Phil

The Rip-Roaring (and Unauthorized!) Biography of Golf's Most Colorful Superstar

Alan Shipnuck

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781476797106
• eBook ISBN: 9781476797113

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "A rollicking good time." — Golfweek * "Thoroughly engaging." — The Washington Post Now with a new afterword: a juicy and freewheeling biography of legendary golf champion Phil Mickelson—who has led a big, controversial life—as reported by longtime Sports Illustrated writer and bestselling author Alan Shipnuck. Phil Mickelson is one of the most compelling figures in sports. For more than three decades he has been among the best golfers in the world, and his unmatched longevity was exemplified at the 2021 PGA Championship, when Mickelson, on the cusp of turning fifty-one, became the oldest player in history to win a major championship.In this raw, uncensored, and unauthorized biography, Alan Shipnuck captures a singular life defined by thrilling victories, crushing defeats, and countless controversies. Mickelson is a multifaceted character, and all his warring impulses are on display in these pages: He is a smart-ass who built an empire on being the consummate professional; a loving husband dogged by salacious rumors; a high-stakes gambler who knows the house always wins but can't tear himself away. Mickelson's career and public image have been defined by the contrast with his lifelong rival, Tiger Woods. Where Woods is robotic and reticent, Mickelson is affable and extroverted, an incorrigible showman whom many fans love and some abhor because of the overwhelming size of his personality. In their early years together on Tour, Mickelson lacked Tiger's laser focus and discipline, leading Tida Woods to call her son's rival "the fat boy, " among other put-downs. Yet as Tiger's career has been curtailed by scandal, addiction, and a broken body, Phil sails on, still relevant on the golf course and in the marketplace. Phil is the perfect marriage of subject and author. Shipnuck has long been known as the most fearless writer on the golf beat, and he delivers numerous revelations, from the true scale of Mickelson's massive gambling losses; to the inside story of the acrimonious breakup between Phil and his longtime caddie, Jim "Bones" Mackay; to the secretive backstory of the Saudi golf league that Mickelson championed to wield as leverage against the PGA Tour. But Phil also celebrates Mickelson's random acts of kindness and generosity of spirit, to which friends and strangers alike can attest. Shipnuck has covered Mickelson for his entire career and has been on the ground at Mickelson's most memorable triumphs and crack-ups, allowing him to take you inside the ropes with a thrilling immediacy and intimacy. The result is the juiciest and liveliest golf book in years—full of heart, humor, and unexpected turns.

CHAPTER ONE

So, what’s your best Phil Mickelson story?

“A year or two after I retired,” says Tom Candiotti, a big-league pitcher from 1983 to ’99, “I played Whisper Rock [Golf Club] with Phil and Jason Kidd. Afterward, we were sitting around the clubhouse, talking shit. Phil went on this whole riff about how if he hadn’t been a golfer he could have played Major League Baseball. Oh boy, okay. I just rolled my eyes, because I’ve heard that so many times; every professional athlete thinks they could have been great in another sport, even though it’s never really true. But Phil wouldn’t shut up about it. He kept saying, ‘I could have been a really special player.’ Finally, I said, ‘Okay, let’s see it.’ So we drive to my house and get all this gear—bats, balls, helmets—and then go to the baseball field at Horizon High School. I start throwing batting practice and Jason pops a few home runs right away. He’s a great athlete. Now it’s Phil’s turn. Imagine driving by and seeing a Hall of Fame basketball player shagging fly balls and a Hall of Fame golfer at the plate… wearing golf spikes, a Titleist glove, and a right-handed batting helmet, with the flap on the wrong side. I’m just throwing easy fastballs and Phil is swinging out of his shoes. He’s so determined to hit one over the fence, but he can’t even get it to the warning track. He’s getting more and more pissed off and me and Jason are trying really, really hard not to laugh. Eventually Jason got so bored he just laid down in the grass in centerfield. Phil never did hit a home run.”

“There was a period in 1989 and 1990 when Phil and I played a lot of golf together because we were on Walker Cup and World Amateur teams together,” says David Eger. “At the 1990 U.S. Amateur, we faced each other in the semifinals and he beat me pretty good [5 & 3]. We were always friendly, but over time we just kind of lost touch, which happens. Fast-forward to 2017, when the PGA Championship was at Quail Hollow, where I’m a member. Phil came out early for a practice round and I heard about it. It’d been at least ten years since we had last seen each other, so I grabbed my wife and we jumped in a cart so we could go say hello. We found him putting on the fifth hole. We walked up onto the green and I introduced him to Trish, and literally the first thing Phil said was ‘Did David tell you what an ass-whooping I put on him at the Amateur in 1990?’ It had been twenty-seven years.”

