WHEN ALAN Shipnuck first sat down to write the story of Phil Mickelson, the journalist and author did not know that he would, in a sense, become part of the narrative.
With 45 PGA Tour wins and six major championships to his name, the American star is widely considered one of the greatest golfers of all time.
And, as a new unauthorised biography by Shipnuck illustrates, Mickelson is also one of the sport’s most fascinating characters.
‘Phil’ paints a nuanced portrait of a complicated figure. There are several examples of the humanitarian side of the star, whose random acts of kindness and outgoing nature have endeared him to many fans and associates over the years. On the other hand, Shipnuck also does not shy away from exploring the controversies involving Mickelson, including the gambling problems and reported $40 million of debt he accrued between 2010 and 2014 alone, the insider trading accusations and of course, his decision to join the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf tour.
The book was nearly 30 years in the making, given that Shipnuck first started covering Mickelson in 1994, during the golfer’s second full season as a professional.
“I would say unlike most other modern golf superstars, Phil actually saw the value in reporters and building a rapport,” Shipnuck tells The42. “I think he enjoyed the jousting, but I think he also saw the utility in building his brand.
“He let reporters into his life more than other top players. It was just fun to be around him. He’s obviously really fun to watch play golf. So I’ve always just kind of followed him.”
After writing ‘The Swinger’ with fellow golf journalist Michael Bamberger in 2012, Shipnuck was signed on to write another book for publisher Simon and Schuster. With countless tournaments and events postponed, the pandemic provided the perfect opportunity to immerse himself into the world of Mickelson.
And yet for all the insight and detail in ‘Phil,’ Shipnuck says its subject remains a somewhat elusive and enigmatic figure.
“I certainly learned so much about Phil and his life, the people around him, the choices he’s made through the years and I do feel like I have a much deeper understanding of who he is.
“But he’s a very complex, contradictory character. In writing this book, I just wanted to understand Phil better and I wanted to present who he is to the readers.
“And ultimately, it’s not my job to tell people who Phil is, they need to decide that for themselves. I just tried to write a very fair, balanced look at a really big personality.
“Now that the book has been out for a while and people have had a chance to read it and digest it, it’s been fascinating to see the spread of reactions from golf fans. Some people say they like Phil more than they did before reading the book. He’s lost some fans, and a lot of people seem a little conflicted, they’re not sure how to feel about the guy, because he is just a unique personality in the sports world.
“So that tells me I probably did my job. I didn’t want to tell a story and say: ‘Phil is a bad guy and here’s why.’ That was never my goal. It was just to find out who he really is, present that to readers, and they’ll make up their own minds.”
Shipnuck had hoped to interview Mickelson for the book, but multiple requests were initially declined.
“I went to Phil three times, face to face, and asked him to sit for interviews for this book, starting at the PGA Championship in 2020 at Harding Park and then I approached him again at Torrey Pines, and then Pebble Beach early in 2021. He mulled it over and ultimately decided he wasn’t going to do interviews for the book. And that was fine, that’s his prerogative. I’d had so much access to [the people around] Phil, I didn’t really need him. But, as I explained to Phil, I thought it would make sense for him to tell his side of every story and to put his spin on everything. But he elected not to do that.
“So then I just plunged into the writing of the book. And in October 2021, Phil’s lawyer reached out to make that very unusual offer [which was declined] for me to be a paid consultant to Phil. The lawyer said that Phil was gearing up to take on the PGA Tour, to try and take possession of his media rights.
“And so that led to a dialogue with the lawyer. And ultimately Phil said he would sit for interviews, and ‘we’re working on a date,’ and then Phil’s agent put the kibosh on that.
“So this whole time, I’m still just working on the book, I couldn’t really wait around. And then, out of the blue, Phil texted me right around Thanksgiving of 2021 and asked to speak. And so it was kind of this long process.
“I think, in the final analysis, it’s been said many times about Phil, he likes to be the smartest guy in the room, and he just didn’t and couldn’t help himself. He had to explain to me how he outsmarted [the PGA tour commissioner] Jay Monahan and Greg Norman, and how he had gamed the whole system.
