AS IT TURNED out, Jordan Spieth didn’t win the British Open, which was played that year at St. Andrews. But he came awfully close. He actually led for part of the final round, which was pushed back to Monday because of a number of rain delays, before finishing one shot out of a three-way playoff between Zach Johnson, Louis Oosthuizen, and Marc Leishman.
His final chip, from the famous “valley of sin” on St. Andrews’s 18th hole, swerved just to the left of the hole—leaving him about six inches from making it a four-way playoff.
Spieth signed his scorecard, met with the media hordes—many of whom were far more interested in his losing than in who was going to win the four-hole playoff—and then returned to the back of the 18th green to greet the three playoff contestants and to give Johnson a congratulatory hug after he had won the championship.
The number of players who would have returned to greet the winner under circumstances like that can be counted on one hand. Perhaps one finger of that hand.
That was Spieth.
“You know, when he first came out and I heard about how mature he was and what a great kid he was, I was a little doubtful,” Rory McIlroy said. “I mean, he sounded too good to be true. Then I got to know him a little, played with him a few times, spent some time around him, and realized, ‘Wow, he really is that person.’ He’s remarkable.”
Three weeks later, at the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin, Mike Davis, the executive director of the U.S. Golf Association, was standing outside the media tent on Friday afternoon when he saw the U.S. Open champion—Spieth—sprinting in his direction.
Spieth stopped to say hello. “Where are you in such a rush to get to, Jordan?” Davis asked.
“I need to get into the media tent right away,” Spieth answered.
“My guess is they’ll wait for you,” Davis said.
Spieth smiled and shook his head. “It’s not that,” he said. “I was signing [autographs] for a bunch of kids back there, and they pulled me away and said I needed to get to media. I told the kids I’d get back there to finish signing as soon as possible.”
He shook hands again with Davis and said, “Great to see you, Mr. Davis.”
He sprinted off to do his media rounds and finish signing all the autographs.
“He’s the U.S. Open champion,” Davis said, laughing. “I need to get him to start calling me Mike.”
As McIlroy said, too good to be true.
Spieth finished second that weekend at Whistling Straits, losing by three shots to a record-setting performance by Jason Day.
He climaxed one of the great years in golf history by winning the Tour Championship in Atlanta, meaning he had won the FedEx Cup. In all, he won five tournaments—two of them majors—and $22 million on the golf course in 2015. In the two majors he didn’t win, he finished T-4 and second. No wonder Davis Love was willing to commit a spot on the U.S. team to him before he’d struck a ball in 2016.
There was one other person who was about 99 percent certain to be on Love’s team: Phil Mickelson.
Love him or hate him—and there were plenty of people in both camps—Mickelson had been one of golf’s most compelling figures for years. He had put himself squarely in the spotlight for Hazeltine with his tirade at Gleneagles and his vocal involvement in the task force. The fact that he had flown in from San Diego to be in the room for the first task force meeting and then had practically sat on Love’s lap during the press conference/pep rally introducing the 2016 captain made it apparent how important the 2016 Hazeltine crusade was to him.
Mickelson had played on every American team in the Presidents Cup or the Ryder Cup dating to 1994. That meant Hazeltine would be the twenty-second consecutive U.S. team he’d played on—a record no one else was even close to touching. Jim Furyk had played on fifteen straight teams from 1997 to 2012. Tiger Woods had played on eleven straight teams from 1997 to 2007 before knee surgery prevented him from playing in 2008. Only American players could put together a string like Mickelson’s, since the U.S. played in either the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup every year. The Europeans and Internationals played only every two years.
For a long time, after the Presidents Cup was launched, there were some American players—Mickelson among them—who felt that having to represent their country every year might be hurting the U.S. performance in the Ryder Cup.
“It is something a lot of guys talked about,” Love said. “It isn’t just that we have to play every year, but we’re expected to win every year. We never get that much credit for winning the Presidents Cup because everyone says, ‘Oh yeah, you’re supposed to win that,’ but when we lose the Ryder Cup it’s ‘How can you possibly lose?’ ”
As the years went by and the Ryder Cup losses continued, the American players objected less to playing the Presidents Cup. Part of it was that younger players had grown up knowing about the Presidents Cup, unlike Love, Mickelson, Furyk, Woods, and others. Making a Presidents Cup team became prestigious—not on the same level as the Ryder Cup, but a notch on the résumé.
Plus, when the Ryder Cup losses came up, there was at least a little bit of fallback from all the Presidents Cup wins. And the Presidents Cup gave players like Spieth the chance—depending on how the calendar fell—to get some experience in a Ryder Cup–light type of atmosphere before dealing with the real thing a year later.
Mickelson had been hurt at various times in his career and had taken time away from the Tour after Amy had been diagnosed with cancer in 2009. He’d dealt with psoriatic arthritis since 2010 but had been able to control it through medication.
One way or the other, though, he had made every American team for over two decades—a truly astounding feat. That record had become a matter of pride, and it was very much on his mind in the summer of 2015.
