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Phil Mickelson fielded questions for nearly half an hour on Monday, with no satisfactory answers.
John David Mercer/USA Today
BROOKLINE, Mass. — Phil Mickelson has addressed the American media many times, occasionally after saying something controversial, but Monday was the first time he did so as an employee of the ruthless Saudi Arabian government. That is what it is. You can dodge it, smooth it out, or change the subject, but that’s what it is.
He went to Saudi-funded LIV Golf for many reasons. Like money, for example. Also, the salary. And then there is the cash. Mickelson has spent his entire career transforming everyman image into riches, and now he found something that pays better than his image, so he took it.
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Mickelson spent most of his 26-minute US Open press conference trying not to create another starter. He says that he no longer wants to fight the PGA Tour publicly. He says that he respects those who have “different opinions.” He wants to take the LIV money and play in the majors and be a fan favorite again. He wants everything but your questions.
Mickelson has a beard these days, which means the only thing he shaves off is the truth. He said the PGA Tour has done “a lot of things that I agree with and a lot of things that I don’t agree with. I have supported them in any way.” This would be news to the PGA Tour stars who stayed on.
When asked if putting a wedge into the world of golf was LIV’s purpose, Mickelson said, “The starting point, I’m going to have to give in to the LIV Golf guys. It was his idea. That’s a change of tone from when he told author Alan Shipnuck that he helped pay for the lawyers to write LIV’s operating agreement.
Mickelson has been searching for a way to sell this decision for more than a year, to the point where some of the explanations contradict each other. He has ridiculed the “hateful greed” of the PGA Tour. In May 2021, as several iterations of a rival golf league were being launched, Mickelson dishonestly framed the entire company. It wasn’t about oil money, you see. It was about making the game better for the fans.
“It’s a big deal to give up control of your schedule,” Mickelson said then. “I don’t know if the players would be selfless enough to do that.”
Disinterested!
“I think the fans would love it because they would see the top players play exponentially more times,” Mickelson said at the time. “Instead of four or five times, it would be 20 times.”
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This was just an outrageous distortion. The best players in the world already met four times a year in majors; again at the Players Championship; three times in the FedEx Cup playoffs; two to four times at World Golf Championship events; and in the Ryder and Presidents Cup in alternate years. That’s at least 11 times, not four or five… and we haven’t even made it to every single PGA Tour event that includes a lot of top players…
…but never mind all that! Phil said Monday that one of the reasons he joined LIV is that “with fewer tournaments, it allows me to have more balance in my life. It allows me to do things off the golf course that I’ve always wanted to do.”
Then what is? Do you want the best players to compete against each other more or less? Pick the one that sounds good to you, please, but first, pour yourself a cup of Phil’s coffee.
Of course, we will see the best players in the world compete against each other. less now than anytime in memory. That is what LIV has done. No reasonable person can say that this is better for golf.
Mickelson has always presented himself as golf’s Man of the People. It was a marketing tool more than anything; being popular is lucrative. But as long as Mickelson charmed the fans, signing autographs, cracking jokes, giving thumbs up, who cared what his motivation was? Fans paid for tickets; Mickelson made them feel important; they bought the merchandise from him. They all won.
In recent years, though, Mickelson has been swimming so deep in his own nonsense that he’s lost all sense of where he’s headed. He launched small fits that painted a picture of a man he believed was never wrong. He hit a moving putt at the US Open and claimed it was a calculated strategy, a ridiculous defense that he later retracted. He pouted when the Detroit News published an accurate story about his game, then said he would only return to Detroit’s PGA Tour stop if 50,000 fans signed a petition and each pledged an act of kindness. This was all nonsense, but it gave us a clue to his mindset: after all these years, Phil thinks he can get away with it.
Mickelson has earned $95 million in prize money from the PGA Tour. He has earned hundreds of millions in endorsements. He said in the last week that he was in danger of spending his fortune on gambling before he solved his problem. He is now apparently trying to get his financial footing back with blood money.
Gambling addiction is serious and miserable for anyone, no matter how much money they have. For that, Mickelson deserves empathy. But we can probably drop the Man of the People part.
The Saudi tour is not designed to be profitable. It’s an expensive PR tactic that depends on having big names. Mickelson is the biggest name to join, giving the Saudis the legitimacy they crave. You are not being paid for your current skills; he turns 52 this week and will probably never be a top 50 player in the world again.
So here’s Phil Mickelson in 2022, having to explain that yes, he actually sympathizes with the families who lost loved ones on 9/11, and no, he doesn’t condone human rights violations. A professional life of chasing paychecks led to the biggest offense imaginable.