“When my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer in ’16, I caught Phil outside the scoring tent in Baltusrol,” says Ryan Palmer. “I took him aside and told him about Jennifer, and before I said anything else he just pulled me in for a hug. It lasted a really long time. Then he said, ‘Here’s what’s going to happen—I’m going to put you in touch with Dr. Tom Buchholz of MD Anderson [Cancer Center in Houston], he’s gonna get you the best doctors and surgeons in the world. They’re gonna take care of you guys and Jennifer is going to be okay.’ That night I was on the phone with Dr. Buchholz, and everything Phil said came true. I’ve never stopped being grateful for what he did for me and my family.”

“The last time the Open Championship was at Royal Birkdale,” says Johnny Miller, “there was a sixtieth birthday party for Nick Faldo. It was thrown by his lady friend at the time, in a really nice house on the eighteenth hole. There were TV people there and some players and past Open champions [including Tony Jacklin, Mark O’Meara, Stewart Cink, Henrik Stenson, and Paul McGinley]. Nice crowd. Faldo is sitting at the head of this big table and just loving all the attention. He’s having a great time. Then Phil sits down next to him and starts talking, and he literally doesn’t stop. He starts saying some kind of outrageous things: ‘Nobody can hit the shots I can hit.’ I’m thinking, Yeah, buddy, because they end up in the wrong fairway. He just keeps going like that, saying a lot of things you shouldn’t really say in front of players of a similar stature, but Phil was doing that Phil thing. At some point, [my wife] Linda leans over and says, ‘Is this guy ever going to stop talking?’ Poor Nick Faldo is just sinking deeper and deeper into his chair. He looks miserable, like all his thunder had been stolen. It was a total alpha move by Phil and undeniably entertaining. Shows how confident he is, how much he believes he is the best to ever do it. The record doesn’t reflect that, but don’t tell Phil.”

“At the 2003 Presidents Cup,” says Jack Nicklaus, who captained the U.S. team, “Phil went 0-5, but I called him my MVP. I did that because most guys, if they go 0-5, they will be down in the dumps and take the team with him. Phil did not do that. He had a great attitude all week and never stopped cheering for his teammates. That’s not easy to do when you’re losing match after match. Told me a lot about his character.”

“For many years I’ve played in the same fantasy football league as Phil,” says Jim Nantz. “He takes it very seriously and he’s good at it—he has won the league championship a couple of times. We hold the draft in person every year in a hotel conference room during the Northern Trust [tournament] and Phil has never missed one. In 2013, he was staying at a different hotel in Jersey City a couple of blocks away, so he walked over… carrying the Claret Jug. Some good wine was drank out of it that night. But the best story is from 2020. Phil had Alvin Kamara as his running back when he went for six touchdowns in Week 16. That gave Phil such a commanding lead in the standings it was a virtual certainty he was going to win the title. I’m talking a 99.999 percent probability. He sent out an email to the whole league, gloating. I mean, he went on and on, really laying it on thick. Well, the team that was in second place had Josh Allen as their quarterback, and in the last game of the season, on Monday night, Allen went for thirty-nine points and Phil lost the title by one point. He was crushed. Absolutely devastated. He took it so hard I honestly believe it affected his play on the West Coast swing.”

“I remember one time, me, Phil, Larry Barber, and Stricky [Jim Strickland] were gonna play a ‘hate game’ at Grayhawk,” says Gary McCord. “A hate game is, whoever you’re paired with, you hate the other two guys really bad. There’s no rules. The verbal sword fights get bloody. Anyway, Phil said he had a photo shoot in the morning, so we agreed to play at one o’clock. We get to the twelfth hole, a short par-4 with a cluster of bunkers around the green. You know that backward shot Phil hits, where it goes over his head? He says, ‘You see that bunker there? I bet I can put a ball on the [steep grass] face and hit it backward to within the length of the flagstick on the first try.’ It’s a twenty- to thirty-yard shot, off the side of a hill, to a sloping green. Seems almost impossible, but with Phil, when you make a bet, you gotta go through all possibilities, because he’ll always try to trick you into somethin’. So we talk it out in great detail and finally all bet him a hundred dollars he can’t do it. He throws down a ball and takes a mighty swing and hits to about six feet. We go ape shit. It was just incredible. Well, remember the photo shoot that morning? He had spent three hours hitting that exact shot from that exact spot over and over and over again for Golf Digest. The rat bastard got us and got us good.” (Years later, Mickelson would play an over-the-shoulder backward shot in competition, from a steep downslope in the back bunker on the fourth hole at Pebble Beach; he hit it to twelve feet.)

