What I Think About When I Think About Phil

The six-time major champion is not in the field this week at the Farmers Insurance Open, but it’s easy to feel his presence at his hometown event.

In Phil: The Rip-Roaring (and Unauthorized!) Biography of Golf’s Most Colorful Superstar, Alan Shipnuck recounts the time I asked Amy Mickelson, the six-time major champion’s wife, if she knew about the rumor of her husband having a Black baby after an affair. This was the day before Phil threw away the 2006 U.S. Open on the 72nd hole at Winged Foot. Amy didn’t flinch. If the rumor was true—and it proved not to be—it would have been just another case of Phil being Phil, a man who could take on any risk because he was a genius at getting out of trouble and getting exactly what he wanted on the golf course and in the game of life.

This rumor of a Black baby is not the first thing I think about when I think about Phil. He makes me think of gambling and how it ruins lives. He makes me think of the IRS, taxes and the time in 2013 when he complained about California’s high-income taxes. 

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the benefits of coffee, because Phil said it helped him lose weight and play better golf. If I could perform as he did at the 2021 PGA Championship and win a major at 50 years old, bring on the caffeine and the fasting.

In 2022, Phil brought into my life sovereign wealth funds like the Saudi Arabian outfit that is funding the LIV Golf Tour. The Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is backing LIV, is one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with assets reported to be $620 billion. Driven by high oil prices, the PIF is wielding its buying power in everything from the stock markets to private equity to purchasing sports organizations in what some view as sportswashing.

I never thought I would put the two men in a sentence together, but Phil has me thinking about the late Las Vegas Raiders owner Al Davis. Nobody ever picked a bigger fight with a sports league than in 1980 when Davis sued the NFL to move his team from Oakland to Los Angeles. For years, Davis was in a feud with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. Phil isn’t going it alone against PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan in the same way that Davis took on the NFL, but his war against golf’s premier tour is charged with a similar anti-establishment vigor.

This week the PGA Tour is at Torrey Pines in San Diego for the Farmers Insurance Open, where Phil’s legend started as a junior golfer with a bunker that his dad built in their backyard. A three-time winner at the event, Phil can’t play here this year because of a suspension handed down last year by the PGA Tour for joining the LIV Golf Tour.

It’s hard to think of Phil without thinking about his roots in this city and this tournament. When Ernie Els visited San Diego as a teenager for the Junior World Golf Championships at Torrey Pines, he said that Mickelson was treated like the mayor. Mickelson’s first tour victory as a professional came here in 1993. In 2000, Phil broke Tiger Woods’s six-tournament win streak when he beat him here by four strokes. The next year he won the tournament again in a playoff over Frank Lickliter and Davis Love III. Yet, he hasn’t won at Torrey since Rees Jones first began renovations in ’01 on the South Course. At the ’21 U.S. Open at Torrey, he got off to a bad start with a 4-over 75 and never recovered, finishing in 62nd place.

Last year, he missed the cut at the Farmers with rounds of 76 and 71. One month later, Mickelson’s life as he knew it on the PGA Tour would change forever after he signaled that he would be joining the LIV Tour in an interview published by Shipnuck. Soon he would withdraw from the Masters and the PGA Championship, and, later that summer, he would officially join the LIV Tour for a reported $200 million.

Phil’s absence at Torrey Pines this week is symbolic of the changes in the golf landscape brought about by the divide between the tours. Held at the beginning of the season, the Farmers represents something new in the game, an annual renewal of traditions that one of its most popular winners is now helping to threaten with a competing tour.

For Mickelson, the hometown hero, his absence here must also feel like a loss. I wonder what he thinks about when he thinks about San Diego and this tournament. Perhaps he envisions a future where he's here again after some kind of reconciliation with the LIV Tour. Or it could just be memories of what was and can never be again.