STILL SWINGING WITH BIG BOYS
In his final event of his first full year as a golf pro in 1993, Phil Mickelson was runner-up to Tom Lehman in the Casio World Open in Japan and cracked the top 50 in the world for the first time at No. 47. Wednesday is the 25-year anniversary and the 48-year-old Mickelson has never left the top 50. That’s 25 straight years — 1,305 consecutive weeks — that he has been among the top 50 in the world. On that day, Mickelson was one spot behind Fuzzy Zoeller and one spot ahead of Craig Stadler. The biggest moment for Mickelson might have been the Phoenix Open this year. He didn’t play the last two months of 2017 and finished the year at No. 37 and then missed the cut in his 2018 debut at the Career Builder Challenge and dropped to No. 49. It’s a remarkable run of consistency. The bad news: Mickelson has never reached No. 1.