“About fifteen years ago, I was playing in a fundraiser for the Wounded Warriors,” says Chip Beck, “and Phil was playing in it, too. My kids absolutely loved Phil Mickelson. So at the banquet that night I brought them over to meet him, and he says immediately, ‘At one of my first tournaments on the PGA Tour, I was walking down the hill at Riviera and I saw your dad talking to a group of reporters. He said to them, “I need thirty minutes to go to the range and figure something out and then I’m going to come back and find you guys and answer all your questions.” He was so nice to the reporters, and I stood there and watched how he handled them and the mutual respect they shared, and it never left me. I’ve always tried to emulate your dad.’ I was floored. I never knew any of that. Made me feel like a million bucks, in front of my kids and everything.”

“I wasn’t even in the room when it happened, but I’ve heard this story so many times it’s become my favorite,” says Paul McGinley. “The 2016 Ryder Cup was right after the Olympics, and Matt Kuchar, who is a bit of a court jester, wore his bronze medal around everywhere he went, just to wind people up. He was slagging Phil and Tiger, saying they’d won all these majors but they didn’t have an Olympic medal. So for one of their team meetings, the Americans bring in the swimmer Michael Phelps to have a chat. Of course, he has twenty-one or twenty-two gold medals, or whatever it is. Phelps gets a standing ovation, he’s high-fiving everyone, and just before he’s about to address the players, Phil speaks up: ‘Hey, Kuch, why don’t you show him your bronze medal—he probably hasn’t seen one before.’ That’s just great comedic timing.”

“Not so much anymore, but for a long time Phil was an astonishing eater,” says Nick Faldo. “I remember moons ago in player dining seeing Tiger with a grilled skinless chicken breast and a plate full of broccoli and Phil had a triple bacon cheeseburger and a huge pile of french fries, and thinking that right there was the difference between them. At Firestone one year, Phil came to dinner with a bunch of the CBS guys. He was talking about what a strong constitution he has and that he can eat almost anything. This restaurant was almost like a little bowling alley and they had these sauerkraut balls on the table. Phil is drinking red wine and holding court on everything from politics to the best way to change a nappy [diaper], and he keeps popping in these sauerkraut balls. He must’ve had a dozen of them. Maybe more. Well, the next day he shot about 82 and had to run to the bathroom as soon as he putted out on eighteen, so I guess he can’t eat anything.”

“At the Wells Fargo Championship in 2012, Phil threw a party for select players, caddies, and a few media at Del Frisco’s,” says Steve DiMeglio, longtime golf writer at USA Today. “We had the basement all to ourselves. It was in celebration to his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame. One long wall was packed with TVs showing the NBA, NHL, and pay-per-view boxing, so of course there was lots of betting. Mayweather was fighting Cotto in the main event. One of the fights on the undercard had a thirty-to-one shot. Of course, Phil was the only one to bet him, and the guy knocks out the heavy favorite. So there’s Phil sitting at a table and everyone is throwing cash in front of him to pay off their bets. ‘What are these?’ Phil said as he lifted twenty-dollar bills off the table, like he only lives in a world of hundred-dollar bills. Big laughs.”

