One Magical Sunday

by Phil Mickelson

  “Dad, I think I can have fun now.”

  “Okay, Philip. Let’s play this last hole together and have fun.”

  Ever since that day, and through all these years since, I cannot tell from the expression on Philip’s face whether he is four over par or four under par.

  Phil Mickelson, Sr.

  Both my mom and dad will tell you that, in those early years, I was a strong-willed child. If my mom told me to go to the left, I would go to the right. Well, they didn’t want to break my spirit, so when I refused to put my napkin on my lap at the dinner table, they took a slightly innovative approach to the problem.

  “Okay, you don’t have to put your napkin on your lap, Philip,” they’d say. “But if we catch you without it on your lap, then no matter where you are—at home, in a restaurant, at a friend’s house—you’ve got to go out somewhere far away and count to ten loud enough for us to hear you.”

  Well, the first time the family went out to a restaurant after setting up this new rule, my sister, Tina, and I quietly slipped our napkins onto our laps. But Dad forgot. And when he took his first bite, we jumped up and said: “Dad, you have to go count.” So my father went outside the restaurant and loudly counted to ten. Tina and I got a kick out of it and kept shouting, “Dad, we can’t hear you!”

  I felt that I had to go out there and count to ten because, if I didn’t, my kids would never learn the importance of honesty, integrity, and doing what you say you are going to do. If the new rule applied to them, then it had to apply to me, too.

  Phil Mickelson, Sr.

  Over the years, there were a lot of little lessons like that—you know, important principles that my parents would try to teach us when we were young. We went on a lot of family trips, for example—to Disneyland, skiing, boating, and so on. Well, wherever we were, Mom and Dad always tried to quit at the peak of the fun. When skiing, rather than let us wear ourselves out and, at the end of the day, be lying in the snow wet, cold, and tired, we’d leave when we were having the most fun. That way, we always wanted to go back and do it some more. In fact, we begged to go back again. It just added to the anticipation and thrill.

  Skiing in the winter was one of our favorite things to do. And my father, who was a great skier, taught me both the skill of skiing and life lessons that went along with the sport. He taught me, for instance, the proper way to fall so I wouldn’t hurt myself. But when Tina and I came down from the bunny slope one time and proudly announced that we had not fallen one time on the entire run, Dad looked at us and said: “Then you didn’t learn anything, did you? Unless you’re falling once in a while, unless you’re pushing the envelope every now and then, you’re probably not improving.”

  Of course the next time we came down the slope, both Tina and I were proudly saying: “Dad! We learned a lot this time! We fell all over the place!”

  I had an awesome childhood. All those family trips we took provided life lessons and memories that will last a lifetime. As you might imagine, though, golf was the biggest part of my childhood. I’m so thankful my parents supported and encouraged me along the way.

  Shortly before I turned five, Mom took me to a week-long junior golf clinic at one of the local courses. At the end of the first day, the guy who was running the clinic pulled me out in front of the rest of the kids. “Here, watch Phil Mickelson swing,” he said. “See how he shifts his weight from back to front. This is the way all of you should do it.”

  At the end of the week, they held a putting contest for the entire group—including some teenagers. I won that putting contest and took home my first trophy (I slept with it that night). The very next weekend, my mom entered me in the Pee Wee International golf tournament—and I came in second.

  By the time I was six, my parents had become good friends with the owners of the Presidio Hills par-3 golf course. And during the summers when they were both at work and I was out of school, my mom would pack a lunch and drop me off there in the morning with five dollars. It would cost $4.50 to play all day and that left me with just enough money to buy two soft drinks—one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

  Our friends there kept close watch on me when I was out playing golf. As time went by, I got bored with hitting to the same holes all the time—so when nobody was around, I’d hit from the fourth tee to the seventh green, and things like that, just to make it interesting. I’d also put my ball behind trees in order to practice difficult shots. I just loved being out there because it was just the golf course and me. It was at Presidio Hills that I made my first birdie and broke par for the first time. I think I was about seven years old when that happened.

  That same year, I earned my first set of golf clubs. My dad and I had this deal. When I finished first or second in a junior golf event, he would buy me a full set of clubs. True to his word, when I finished second at an event in La Jolla, my dad later stopped at a small golf course and went into the pro shop. Left-handed clubs for kids were hard to find. So Dad just asked if they had a used set of ladies’ left-handed clubs. Sure enough, they did—and he paid $45 and we took the clubs home. Then he went right to his workbench and cut the shafts down to my size. You know, my dad was pretty smart about getting those ladies’ clubs. The shafts were weaker than those on men’s clubs and when he reduced the lengths, they actually felt like they were made for me.

  After all of that, however, my dad rarely bought me golf clubs. He made me start earning them. So when I was eight, I got a job working at the Navajo Canyon public golf course picking up range balls two or three nights a week. I did that until the age of twelve when new ownership laid off everyone under the age of sixteen.

