To say Phil Mickelson has it good is an understatement. He gets to play golf for a living, he owns his own plan and to top it all off he is married to a former Phoenix Suns cheerleader who he picked up while he was merely a junior at Arizona State. Want to trade lives?
Success has always come easily for Mickelson; as an amateur he won three NCAA National Championships, the U.S. Amateur and the PGA Tour’s Phoenix Open. His long flowing swing and incredible early success led golf writers to compare him to Jack Nicklaus and dub him golf’s next shining star and the heir to the number one ranking in the world.
Early in his professional career Mickelson won often: 22 times in his first 11 years on Tour: but never when it truly counted. A major championship victory, golf’s holy grail eluded him. Instead it was Tiger Woods who took the professional golf scene by storm, winning eight majors before Phil could collect his first.
Tiger has the killer instinct Phil seemingly lacks; he wants to be feared, relishes it even, while Phil seems content to be loved by fans and players alike. Mickelson became loveable Lefty, golf’s nice guy, the Chicago Cubs to Tiger’s New York Yankees.
We have seen Phil fail: who can forget his heartbreaking double bogey on the last hole of the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot? However, Phil’s flops have only brought him closer to our hearts. They have proved he is human, just a man playing a game, still subject to the wayward drive or the missed three-footer that frustrate golfers of all levels. Phil’s humanity stands in stark contrast to the seemingly flawless winning machine that is Tiger Woods.
We know when Phil is happy and when he is disappointed because he will tell us. Tiger has never allowed anyone that kind of access to his emotions or himself, for that matter, as he routinely gives boring cliché interviews and avoids autograph seekers like the plague. He even named his yacht Privacy.
American sports fans love a winner but not nearly as much as we love an underdog. Over the last 10 years, cheering for Tiger Woods has become kind of like rooting for the sun to come up in the morning; it is boring, a foregone conclusion. He has zapped the drama out of golf winning with a ruthless efficiency more characteristic of an undertaker than an athlete. Tiger is undoubtedly golf’s ultimate champion but Mickelson has emerged as the loveable underdog, the people’s champion.
This is why when the golfing gods decided to let Mickelson’s birdie putt on the 72nd hole of the 2004 Masters slide in the side door, giving Lefty his first major championship and validating his professional career, he was not the only one to jump for joy. The whole golf world: except for maybe Tiger Woods: was genuinely happy for him.
Tiger Woods is the best golfer on the planet, and no one will argue with that. For the last 14 years Woods has dominated professional golf winning 97 times, holding the number one in the world for 598 weeks and winning on every continent except Antarctica. However, this Sunday could spell the end of Tiger’s reign at the top. If Phil Mickelson can win the Players Championship this weekend in Florida he will become only the fourth person to hold the number one ranking in the Tiger Woods era. A win this weekend would put the capstone on a career goal for Mickelson and prove that sometimes nice guys finish first.