“This happened ten years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday,” says TV announcer Jerry Foltz. “The Barclays was at Liberty National, and on the thirteenth hole, Phil drives it into the fairway bunker. He’s playing to a kidney-shaped, two-tier green and the pin is all the way in the back left. Phil’s got a hundred-and-twenty-yard bunker shot…. Nobody wants that. He takes his gap wedge, opens the face way up, and plays this huge slice. His ball lands on the lower tier and then spins dead left, up the hill, and cozies next to the hole. No one else on earth could hit that shot. They couldn’t even think of it, and if they somehow did, they certainly wouldn’t try it in competition, and if they did try it there’s no way they could pull it off. I just looked at him and said, ‘Fuuuuuck me.’ And Phil was like, ‘What? It was just a little side sauce.’ ”

“You remember there was that period when we were having our equipment tested for legality and it was other players who were making the allegations?” asks Paul Casey. “There was a player who accused Phil of having an illegal club. We won’t use his name, but he wasn’t as accomplished as Phil, put it that way. The club was tested and it passed, of course. Phil left a note in this gentleman’s locker that said, ‘You’ll be glad to know it’s legal and, by the way, good luck at Q School.’ ”

“The first time I ever met him I was an amateur playing the Open at Carnoustie [in 1999],” says Luke Donald. “Back then, for practice rounds they just had a tee sheet where you signed your name. I was looking and saw that Phil was scheduled to play with Mark Calcavecchia and Billy Mayfair. It was just the three of them and I was like, ‘Hey, why not?’ I figured they might see my name and play at a different time or something like that, but they all turned up at the appointed hour. Phil arrives on the first tee so energetic and outgoing, asking me lots of questions. I was pretty wet behind the ears and he made me feel so welcome. He says to the other guys, ‘Me and Luke will take you on for two hundred bucks.’ That’s a lot of money for a college kid and I think he could sense I was feeling a little uneasy, so Phil says, ‘Don’t worry, Luke, I got you covered.’ I can’t confirm or deny that any NCAA violations occurred that day. But what a great first impression. There is a larger-than-life element to Phil that has always been there.”

“Right after Phil won the British Open in 2013, the Tour was in Akron,” says Brandt Snedeker. “On Tuesday night I’m driving to dinner, and at a stoplight Phil pulls up next me. What are the chances, right? We roll down the windows and he yells, ‘Hey, buddy, where are you going to dinner?’ I told him I was meeting some people. He asks if I want to join him, but I say I can’t. He’s like, ‘That’s too bad because we’re going to be drinking something special out of this.’ He starts waving around the Claret Jug, smashes the gas, and then takes off. I’m just sitting there shaking my head and laughing like, Man, you can’t make this stuff up.”

“The first time I saw him in action was a clinic at Grand Cypress, in Orlando,” says Paul Azinger. “Phil had just turned pro. This had to be the greatest clinic ever: Nicklaus was there, Palmer, Trevino, Hale Irwin, Freddy [Couples]. Heavy hitters. During the clinic, Phil pulls a guy out of the crowd and has him stand right in front of him and then hits a full-swing flop shot right over his head. These days you see stuff like that on social media, but thirty years ago? It was like a bolt of lightning hit the driving range. The crowd was freaking out, everyone screaming. When the clinic was over and all the people had left, Jack and Arnold and Trevino—especially Trevino—gathered around Phil and said, ‘Son, don’t ever do that again. You’re gonna get yourself sued, you’re gonna get the Tour sued.’ And Phil says, ‘Guys, you don’t understand, there’s no way I can’t pull it off. What I do is…’ He goes into this whole long spiel about the mechanics of the shot. I looked at Calc”—Mark Calcavecchia—“and said, ‘This guy is gonna be goooood.’ I mean, he’s not even on Tour yet and he’s giving Jack Freaking Nicklaus a full-blown lecture.”

“There was a rain delay at the 2008 PGA Championship,” says Brian Gay, “and we were sitting around and Phil started talking about how he was going to take a trip to the moon. He said it was still ten years away, and it would probably cost him a million dollars, but he was definitely going to do it. He was dead serious—he had it all mapped out. It was like, Okay, Phil, whatever. But now guys are on the verge of going to the moon for fun for a few million dollars. He actually knew what he was talking about! No doubt he’s first on the list and someday we’re all gonna wake up and he will be doing fireside chats from the moon. That’s classic Phil. People ask me what he’s like and I say, ‘If you ask Phil Mickelson what time it is he’ll tell you how to build a watch.’ ”

“When Phil was still in college I wrote the first Sports Illustrated feature on him,” says legendary golf writer John Garrity. “I told him I’d take him out to dinner anywhere he wanted and it was my treat. From a college kid, you’d expect a hamburger joint, or maybe a steakhouse. Phil said he wanted to go to this fancy new French restaurant on Scottsdale Drive. I thought that was different and interesting. So we go, and the first thing Phil does is order escargot, saying he’s always wanted to try it. He’s got a plate full of snails and those little tongs—it’s like the scene in Pretty Woman. Of course, at this point he has a pretty high profile around town, so there was this sense that the whole restaurant was watching discreetly, and sure enough one of the snails goes flying and he just gives that Eddie Haskell grin of his. I think I knew then he was going to be a different kind of character than the typical Tour pro.”

