Lefty optimistic he can turn it around
Tour opens play in its annual Pebble Beach stop Thursday
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Optimism is never in short supply for Phil Mickelson, and it was especially high when he left the Monterey Peninsula last year with his 44th career PGA Tour victory and his fifth title in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
He had the entire year ahead of him.
It didn’t turn out the way he imagined.
“After I won last year, I knew I was going to go out and just crush the rest of the year,” Mickelson said Wednesday. “And the rest of the year crushed me.”
It wasn’t that he failed to win again — no shame in that after turning 49 and competing against an increasingly younger PGA Tour — he only cracked the top 20 one time, at the Masters.
The Presidents Cup, which dates to 1994, was played without him for the first time. And by the end of the year, he was out of the top 50 in the world for the first time in 26 years.
“I didn’t play up to my level of expectation, and it just kind of snowballed and got worse,” Mickelson said.
He returns to Pebble Beach with his optimism still strong. Mickelson has shied away from a previous guarantee of reaching 50 wins on the PGA Tour. With age comes a dose of reality. But he likes the way he is swinging. He likes the way he is thinking again. And he picked up some momentum from finishing third last week in Saudi Arabia.
It was particularly refreshing because Mickelson had missed the cut in Palm Springs and San Diego, the first time in his long career as a pro he had missed the cut in consecutive events to start the year.
“I was really excited about how I was playing. And then I get on the golf course and I start not seeing what I want to have happen but more what I don’t want to have happen,” Mickelson said. “My inability to kind of control my thoughts was getting the best of me the first few weeks. And I was able to identify the problem and then fix it and start to control my thoughts a little bit better, control my visualization, and I hit a lot of good shots thereafter.”
For everyone, there will be plenty of good visualization this week, with a forecast of sunshine, although temperatures will remain in the 50s. Players will take sun over a few extra layers for warmth rather than a rain suit.
“When the sun shines, there’s no better place on the golfing planet to be,” Graeme McDowell said.
Three of the more intriguing players in the field all have Saudi connections — Mickelson, McDowell and Dustin Johnson. McDowell won the Saudi International by two shots over Johnson, with Mickelson in third. All three flew across 12 time zones to take part in a tournament with heritage and beauty.
“The win last week was important at a lot of levels, just to get me back up the rankings, get me back in a couple of the WGC events — which is really important — the major championships, and get me back in the right direction again,” McDowell said. “Ticked a lot of boxes and hopefully I can use it as a springboard to kick on for a big year, big season ahead.”
McDowell’s victory got him back into the top 50 in the world for the first time since 2015. Johnson is a twotime winner at Pebble Beach who is approaching the oneyear anniversary of his last victory, an alarming development given a skill set that leads many players to believe he’s still the best in the game.