Lefty at 50:
Mickelson’s desire, work ethic keep him in mix, players say
PGA Tour players believe Phil Mickelson has more wins ahead.
From the time the calendar flipped to January 1, 1900 — for you history buffs, the first electric bus became operational in New York City that day and the second Olympic Games began in Paris five months later — more than 16,800 players have teed it up on the PGA Tour.
In that span, more than 4,300 official PGA Tour events have hit the books, with 914 individual winners grasping championship hardware.
Of those, all of seven were 50 years or older.
Will Phil Mickelson make it eight? History, and the odds, are against him. The only players to roll through the elderly roadblock on the PGA Tour were Craig Stadler, Fred Funk, John Barnum, James Barnes, Davis Love III, Art Wall, Jr., and Sam Snead, who was 52 years, 10 months and 8 days old when he won the 1965 Greater Greensboro Open, making him the oldest to win on the PGA Tour.
But Mickelson, who turns 50 on Tuesday and was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame eight years ago, has turned back the clock before in the latter part of his career. His two most recent of 44 wins — ninth on the all-time list — came at the 2018 World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship at age 47 and the 2019 AT&T Pebble
Beach Pro-Am at age 48.
Lefty remains confident he can play at the highest level in professional golf and add to his Tour victory total. For now, he’ll hold off on booking passage to the PGA Tour Champions.
Good decision, his fellow PGA Tour brethren said.
“Oh, yeah, he’ll win again,” Brendan Steele said. “He’s hitting it farther probably than he ever has before, and in my opinion, one of the limiting factors if you’re going to win after 50 is length. Well, that’s not a factor for him.
“Now you add his short game, his wedge game, his putting, which is as good as most any player, there’s no reason for him not to think he can play and compete on the PGA Tour for a number of years still.”
And while Farther Time marches on, Steele said Mickelson remains a big kid.
“He’s always coming up with new shots that he can implement into his game. And that’s part of his charm — he’s always trying to come up with stuff to get better,” Steele said. “Some of it doesn’t work but some of it he’ll be able to pull it off and it’s incredible. He always gets excited about new shots, new clubs, new strategies, all these different things, and I think that’s what keeps him young.
“I definitely think the drive is there, the enthusiasm is there, the skill is there, it’s all there, so he can definitely continue to win. And I think he can win, and I know this could be crazy, but I think he can the Masters in his mid- to late-50s. I know that would be wild but I don’t see any reason why he can’t.” Others are of the same mindset.
“He will contend in the Masters for another 10 years,” Keegan Bradley said. “He loves that place and knows that place so well. And he loves golf so much and works at it so much. Yeah, he’ll win again. I think he’ll win multiple times.”
Age may be against him, but it won’t get the best of him, his colleagues said.
“I don’t have any doubt in my mind he’ll win again, because he’s still so passionate about it, still practices really hard, plays a ton of golf. And he’s still very, very good,” Brandt Snedeker said. “He loves the game of golf. I can’t think of any guy on Tour who really loves the game of golf more. In that aspect he reminds me of Arnold Palmer. Not just because of the way he is with the fans, but because Arnold literally until his last day on this earth wanted to go out and play golf. He wanted to go practice, tinker with his clubs. Phil is very similar in that regard. Phil is always trying new equipment, he is always out there playing golf, he’s always trying something new.
“I think it’s so cool to see somebody so passionate about it. That’s the one thing I love about Phil; literally every day he’s trying to find a new way to do what he does better. And there are very few people who still do that.”