The interview room never made him feel like Phil the Thrill. Phil Mickelson would shoot himself out of another major, or somebody would make the kind of putt Payne Stewart made on the last hole of the 1999 Open or David Toms made at the 2001 PGA, the kind that made Mickelson feel as if he'd been shot in the heart. Or Tiger Woods would be too good, again. And then it would feel to Mickelson as if he had to play another eighteen with the media. Because no matter what he said, no matter how stand-up he tried to be, no matter how much he acted the way he thought one was supposed to act, it was never quite right. He was never quite sad enough to suit the media. Or maybe he smiled a little too much. Sometimes you watched these scenes play out and wondered if the press wanted Mickelson to share its pain, and not the other way around.
"I like just about everything about my job," Mickelson said to me after the Masters. "I love golf and I love the life it's been able to give me and my family. But let's just say those [press conferences] weren't my favorite part of it."
Mickelson paused, talking about all the times when he couldn't win a major and then couldn't win with the notebooks and microphones and cameras afterward.
"No matter what had happened," he said, "no matter how the tournament had played out, there weren't supposed to be any positives, just negatives. Even now, I can tell that people want me to say that I'm a happier person than I was before. Listen, nobody could have been happier to win than I was at Augusta. But I was a happy person before. Sometimes people don't want to hear that. I just got back from the park with my oldest daughter. A day like that, it made me happy before I won the Masters and it makes me happy now.
"My family makes me a happy person," Mickelson said.
Then Phil Mickelson, Masters champion, laughed.
"But I don't have to deal with that part of the job anymore, do I?"
I always liked his attitude. Mickelson did not come out of the Pat Riley school, where there was winning and there was misery, with nothing in between. He never looked at things the way George Steinbrenner does, where if you don't win the World Series, you fail. Mickelson always came across as one of the sanest players out there. A good guy who wasn't going to let anybody in the media or elsewhere tell him he was some kind of bum because he hadn't won a major yet, hadn't "won a ring" in the winnertake-all culture of modern professional sports. He stayed in there, kept enjoying his career, kept coming close in the majors and doing something even more important: Mickelson was living a life and not an apology.
And more than anything, it is why he does not look at the 2004 Masters, as dramatic a victory as anybody has ever had in a major golf championship and as popular a victory as anybody has ever had—that includes the young Arnie and the old Jack of '86—as any kind of finish line.
It is why Phil Mickelson came out of Augusta, Georgia, this spring feeling as if he were just getting started.
"I know there have been guys in the past who looked at winning a major as the pinnacle of their careers," Mickelson said. "As if for one week—and maybe just one—everything came together. Or everything broke just right for them. I don't look at the Masters that way. More than anything, more than the things I learned about myself down the stretch, I just felt as if I learned a lot, period. I'm excited just because I think I have a much better idea about how to do this now."
We were talking several weeks before the U.S. Open, and it wouldn't surprise me if by the time you read this he's got a big USGA trophy to toss his green jacket on. We chatted for a little while about all the things he had learned, mostly about preparation and decision making, all the things he'd worked on with Rick Smith, his swing coach, and Dave Pelz, his short-game coach, in the months and weeks of 2004 leading up to Augusta. He spoke of all the analysis the three of them had done about how close he really had come to winning the Masters, all the places where he could have saved strokes and didn't. The media had focused on the number of major championships—forty-six and counting heading into the '04 Masters—in which Mickelson couldn't find a way to win. The number seemed huge, as if Mickelson, as gifted as he is, were somehow forty-six over par for his life.
Meanwhile, Mickelson was looking at a much smaller number. A shot here. A shot there. Until finally he made that putt on the eighteenth at Augusta and was one shot better than the field.
"I didn't come into the Masters this year feeling as if I had to play spectacularly to win," he told me, "which is the way I used to think sometimes. And I won't go into the rest of the year's majors feeling that way. I just know now that if I play my game the right way, and think the right way, I can do it."
He will not be a one-hit wonder. He is too talented for that. He was always too good a guy and too great a player to carry around the burden of never having won a major like he was some undersize caddie shouldering two golf bags each bigger than he was. The week after Mickelson beat Ernie Els by a shot to win the Masters, I heard somebody on the radio trying to explain why this was such a popular victory, and he described Mickelson as "Everyman." It made me laugh. I wonder how many average guys have ever had the combination of distance and shot-making skill and touch and imagination that Mickelson has?
He is a better golfer than Davis Love III, who is still at one major—the '97 PGA at Winged Foot—and counting. He has more game than one of my all-time favorites, Justin Leonard, who still has just the one British Open, even if he did make the playoff in the Jean Van de Velde Open of 1999. I thought Leonard would win more, and he still might. Same with DL III. We thought it was just the beginning for David Duval when he won his British Open, not knowing that he would soon disappear like Bagger Vance over the hill.