  One of my fondest memories as a kid is playing golf with my father. When he wasn’t flying, he’d pick me up from school around three o’clock and we would go out to the Balboa golf course. For only a couple of dollars, we could play until dark. And many times, we’d get stuck out around #13 and #14 because we couldn’t see anymore. So we’d have to hike down the mountainous terrain and back up Cardiac Hill to get to the clubhouse. And now, as an adult, every time I drive by that course, I think of my dad and those walks—and the conversations we had along the way.

  The Masters golf course at Augusta has a similar terrain. And every now and then, as I would be walking from shot to shot there, it would remind me of those days and evenings with my dad at Balboa.

  My second shot on #2 was about five yards off the back left side of the green and I have quite a distance to cover to get to the pin. As I survey the green, I realize I don’t need to hit the ball very far but, rather, need it to come in really soft because the slope is steep and fast. So I decide to try a lob shot and fly the ball as close to the hole as I can. If I land it shorter, it will gain momentum down the hill—and I really don’t want that to happen. I open the face of my wedge way up and hit a big, long, high, soft shot. But as the ball hits the green, it gains momentum and runs just off the edge into the fringe—a little farther from the hole than I’d like. It turns out there was just no way to get the ball stopped from where I was. I shake my head in bewilderment but, because I’m only 20 feet from the hole, I know I still have a chance to make birdie.

  Chipping around Augusta can be difficult. So this year, I’ve tried to putt when I could. In my pre-tournament preparations, I spent a lot of time practice putting from off the greens because chipping can be tough at Augusta National. Part of the difficulty in chipping is due to the fact that the grass is mowed away from the green—which is opposite of most other courses. As a result, the blades of grass are facing toward you when you chip—and when your ball hits the grass, it has a tendency to slow down or even stop rather than go forward.

  So I decide to use my putter. I move the ball slightly up in my stance to give the club more loft so that the ball doesn’t get caught by the grass right away. I’m thinking to myself that this is not a hard putt—just a little right to left break. If I get the speed right, I have a good chance to hole it. I make a good stroke and the ba
ll falls right into the cup.

  It’s nice to start off with a birdie at the first par five. Everybody else who’s going to make a run today will probably birdie the second hole. And even though I didn’t play it the best, I’m able to walk away with a four and not give up any ground.

  Chris DiMarco also made a birdie, though. After the second hole, we’re still leading the field by two.

  PLAYER

  SCORE

  HOLE

  Mickelson

  -7

  2

  DiMarco

  -7

  2

  Langer

  -5

  2

  Casey

  -4

  2

  Els

  -3

  3

  3

  Flowering Peach

  Par 4

  350 yards

  The third hole at Augusta is a short par four. There are fairway bunkers on the left and you’re hitting to an extremely small elevated green. So far, I’ve played this hole differently each day (depending on where the pin is located). In two of the first three rounds, with the pin back and plenty of green to work with, I was able to use a driver and knock it down to within 50 yards and then chip up. But today, the pin is over in a tiny little area where it is extremely hard to land your ball. If you hit it even a tad too short, it’ll roll off the front of the green. And if you hit it just a little too long, it’ll roll off the back.

  My decision is to hit a 3-iron off the tee and play a low, knockdown, running shot. That way, I’ll have a full wedge second shot that I can take high and bring it in to the green more vertically (which will give me a better chance of landing it on the green close to the hole).

  My tee shot goes exactly where I want it to go—in the middle of the fairway. I’m sure this surprises the golf analysts. Rarely am I in the top ten in driving accuracy. But this week, I’m hitting it great and am tied for ninth in driving accuracy going into today’s round.

  For my approach shot, I’m thinking that I have to fly the ball all the way to the hole. I fly it too far, however—about five yards over the green. But I missed it where I had to miss it to make par. There’s a ridge between my ball and the pin, so I’ll have to go up it and let the ball roll down to the hole.

  It’s funny. I’ve had this exact same shot every year that I’ve played in the Masters. Yet I’ve never gotten it up and down for par. I’ve tried chipping it with a sand wedge, hitting it high with a lob wedge, and doing a bump and run with other irons. But I’m really looking forward to this shot to see if I can do better. It’s a tough one for me—but, even as a child, I loved challenging shots around the green.

  When I was nine or ten years old, my dad built a putting green in the back yard complete with bunker and flagstick. He also mounded the area so we could hit just about any kind of shot that could be envisioned. There were plenty of slopes and, of course, there were trees and bushes all over the place. Beyond the green, there was a rather large canyon. So when we got tired of chipping, we could let some fly out there—maybe up to 150 yards or so. And over the years, we hit garbage cans full of balls out into that canyon. Most of the golf balls were given to us by the local driving ranges before being discarded.

  Sometimes, I would play out there by myself all day long and, when we added some lighting, well into the night. After a while, I’d get bored with the same old monotonous shot, so I started moving all around the back yard—around obstacles, under trees, behind bushes, on the side of the bunker, in the sand. And I just kept making shots up like that. I’d go back up against the fence and try to hit the ball on the green. I’d hit it below the tree, above the bush, and out to the flagstick. And then I’d move the pins around. It’s easier on this part of the green; harder on that part. Hit it from here and go over the trap. Chip it from a downhill lie, an uphill lie, a flat lie. Put some spin on the ball and see if I can back it up next to the hole.

  As I got better and better, my dad would work with me and we’d devise all kinds of different games. For instance, we’d take twenty balls each and, from different places around the green, see how many shots we could knock within a flagstick length of the hole. If we knocked one in the hole, we got two points.

  After a while, I began to notice that the ball would react in different ways depending on how my club struck it. So I started to experiment. If I hit it just right, I could make it back up, or bounce right, or bounce left. I could hit it fat and watch it loft very softly—de-loft the club and watch it roll along the ground. I’d hit it below the equator of the ball and above the equator just to see what would happen. Sometimes, my dad and I would try some crazy shots and then talk about why the ball did what it did. It was just fascinating to me.

  Before you knew it, I was practicing all kinds of trick shots in the back yard. It got so I could hit the ball high enough in the air to go over a man’s head standing three feet in front of me and have it land in a bucket behind him. Usually, I practiced these types of shots when I was home by myself, because they were pretty risky.

  I remember one time when I was facing our house and trying to make the ball go in a different direction with a full swing. Well, I hit it wrong and it went flying off to the right at full force and crashed into our neighbor’s sliding glass doors. When I heard the glass shatter, I remember thinking, “Oh, no!” I ran back into the house and sure enough, within thirty seconds the phone rang and I answered it. “Hello?” I said.

  “Philip,” said Mrs. Peters, our next door neighbor, “is your mother home?”

  “No, Mrs. Peters, ma’am, she isn’t. Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, yes, Philip. Everything’s fine. I just want to talk to your mother.” I remember it took me forever to pay for those new sliding glass doors.

  The truth is that I broke a bunch of windows in the Peters house. One time Mr. Peters came home and found one of my golf balls on the floor of an upstairs bedroom. Of course, the window was smashed to pieces. “Hmmm,” he said when he called my mother, “I wonder who could have done this.” Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Peters did not get upset easily.

  Despite the occasional broken window, I was improving quickly. And I remember the first time I ever beat my father. I was about ten years old and we were playing a round over at Navajo Canyon. It just so happened on this day that Dad was not playing his best and I was playing as well as I could. He ended up shooting an 81 and I had a 73. I beat him by eight shots and I wanted everyone to know.

  Well, when we got home, Dad started messing around in the garage and I was hanging around my mom in the kitchen. But I could not tell her what I had done because of a lesson I remembered from a skiing trip a few years before.

  On one of our family trips, we were riding a chairlift up the mountain next to a guy who kept telling us he was the greatest skier in the world. And I remember being real impressed with what he said he could do. But when we got off the lift, the “greatest skier in the world” kept falling flat on his face. It turned out he was a terrible skier. And that’s when my mom and dad pulled me aside. “You see, Philip,” they said, “it just doesn’t sound good when you tell a person how great you are or how good you are at something. It just doesn’t come across right. It’s always better to hear it from somebody else.”

  So when I got home, I waited until my dad came in from the garage and we were all in the kitchen together. I thought he was going to tell Mom what had happened, but he didn’t. And Mom was too busy cooking to ask how our round went. Well, I just couldn’t take it anymore, so I finally burst out: “Dad! Aren’t you going to tell Mom what happened? C’mon!”

  “Oh, yeah,” my dad said finally. “Philip beat me for the first time—by eight strokes.”

  He was just beaming from ear to ear! What a smile! He was so proud of himself at that moment. And yet, he did not want to sound conceited. He just would not tell me himself. It had to be his dad who told me.

&nbs
p; Mary Mickelson, Phil’s Mom

  A few years later, I started playing in junior golf tournaments. I’ll always remember my dad driving me all the way to Tucson to play in one two-day event. I had been only a shot or two behind going into the second day, but I ended up shooting an 88 and fell way back.

  We had a six-hour drive back home and, instead of laying into me (like I had seen many fathers do to their sons in junior golf), Dad simply said: “What can we learn from today? Let’s look at the bright side. There are a lot of things we can pick out and work on so that you’ll be better next time.”

  At the time, we had a little pickup truck with a camper top on it. During the long ride home, I rode in the back and climbed up near the window—and my dad and I talked for the entire ride home. We analyzed each shot and what I was thinking. He asked me where I went wrong and what I thought I could do to get better. He made suggestions. And together we talked about what to practice when I got home and how to play smarter in the next event.

  After I started winning some of those junior golf tournaments, I announced to my dad that I wanted to play golf for a living. “Well, that’s great, Philip,” he said. “I just want you to realize how many people try to play on the PGA Tour—and how many actually make it. So let’s make sure you go to college to set up some other options if that dream falls through.”

  Back then, playing professional golf was just that for me—a dream. It’s all I wanted to do since I was about nine or ten.

  I was in the kitchen cooking during Sunday’s final round of the 1980 Masters Golf Tournament. Philip was in the living room watching television when, all of a sudden, he started yelling: “Mom! Mom! Come here! Come here!” I went in to see what was going on and there on the television was the leader of the tournament (Seve Ballesteros) walking up the fairway to the 18th green. People were cheering for him and he was waving back.