“I want to make this Presidents Cup team,” he said in the locker room at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, one afternoon. “I want to make it on points. I’ve never been a captain’s pick before, and I don’t want to be one now.”
Mickelson had not had a good year—for Mickelson. He had finished tied for second at the Masters, four shots behind Spieth’s masterpiece. He had also finished in the top five in three other events, but had not played well during the summer.
“I’m going to play four of the next five,” he said that day in Akron. “I think I’m ready to start playing some good golf and I don’t want Jay [Haas] to have to pick me for the team.”
Mickelson knew that Haas would pick him, regardless of where he was on the points list. He had earned that, not only because he’d made twenty teams in a row on points but because of his “papa bear” role.
“There’s no one on the team who doesn’t want Phil there,” Zach Johnson said. “It doesn’t matter where he finishes on the points list. We want him on the team. We need him on the team.”
As it turned out, Mickelson wasn’t ready to “play some good golf.” His best finish in the next four tournaments was a T-18 at the PGA Championship, and he failed to finish in the top forty in the other three. He finished thirtieth on the points list.
And yet when Haas picked him, neither was it surprising nor did anyone question it.
Mickelson ended up playing very well in the Presidents Cup matches in South Korea, going 3-0-1, including a 5-and-4 victory in singles over 2011 Masters champion Charl Schwartzel. The U.S. won—again—although the matches were closer than normal, Bill Haas (Jay’s son) having to win the final singles match to secure a 15½–14 ½ U.S. win.
The win was a relief—albeit a small one—for the American players. They were expected to win, and they had won. They had also done it in the middle of the night in the U.S., meaning that even fewer people were watching than normal.
The Ryder Cup remained the holy grail, and no one knew that more than Mickelson.
“I put myself in this position, I understand that,” he said in the spring. “My feeling is if I had to take one for the team to try to help us win Ryder Cups—this year and in the future—it was worth it.”
Mickelson is always keenly aware of any media criticism, and he had taken a good deal of it after Gleneagles.
He had been aware of the Ryder Cup as a kid growing up in San Diego. Even though he was right-handed, he learned the golf swing left-handed because he would stand opposite his father and mimic his swing, as if looking in the mirror.
He was a star junior player and first remembers sitting down to watch the Ryder Cup when he was a high school senior.
“It was ’87, when Europe won at Muirfield Village. Obviously, I was pulling for the U.S., but I really admired Seve [Ballesteros] and I liked the way he teamed with [José-María] Olazábal. I remember the Americans having a lot of trouble playing the 18th hole on Sunday. I actually kind of enjoyed seeing them dance on the green—not because I liked them winning but because I thought it was a cool thing.”
By 1991, when the “War by the Shore” took place, Mickelson was far more than just an interested observer. Earlier that year, Mickelson had won the Northern Telecom (Tucson) Open as an Arizona State junior. He was only the sixth amateur to win a PGA Tour event (no amateur has won once since), and his big smile, dark good looks, and natural charm made him the kind of star sponsors lined up for when he graduated in the spring of 1992.
The win in Tucson meant that Mickelson had full status on tour as soon as he turned pro. He had watched the matches from Kiawah Island thinking he very much wanted to be part of the Ryder Cup in 1993.
“That was the first time I really got caught up in it,” he remembered. “I was pretty much glued to the TV that weekend.”
Nine months after that Ryder Cup, amid much fanfare, Mickelson turned pro. He had been a four-time all-American at Arizona State and had won three individual NCAA titles. But it was the win in Tucson that made his arrival on tour much anticipated.
This was four years before Tiger Woods showed up to galvanize the game, and golf was looking for a charismatic young star—specifically a charismatic young American star, since the best players in the world at the time were—for the most part—non-Americans: Nick Faldo, Greg Norman, Nick Price.
Fred Couples was briefly at the top of the game after winning the Masters in 1992, but persistent back problems and inconsistency kept him from being a regular contender in the major championships. He didn’t finish in the top five in a major again until the 1998 Masters. During that stretch he had more DNPs (did-not-plays) and cuts missed—six—than top tens—five, the highest being a T-7.
As cool as Couples was, as much as he made female hearts flutter, he was never going to be on Sunday leaderboards week in and week out.
Mickelson didn’t win during the second half of 1992, but won early in 1993—in San Diego, by four shots. But he struggled for much of that year before winning again in August at the International. That was one week after Tom Watson had selected Raymond Floyd and Lanny Wadkins as his captain’s picks for the 1993 U.S. team.
“I just didn’t play well enough to make that team,” Mickelson said. “Tom went with experience, plus, I won a week too late, after he’d made his choices. It was disappointing, but I understood. Funny thing is, under today’s rules, I probably would have made the team.”
Back then, the U.S. had only two captain’s picks; now it has four. And the picks were made in mid-August rather than in September.
A year later, in 1994, Mickelson played on the first U.S. Presidents Cup team—one that a lot of American players weren’t thrilled about, since they saw it as little more than a PGA Tour money grab.
