Mickelson bags 68 with bro’s help
Phil Mickelson does not panic.
Shirt- sided to a tight pin? He’ll show off with an eye- opening flop shot. Have a forest of trees between himself and the flagstick? He’ll find an opening somewhere. Three- putt? There’s the next hole to make up for it.
He’s an optimist to the nth degree. There’s no shot he can’t hit, no shot that scares him. Aggression has cost him over the years, but over the course of his career it has made him who he is — the second- best player of his generation.
Nor does Lefty mope. He picks himself off the floor, dusts himself off and forges ahead. These characteristics have served him well over the years, as most any other player would have been devastated by so many heart- crushing defeats during his or her career. To hear the man with 42 PGA Tour titles and five majors on his résumé talk the last few months, you’d have a hard time believing he hasn’t won since the 2013 British Open. Heck, Tiger Woods has won a tournament more recently than Mickelson.
At 46, Mickelson is still a kid at heart and says he’s in his best shape in decades. He’s not blowing smoke when he says some of his best golf is ahead of him. He still goes big all the time and still finds a way to figure it out.
So when his longtime bagman Jim “Bones” Mackay showed up Friday for the second round of the World Golf Championships- Mexico Championship looking like one of those characters from
The Walking Dead, Mickelson didn’t freak out. Bones was ill from a stomach flu or food poisoning, and his prospects of making all 18 holes of the Club de Golf Chapultepec weren’t looking good.
A backup plan was at the ready — Phil’s brother, Tim.
The younger Mickelson, the former golf coach at Arizona State, took over when Bones had to call it a day on the 13th hole ( Mickelson teed off on the 10th) and became the first caddie other than Bones to carry his brother’s bag since 2012.
“And of course we proceeded to make a bogey, so I’m sure someone said, ‘ First hole he ever caddied, bogey,’ ” Tim Mickelson said, smiling.
Well, a birdie came on the next hole. And two more came on the inward nine, and Mickelson signed for a 3- under- par 68 to move to 7 under through 36 holes. He’s on the first page of the leaderboard, trailing leader Rory McIlroy by two strokes.
“It was the first time we were able to do that, and it was fun. Trust me, I don’t want Bones’ job, though. I have a whole new respect. Every hole seems uphill,” said Tim Mickelson, who said he would ask for a nice dinner and a glass of wine in lieu of being paid for the loop. “The coolest thing is that after he’s been out here 24, 25 years, to see how competitive he still is. You know, ‘ I want one more. Let’s get onemore.’ That fire is definitely still there.”
Mickelson was already dealing with the unique challenges inherent with the golf course, which is 7,500 feet above sea level and has some tricky greens. But he took on the task of being without Bones with no trouble at all.
“Bones is irreplaceable, because he’s so good at what he does and we’ve worked together now for 25 years that we just have this intricate rapport. He does a great job with club selection and we just work well together, so he’s irreplaceable,” Phil Mickleson said. “We knew that this was going to happen at some point today, so we had Tim come out, and Tim is one ofmy favorite people to be around. Certainly I’m biased, because he’s my brother, but he’s so fun to be around and he’s a good player in his own right. He’s coached college golf for so many years — and now manages Jon Rahm — that he understands the game, he understands strategy, course management. He knows the way I like to play, so we had a really good rapport out there. I thought he did a phenomenal job, and we had a lot of fun.”
Tim Mickelson underscored his importance by saying he was just a bystander and joked, “Well, he’s never listened to me on the course or off the course, so nothing is going to change,” when asked if he offered up unsolicited advice. “We both made sure we did the numbers, and then after that it was up to him to figure out stuff,” he added.
The elder Mickelson said the venue helped with the situation. “At Augusta it would be catastrophic, because we have so much history on that golf course over the years, so many shots that ( Bones has) documented, how far each club has gone and where we want to be and not be and what happened in certain years when we went here and we made that putt and that putt,” he said. “It would costme a lot of shots.
“But a place here, which is a new golf course, we don’t have that history. It probably was the easiest place to do it.”