atmospherics than omens, coming as it did over a still wobbly
Woods. No win is easy, though, and Mickelson came within a
bank shot off the spectator stands beside Augusta National’s
fourth green from winning a fourth Masters. Last February
Phil’s fire was in doubt. That day Bones said: “Don’t ever
question the guy’s motivation. He wants to win tournaments,
and he wants to win majors, period.” Did then. Does now.
To an extent to which none of us is privy, life intruded on
Mickelson’s golf just as time began to grow short. “I don’t
think we fully understand what he’s going through himself.
Emotionally, we can guess with his wife and his mother, but
with his own arthritis we don’t know exactly,” said another
Mickelson friend, Padraig Harrington. “It’s tough enough
out here. Phil would love to be the guy bombing it out there
another 20 or 30 yards, but there’s no doubt the arthritis
is holding him back from doing the training he’d like to do
and doing all the stuff he’d like to do.” Phil’s Sonoran Desert
60 was an electric statement. Seven years and change
removed from being the next savior of the Champions Tour,
he’s not going gently into that good night.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intel-
ligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at
the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Phil
has trouble keeping it to two. Simultaneously inquisitive
and stubborn, he has the uncanny ability of being able to
believe in something utterly, right or wrong. After all, one
of Jack Nicklaus’ nicknames, behind his back of course,
was Carnac. This, by the way, is not a bad thing if you’re
standing on a patch of pine straw between a couple of trees
with a 6-iron in your hands on Augusta’s 13th and the whole
world is watching. It’s how you can be the losingest player in
U.S. Ryder Cup history and love every moment of it just the
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