At Augusta, Phil’s no LIV rebel. Here he’s king of the world

PHIL MICKELSON loped on to the first tee at Augusta National as if nothing had changed.

He was met by warm applause and some cheers and even if they do not allow anything as uncouth as hollering at the Masters, a few of the patrons came close. Mickelson nodded his head in acknowledgement and appreciation, the way he has always done.

That is what happens here. When a golfer drives down Magnolia Lane, Augusta absolves him of all his sins and beatifies him. It takes only the good things and preserves him at the moments of his greatest triumphs. And so Mickelson is not a LIV Golf apostate within these walls. He is a king of the world again.

Augusta acts as a sanctuary like that. For Mickelson, that means that no one talks here about him being the catalyst for the fracture that is still tearing men’s golf asunder. No one mentions Mickelson referring to the Saudis, who bankroll LIV, as ‘ scary mother*******’, a quote that helped define the schism.

He does not face the same kind of questions he faced at St Andrew’s during the Open in 2022, for instance, when he was quizzed about why he had not attended a dinner for past champions held by the R& A. Mickelson soon grew perplexed by the line of questioning. ‘Let it go, dude,’ he told one journalist.

This week, none of that exists. Augusta National is where golfers come to forget the bad things. And this week, after all, marks the 20th anniversary of Mickelson’s first triumph at Augusta, the first major victory of his stellar career. It had taken him 47 majors to land his first win and five more followed.

So even though Mickelson stayed away from the event in 2022 in the midst of a self-imposed exile at the height of the LIV controversy, he came back last year and scythed through the field on the final day, finishing tied for second with Brooks Koepka. After so much vilification, it felt like a rebirth.

Mickelson has not exactly torn up the fairways since then. Last week, at the LIV Golf tournament in Miami, he finished 47th out of a field of 54 and the HyFlyers team which he captains and whose logo was plastered across his hat and shirt here, finished 13th and last of all the competitors.

And yet at Augusta, he seems to come alive again. His runners-up finish last year was a remarkable performance in light of everything that had gone before and even though he is now 53, he appears in better physical shape than he was in most of the years of his prime on the PGA Tour.

‘Phil’s looking fit,’ a lady standing in the crowd of onlookers near the first tee observed. And indeed he is. It is as if the wilderness he cast himself into when he joined LIV Golf has wrapped him in its embrace and rolled away the years.

He smote his opening drive down the first fairway and even though it was met only by nervous applause, it stayed out of trouble, coming to rest on the lip of the bunker that lies in wait at the top of the hill the players have to climb as they march up the other side of the valley that dissects the first fairway.

Mickelson gazed after it. He pulled his sunglasses down from the bridge of his nose so that he could peer over them, the better to see where his ball had ended up. He looked satisfied. His approach found the front of the green but he could not get down in two and dropped a shot on the first hole.

Large galleries followed him all around the course. It is the way it should be. I went to watch him play at the LIV Golf event in Las Vegas in February and there were 50 or 60 people grouped around the greens where he was lining up his putts. Mickelson is one of the greats of this game. It didn’t feel right.

Who knows how long it will last but at least on the first day of the Masters, it felt like he was a contender again. There is no reason why he should not be. He did, after all, become the oldest man ever to win a major when he won the US PGA Championship at Kiawah Island in 2021 at the age of 50.

Then he tied for second here last year. And yesterday, he recovered from that early bogey to birdie the third and the eighth to lie just outside the top 10 as his round entered its final stages.

Television channels dug out their footage of his famous leap into the air when he won here in 2004. Augusta National had worked its magic on him again.