Phil misses opening mark
UNIVERSITY PLACE, Wash. — We know from Phil Mickelson’s opening round that he can play Chambers Bay. Maybe no one else in the field is more qualified. X-ray his head during the day and you’ll get something that looks like an Einstein formula. Plotting his way around the former gravel pit seemed great fun to him.
But can he win? Can he finally throw the U.S. Open gorilla off his back after six seconds and complete the Grand Slam? Maybe we found the answer to that question Thursday as well.
Mickelson came home in 69, one under par for the day, certainly a good start, perhaps a carryover from his best finish of the year last week. But there was one nagging element to the round, a recent trend the last two years.
Mickelson got it to 3-under twice, the last time with a nice bounce-back birdie on 11. But he couldn’t find that next gear over the final seven holes. And that was topped off by missing birdie chances on 16, 17 and 18, from five feet on the final hole.
It’s a U.S. Open. It’s hard. Par is your friend. We all get that. But even a U.S. Open test yields the occasional special round, the kind he had a chance to shoot. But didn’t.
Mickelson was asked if he had a score in mind when he got to 3-under.
“No, no, just tried to keep it up with good shots,” he said.
“I’m very pleased with the way the round went. I hit a lot of good shots today,” he said. “I shot under par the first day of the U.S. Open. The first round was the round I was going to be most nervous at, getting started. You don’t want to have to fight to come back all the time. You want to get off to a solid start around par. And I got off to a good start and shot 1-under.”
All of Mickelson’s six runner-up finishes have come on par 70 courses like this. This ties his secondbest first round score of those six — at Bethpage Black in 2009. He shot an opening 67 at Merion two years ago.
Consider, however, that over the final three rounds of those tournaments, he had only four rounds in the 60s. Thursday, as calm as it was in the morning, was the day to stamp a number.
Mickelson came out blazing. After a nice par save on the first hole boosted his confidence, he started using the slopes to give himself good birdie looks. He got three of them and missed a shortie on 6.
He bogeyed 10 from out of a fairway bunker but came right back with a birdie on 11, which sent him to the tee on 12, the drivable par four. Both of his playing partners, Bubba Watson and Angel Cabrera, pulled driver and drove the green. Mickelson laid up with an iron.
As they walked toward the hole, Mickelson told his caddie, Jim (Bones) Mackay, to get a precise yardage.
“Take your time on the number,” he said. “We’ve got to get this right.”
The number was right. The execution wasn’t.
“I felt like the left pins were going to be difficult for me to get driver up on the top section,” he said, explaining why he didn’t go with the driver. “I was going to be on the low section with a very difficult putt. I felt I could get a wedge every bit as close as I could a putt from the front of the green.
“And I also felt at 3-under I don’t want to have one hole ruin my round. If I hit one bad drive and go in the junk and I make a five or a six, it just hurts the round. I didn’t want one hole to come up and bite me. I hit the wedge too hard or not hard enough, depending on how you look at it. I flew it too far past the hole.”
That disappointment led to back-to-back bogeys on 13 and 14, the later of which was a good bogey. After going from fairway bunker to greenside bunker, he rolled in a 15-footer for the five. “That was a big one,” he said. “Everyone is going to make bogeys, it’s the doubles you want to try to avoid. To make that one and not make any doubles, that was a big one for me.”
Bottom line. It was a good round that could have been better. That extra gear is still elusive.