It was the following year, 1995, when Mickelson finally got his shot at a Ryder Cup—though it didn’t quite go according to plan. This was the year when Mickelson was miffed at captain Lanny Wadkins for failing to tell him in advance that he was sitting out the Friday morning match (and he found out only when the pairings were announced at the opening ceremony).
Communication was something that would become vitally important to Mickelson. Wadkins’s thinking was actually pretty clear: he believed the boom-or-bust Mickelson would be more effective in four-balls, where making birdies is critical, than in foursomes, where keeping the ball in play is more important. It turned out—at least that year—that he was right: Mickelson sat out both foursomes sessions and was 2-0 playing in afternoon four-balls, first with Corey Pavin on Friday and then with Jay Haas on Saturday. But his logic was overshadowed—in Mickelson’s mind—by lack of communication.
“I think I was told at different times I was playing with four different guys on Friday,” Mickelson said. “First it was [Jeff] Maggert. Then it was Jake [Peter Jacobsen]. Then Pavin, then someone else I can’t remember, and finally Corey again. You’re going into the most pressure-packed situation of your career and you feel like you’ve got no direction.”
The U.S. had taken what appeared to be an insurmountable 9–7 lead on that Saturday after Pavin chipped in on 18 to give him and Loren Roberts a one-up victory over Bernhard Langer and Nick Faldo.
“In a strange way I think Corey’s chip-in hurt us,” Mickelson said. “We’d never lost a singles session and, with a two-point lead, playing at home our feeling that night was that we had it locked up. I think we let down a little bit emotionally, and it hurt us on Sunday.”
Playing Per-Ulrik Johansson the next day in the twelfth match, Mickelson could tell things weren’t going well. If he couldn’t tell by the lack of cheering, he could tell by looking at the scoreboards.
“Lot of blue,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t going well. I began thinking my match might decide the whole thing.”
After Wadkins had gotten in his face when he was two down at the turn, Mickelson birdied the first three holes on the back nine to take the lead. But the quiet up ahead of him made him nervous. Moments after he’d shaken hands with Johansson on the 17th green, he saw Davis Love standing by the side of the green waiting to tell him that the U.S. had lost.
Mickelson was stunned. The U.S. had been outscored 7½–4½ on the final day, the first time—as Mickelson pointed out—it had ever lost a singles session to Europe.
“I was kind of in shock,” he said. “I knew we were struggling all day, that was obvious. But walking off the green feeling so good about winning turned into feeling completely empty because we’d lost.”
During the next nineteen years, Mickelson played on two winning teams—Crenshaw’s comeback team at Brookline in 1999 and Azinger’s “pods” team at Valhalla in 2008. In addition to Oak Hill, there were seven more losses, ranging from routs (2004, 2006, 2014) to close-but-no-cigar (1997, 2002, 2010) to the heartbreak at Medinah (2012). Through it all, Mickelson seethed. His explosion on Sunday night at Gleneagles was the culmination of pent-up frustration that dated to the opening ceremony at Oak Hill.
In effect, Watson took the blows for Wadkins; for Hal Sutton, whom Mickelson blamed for his failed partnership with Tiger Woods in 2004; for the PGA of America for ignoring his pleas to name Azinger captain again in 2010; for Pavin for telling him his team would be a “twelve-man pod.”
Right or wrong, Mickelson is very firm in his self-belief. In 2016, Love would joke, “I used to think about half of what Phil said was crazy, now I only think about twenty-five percent of it is.”
Mickelson felt like he—even more than Woods because he’d been on ten U.S. teams before Hazeltine and Woods had only been on seven—had become the number-one scapegoat for the U.S. losses.
“They kept putting us in positions to fail [‘they’ being everyone from PGA presidents to captains], and then we got the blame for losing,” he said. “It just wasn’t fair.”
If there was a moment when the line was drawn in the sand, when Mickelson decided he was going to stop bottling up his anger, it came on that Saturday morning at Gleneagles when Watson delivered the news that Mickelson and Bradley were benched for the day.
“We were pumped, ready to play,” Mickelson said. “We were dying to get back out there in the afternoon. We’d finally lost a match together on Friday [they’d been 4-0 before that afternoon defeat in foursomes], and we wanted to get back out there and make up for it.
“Then Tom says we’re not playing. It wasn’t just disappointing, it was deflating.”
It was what Watson said next, though, that made it certain Mickelson and Watson weren’t going to kiss and make up anytime soon.
Beyond the benching, Mickelson never got over Watson telling him that he and Bradley weren’t playing well enough.
“ ‘Phil, it’s done,’ ” Mickelson said, repeating Watson’s words. “ ‘You guys just aren’t playing well enough for me to put you back out there today.’ ”
That last sentence—those final sixteen words that Mickelson remembered verbatim—sealed the deal. It didn’t matter what Watson or Mickelson said when the team met for the Saturday night gathering. If the U.S. had somehow rallied and won, it might have been different.
But that wasn’t going to happen. Before walking into the interview room on Sunday, Mickelson told himself—and his teammates—that neither he nor anyone else should say anything about their captain or the weekend.
Four questions in, he began his rant. And Ryder Cup history in the U.S. changed forever.