“One day right after he got his pilot license we went up in a small plane,” says Jim Strickland, a college teammate and still a close friend. “Phil was gonna fly us to Laughlin to gamble for a couple hours. We were up in the air for six or seven minutes and Phil says, ‘Uh-oh, we don’t have any gas.’ It was like, What? He says, ‘Yeah, the guy was supposed to fill it up. But don’t worry about it, I can put this thing down anywhere.’ I look down and we’re flying over canyons and mountains. There is nowhere to land. My heart starts pounding. I am panicking. I am literally sweating. But Phil was so calm it was almost scary. He went through the backup systems, he communicated with the folks in the tower, and it turned out we did have gas, but it was an instrument malfunction. But the coolness and calmness was something to see.”

“Phil was always trying to talk me into flying with him,” says Charles Barkley. “No fucking way, dude. Fuck that shit. I thought his total confidence was funny. He was like, ‘C’mon, man, I’m a good pilot.’ No, you’re a great golfer. There’s a difference. I’m a firm believer that you only get to be good at one thing in life. You don’t see any United Airlines pilots on the PGA Tour, do you? I rest my case. But Phil argued that point all day long.”

“One year at Bay Hill, we’re on the eighth tee and he’s talking to [his former caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay] about what club to hit,” says Justin Leonard. “There’s a fairway bunker down there and Bones says, ‘Your stock driver will get to it.’ I had never heard that term before, stock driver. Phil asks, ‘Where will my 3-wood leave me?’ Bones says, ‘Maybe 178 out.’ That’s more than Phil wants, so he says, ‘What if I take four yards off my stock driver?’ At this point, I’m laughing out loud. I can’t believe this is a serious conversation, but it is. Bones says, ‘Yeah, take four yards off the stock driver.’ That’s just the way they did things. And by the way, his drive wound up ten yards short of the bunker. I guess he took too much off of it.”

“This whole ‘bombs’ thing, this guy is like fifty-one or fifty-two or whatever it is, like, c’mon, he’s not going to hit it that far,” says Harry Higgs, recalling his thinking ahead of his first competitive pairing with Mickelson at the 2021 BMW Championship. “Phil says aloud to Tim [Mickelson], his caddie, ‘Tim, do you like stock or nasty here on this tee shot?’ This comes out of his mouth. [My caddie] and I are just looking at each other like, Are you kidding? No one has ever said this on a golf course in a professional golf tournament in their lives. But that’s just Phil. And Tim’s like, ‘Stock is good here, Phil. We can get there with a good stock one.’ He goes through his routine, swings… and grunts. This is not stock. He audibly grunted as he struck the golf ball. That’s one of the nasty ones. To Phil’s credit, it went nine miles.”

“Phil likes to go to Augusta ahead of the Masters and I’ve been lucky to go with him a bunch of times,” says Keegan Bradley. “The first time we go, we’re having lunch in the champion’s locker room. We’re just wearing regular golf clothes. At some point Phil excuses himself. I figure he’s going to the bathroom. But he comes back and he’s wearing his green jacket, and with this huge shit-eating grin he says, ‘Sorry, I got a little chilly and needed another layer.’ ”

“One time at Pebble,” says Kevin Streelman, “there were a bunch of guys at dinner, including Phil and Gary McCord. As you can imagine, none of the other nine of us got a word in. Phil and McCord spent the whole time talking about astronomy and geology and the big bang and the expansion of the universe. Phil was really going deep, to the point he was trying to text a buddy at NASA to clarify some point about the start of humanity. I was like, Hey, pass the wine.”

“At Pebble Beach one year,” says Peter Kostis, “McCord and I are at the house of a guy named Ernie Garcia. It’s a great house with a formidable wine cellar, and we dug around pretty deep. The last bottle we had before Phil came to join us was an ’82 Petrus [a Bordeaux that can retail for low five figures per bottle]. Knowing Phil was coming, we got some ’86 Silver Oak”—a perfectly good cabernet that sells for around $120—“and poured it into the Petrus bottle that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Source Notes and Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright