Here’s a theory: It’s the memories you don’t see coming that you wind up remembering the most. The moments that drop out of nowhere, like they belong to somebody else. Because they’re not supposed to happen. They’re a bit of a shock, even to you.
Phil Mickelson on Sunday. Those four words alone: When was the last time anyone had thought about Phil Mickelson on a Sunday? And yet there he was, at age 50, triumphantly striding up the 18th fairway, Tiger Woods’s former foil, now the newly-crowned King of Kiawah, mobbed in the chaos of a khaki shorts Woodstock.
This was Pete and Alice Dye’s primo ocean course, waves crashing, sun primed to set, a laughably beautiful vision on an ordinary day, and now it’s a sunburned preppy madhouse. Golf seldom stirs like this, and to have it happen after a year like the past one, when protocoled players were asked to make these walks on near-empty tracks?
And to have it happen to Phil the Thrill? The scene felt like a rapturous release.
Phil! Phil! Phil!
“Slightly unnerving but exceptionally awesome,” Mickelson will say. He needed a wedge of police just to pry loose and walk onto the green.
Phil! Phil! Phil!
How could you ever dream of something like this?
“I just believed it was possible,” Mickelson says later, “but everything was saying it wasn’t.”
He thought he still had tricks in the bag. You don’t keep grinding like he did if you don’t. You don’t show up, a five-time major winner now outside the world’s top 100, if you don’t think it can happen, that somehow you will eventually summon the old sorcery and do it one more time. It’s too hard to bother otherwise. It’ll get embarrassing fast, if you don’t believe.
And yet pretty much everyone else had moved on. At least one sports book had Mickelson at 300-to-1 to win the 2021 PGA Championship. He’d been regularly missing cuts and entered this event ranked 115th in the world. He was a long shot’s long shot, a name brand still, but as bets go, a nostalgic lark.
He had his doubts, too.
“I know what my problem is,” he said in April, after missing another cut, at the Valspar Championship. “I’m not physically able to keep my focus. As I’ve gotten older, I have a hard time focusing.”
On Sunday, he kept focused, almost comically so. How many times did we watch Mickelson, clinging to a fragile lead, step to the ball and then take a sudden step back, closing his eyes and visualizing a positive outcome? This was a different trick in the bag. The situation was absurdly tense—an unexpected chance, true history on the line—but Mickelson maintained a wizard’s studied calm. He would not get unfocused and impulsive and blast himself into trouble.
Phil remained Phil, though. He took big shots and nearly suffered some very big misses, and the final round played out nervily. Mickelson was paired with the muscular comet Brooks Koepka, 31, who’s won four majors, including the PGA twice, and the two of them swerved around the front nine—three bogeys and three birdies for Phil, and a bogey, two birdies and a buzzard for Brooks. Mickelson vs. Koepka had been presented as a battle for the ages, but it was starting to look like a buddy movie gone awry.
The first inkling it might really be Phil’s day occurred on the par-3 fifth, when he holed a staggering bunker shot for a birdie. It was the sort of crafty, why-the-hell-not magic that Mickelson used to deliver all the time, back when he was packaged, fairly or not, as Woods’s closest rival, but now he was doing it as a half-centenarian who’d hadn’t won a major since 2013.
Ooooooooooohhhhh—yes! The crowd roared on the bluff. Mickelson shot his arms skyward. They’ll replay that shot always.
The back nine proved to be as edgy as the front—a little bit of magic, a little bit of uh-oh. It became riveting theater. It’s fascinating to watch a gifted player thrash a course, but championship golf is far more fun when it’s one step from disaster, because that’s a product that mortal hackers recognize. Mickelson couldn’t avoid trouble, but he avoided catastrophe, and Koepka, worn down by his surgically-repaired knee, failed to plunge a knife. Contenders elsewhere on the leaderboard (Louis Oosthuizen, Kevin Streelman) never made a big move. When Mickelson blasted a 366-yard tee shot on the 16th—the longest of the week, and not from a young gun, but a cool-headed elder—it felt like higher forces were in play. The tournament was Mickelson’s to win.
And then he won it, tapping in a two-putt, to finish out 70-69-70-73. It’s the sixth major of his career, the second at the PGA, and this time he did it with his brother, Tim, serving as caddie. Mickelson, who turns 51 on June 11, is now the oldest person to win a golf major, but what is old anymore, anyway? Tom Brady won a Super Bowl at age 43 and Roger Federer and Serena Williams will play Wimbledon this summer on the cusp of 40. The former benchmarks of sporting obsolescence are vapors. Over the weekend, France bid adieu to the 109-year-old cycling legend Robert Marchand, who set world records at age 100 and 105—that’s more than double a Mickelson.
In victory, Mickelson talked about the extra work he’d done, and the physical maintenance, and over the years, he’s become more disciplined with both his diet and regimen—don’t get him going on his coffee—but this championship felt like a surprise even to him. Maybe even a bit of a shock. Phil Mickelson had stood in this position before, more than a few times, but this is the one that he didn’t see coming. Nobody did. That’s why you saw that pandemonium on Sunday. Golf will remember it forever. So will he.
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Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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