The sun was out on opening day at Augusta, and you could catch the reflection bouncing off Phil Mickelson’s big old grin as he walked on to the first tee from the next county. At 54, the American’s smile seems to be the one bit of his game that’s still in good trim. He cuts an odd figure around the grounds these days, in his aviator shades and LIV-branded kit. Mickelson is a six-time major champion, and three-time Masters winner, and by any measure one of the very best to ever do it. He ought to be one of the most popular men here but it can feel hard to find anyone in the clubhouse who has two kind words about him to rub together.
“I don’t know what level Phil is competing at,” said Jack Nicklaus in his morning press conference. “I guess he’s still playing. He’s playing the LIV Tour, is he? I don’t know if he’s playing or not. I don’t know. You never see that any more.” Nicklaus is 85 now, and while he knows damn well which tour Mickelson is on these days, he evidently doesn’t want to spend any of the time he has left watching him play on it. “You know, Phil has been a good player, there’s no question about that,” Nicklaus offered. “He has been competitive in an odd event here and there but not really in the last few years.” Ouch.
He’s not wrong, mind. Mickelson finished runner-up here in 2023, when a brilliant final-round 65 swept him up the field from 10 shots back, but since then he has missed more cuts in the majors than he has made. His best finish in the seven he has played was 43rd here last year. Even more dispiriting, he has only just recorded his first solo top-10 finish on the LIV tour. He came third behind Sergio García in Hong Kong last week. Whatever else LIV got for the $200m-odd it is supposed to have paid him to join, it was not a championship contender.
He still makes his fair share of headlines, mind. There were more last week when he wrote a post on X, swiftly deleted, in which he described Fred Couples, who is one of the most popular men in the sport, as behaving like a “low class jerk” because he said he was sure Brooks Koepka wanted to rejoin the PGA Tour. And he’s popular with the patrons, too, there’s a little ripple of excitement wherever he goes out on the course, although by the time he was at the turn the cries of: “Go get ’em!” had given way to chirrups of: “Hang in there!” and: “Head up!” A lot of the shots he made around the greens were met with stone cold silence, which is never a good sign.
Mickelson scrambled around the opening four holes in even par but started to slip backwards when he reached the 5th, where he had to lay up out of the big fairway bunker. He dropped another shot at the 7th where, caught under the overhanging branches on the right side of the fairway, he tried an uneasy sort of draw with his wedge and ended up back in the sand again. It was the sort of shot he would have pulled off in his pomp. Then on the 9th he had to play out of the pine straw, and dropped a third. He picked a couple of strokes coming around the second nine, though, then dropped them again as he came down the stretch.
Mickelson had been paired with Jason Day and, in one of those little twists the tournament committee is so fond of, Keegan Bradley. Mickelson was, everyone reckoned, a cert to be the USA’s Ryder Cup captain at Bethpage Black later this year. Then he joined LIV. When Tiger Woods decided he didn’t want the job, it fell out of the blue to Bradley, who was just as surprised as everyone else that it landed in his lap. He is only 38 and the youngest man to get the job since Arnold Palmer in 1963. He goes by the unofficial nickname of “Cap’n”, now, “Shot, Cap’n!”, “Let’s Go, Cap’n!”
Bradley and Mickelson are old buds and were a brilliant Ryder Cup pair themselves back in the day. But Bradley has already said Mickelson is unlikely to be involved this time.
Bradley looks the part, he’s sporting a proper Tom Selleck soup-strainer on his top lip these days, and he plays it too: he broke off from preparing for his opening shot to sign a child’s autograph book and he didn’t leave a single fist hanging as he walked around the 18th. Out by the 6th green one corporate sort of gentleman was busy explaining that his firm had just signed Bradley up to a brand new sponsorship deal for Ryder Cup year. “Hell of a good get,” said his friend. Bradley’s biggest problem right now may be that he’s playing so well he ends up qualifying for his own team, which would put him, and them, in a pickle.
He will need to putt a bit better if he’s going to do it, though. He missed three from inside 10 feet on the front nine, and by the time he made it to 18 he was on two over par, right alongside Mickelson, who duly scored another bogey to end the round on three over. Similar scores, different fortunes.
