PHIL SENDS BALL FOR WILD RIDE ON NO. 18

“Oh, boy,” Justin Leonard said Sunday on NBC as Phil Mickelson launched a shot on the 18th hole at Torrey Pines South during the final round of the U.S. Open. “What is he doing here?”

Broadcast partner Terry Gannon chuckled as he said:

“It's like, ‘I'm Phil, what do you think I'm doing?' ”

A few hundred yards north of where Mickelson swung off a sidehill lie to the right of a fairway bunker, Steven Remedi of Phoenix was on the phone with his stepfather.

“He was like, ‘Phil's shot is bouncing down the cart path. Are you right there?' And it skipped right by me,” Remedi said.

A little beyond Remedi was Darin Boles, a Torrey Pines Men's Golf Club member working as a marshal behind the first tee.

“I saw a ball rolling, and I thought someone had dropped one of the souvenir balls,” Boles said. “And then there's this USGA marshal at a sprint — ‘Stay back! Stay back! Keep people away!'

“The ball is still moving and then it stopped. People were asking, ‘What is it? It's a Callaway. It's Phil's!' And then we had to move the crowd back. It was just great.”

The tournament's official scoring system described Mickelson's second shot as “300 yards to undefined area back, right of green.”

It was back, alright. The ball stopped against a fence about 100 yards from the hole. Boles said he has played hundreds of rounds at Torrey Pines and never seen a ball there.

“This is the first tee,” he said. “The ball doesn't come back to the first tee box!”

Mickelson walked down the path to get his ball, then walked about 200 yards the other way to take a drop just past the giant scoreboard to the right of the fairway, some 90 yards short of the green. He hit that shot in the greenside bunker, pitched out and two-putted for bogey.

Four weeks after shocking just about everyone by becoming the oldest player ever to win a major, capturing the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island, S.C., Mickelson predictably struggled at a course where he rarely has played well since it was redesigned 20 years ago. His four rounds here this week: 75-69-75-76. His total of 11over 295 placed him in a tie for 62nd place among the 71 who made the cut.

“Obviously I'm disappointed I didn't play better,” Mickelson said. “I was kind of fighting it a little bit and struggled a little bit on Thursday. I really found something on Friday (and thought), ‘OK, I'm just going to start playing like I did at Kiawah into the weekend,' and Saturday I lost it.

“So it happens. I just lost the timing, the rhythm got quick, and started hitting it sideways, which you can't do out here.”

And how would Mickelson describe what happened on 18?

“Oh, I just got on the cart path, and it just ran down 100 yards past the hole,” he said. “So we had to go 100 yards the other way.”

Praise for USGA, Torrey

Mickelson hasn't always been the biggest fan of the United States Golf Association (hitting a moving ball at Shinnecock Hills in 2018 comes to mind) but he was effusive in his praise of the setup this week at Torrey Pines.

“I'm very surprised that, in the 30 years that I've played the U.S. Open, this is the best I've seen,” he said. “I thought they did a remarkable job, and I'm really proud and happy that it's here at Torrey. … The setup is the best I've ever seen ... What they did really well is they made some of the hard holes harder pars, like 11 and 12, and they made some of the easy holes, like two, easier so you can make birdies.

“That type of setup allows the players who are playing well to make up ground or separate themselves from the field. They just did such a great job here. I'm very impressed. I think this course here has been a great site.”

His fellow San Diegan, Xander Schauffele, agreed.

“I'm biased, of course,” Schauffele said. “Sleeping in my own bed is always nice. Yeah, I think it was fair. It held up fair. The USGA did a nice job with pin locations this year. They could have easily let that get out of control, but they did not. It was kind of the U.S. Open that we expected.”

Schauffele finds a way

Schauffele lived out a dream playing a U.S. Open in his hometown, and he made some history by joining Bobby Jones as the only players to begin their Open career with five consecutive top-10 finishes (Jones had seven straight from 192026).

Still, even though he finished tied for seventh (the worst of his five Opens), Schauffele never really reached serious contention. Sunday he made birdie on the first hole “but it kind of went flat after that,” he said after a 71 that left him at 1under 283 for the week.

“It was awesome,” he said. “Playing at home in front of friends and family is always really cool. I played well. It obviously wasn't enough. … Overall, pleased that I was somewhat in contention at points, but just didn't really have enough this week.”

One of the top-10 putters on tour, Schauffele changed his putter and his stroke two weeks ago and this week tied for 58th in strokes gained putting. (He was first in strokes gained off the tee.)

What about Tokyo?

Schauffele likely will have the opportunity to represent the United States at the Tokyo Olympics, but he said he wasn't sure if he wanted to go.

“Logistics are tricky,” he said. “There's no opening ceremony, no experience of Japan. You're kind of locked down in your hotel. You can't go and see other venues or events. In terms of an actual Olympics, obviously, you're playing for some hardware, some gold medals and whatnot, but the overall experience, which I hear is really cool, isn't going to be there in Japan this year.”

Notable

The hardest hole of the week was the par-3 11th, with a stroke average of 3.393. The par-4 12th (4.389) was close behind, followed by the par-4 15th (4.318).

The easiest holes were the par-5 18th (4.640) and ninth (4.901).

The overall scoring average was 73.45. At the 2008 U.S. Open here it was 74.71.