, who can be loaded with charm, who has all the best words, who has been engaging with fans and reporters and golf’s corporate sponsors for decades, is a restless personality. In the history of golf, you can’t think of another person like him. It’s not really that surprising to see him in the spot he is in.
And if anybody has the skillset to turn this around, it’s Mickelson.
Time is not on his side. Next month, he would surely want to play in the Players Championship. In April the Masters. In May the PGA.
Tiger Woods delivers surprising response to Phil Mickelson’s media rights gripes
Golf already has one global superstar who leads an essentially isolated, quiet private life: Tiger Woods. Mickelson has always been the anti-Woods. But right now, Woods — with his temperate, well-considered remarks about his allegiance to the world that made him — looks like golf’s elder statesman. Those comments came in December, at a tournament Woods hosts in the Bahamas, and last week at Riviera, at the Genesis Invitational, another Tiger Woods production.
Mickelson has been down this road before, sort of, most notably after the 2014 Ryder Cup, when the Americans lost in Scotland and Mickelson excoriated his captain, Tom Watson. But that whole thing was narrow, compared to this.
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