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“The idea that I was going to write this whole book about him and I would miss things I would not know [was frustrating to him]. So he just picked up the phone and called me even though his agent didn’t want him to and Phil had already said ‘no’ a few times.
“So it’s a fascinating episode and reveals a lot about who Phil is. I mean, he has lived life the way he plays the game, which is aggressive to the point of recklessness and this whole high-stakes phone call that we had was just part of that.”
During the conversation in question, Mickelson chose to address the much-discussed sportswashing accusations in explaining his association with LIV golf, branding its Saudi Arabian backers as “scary motherfuckers to get involved with” on account of the country’s poor human rights record.
“We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights,” he said, in reference to Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate in 2018.
“They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it?
“Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.
“They’ve been able to get by with manipulative, coercive, strong-arm tactics because we, the players, had no recourse.”
File photo dated March 2018 of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed in Istanbul. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Knowing the quotes were newsworthy, Shipnuck chose to publish Mickelson’s inflammatory comments in advance of the book’s release.
“With the Saudi question coming to a boil, Mickelson’s role in helping to organise the SGL [Saudi Golf League], and his true feelings about it, felt too important to the future of professional golf to leave buried in the pages of this book,” he writes in ‘Phil’.
“For over a year, one of the biggest questions in the sport had been: What does Phil want? Among professional typists, only I knew. In mid-February — three months before the release date for this book — Mickelson’s comments to me about Saudi Arabia and the PGA Tour were excerpted on the website of The Fire Pit Collective, at which I am a partner.”
The story subsequently blew up, with nearly 300 websites linking to the original piece. Mickelson responded by saying the comments he made to Shipnuck were off the record, but the journalist rejects this claim.
“It was definitely a little disorienting to be the centre of the story for so long and for it to be such an impactful thing to the whole sport. No reporter wants to be the story, our job is to tell stories. So that was uncomfortable, for sure.
“For Phil to say it was off the record was disappointing. It’s revealing of his character. He said what he wanted to say, and when the blowback got too hot, he tried to blame the messenger.
“Phil called me and I had asked him three times to do interviews for the book, anything he tells me is going straight into the book unless we expressly agree otherwise. And he never asked to go off the record. And if he had, I would have pushed back really hard, because this was my one chance to talk to him for the book.
“He rarely opens his mouth without an agenda. And I think this was just another example. He wanted to influence what I was going to write. He wanted to send signals to the golf fans out there. Because as this book was going to the printers, the whole Saudi thing was still unsettled. And so if he wound up taking the money, which he did, his comments to me were sort of a signal to golf fans that: ‘Hey, I know, these are bad guys, but this is just business.’ And if he wound up going back to the PGA Tour, it could look like a political defeat, but then he would have already enumerated for me all the battles he had won, and all the ways he had already changed the sport. And so he was just kind of working both sides of the street.
“And, it’s an interesting thing. When Phil picked up the phone to call me, did he mean to tell me all those things? I can’t say, but it was a long, somewhat emotional phone call. And sometimes when people start talking, they get carried away by the sound of their own voice and lost in the moment.
“Maybe he really didn’t mean to tell me all that at the start of the conversation, but in the end, he couldn’t help himself. And this is not a rookie doing his first interview, who was overwhelmed by the attention. This is a very cagey manipulator of the media and he’s spent his whole career jousting with reporters and shaping public opinion.
“So Phil told me exactly what he wanted to tell me. And when the reaction was different than he expected, then he kind of concocted this whole thing about being off the record. But I mean, I’ll go to my grave knowing that he never asked me to go off the record and that all those comments were always going to be for the book.”
File photo dated 11-06-2022 of (left to right) South Africa's Branden Grace; South Africa's Charl Schwartzel; Captain, South Africa's Louis Oosthuizen and South Africa's Hennie du Plessis of Team Stinger GC, with the LIV Golf Invitational Team trophy. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
So what does Shipnuck believe are the primary motivating factors behind Mickelson’s decision to risk his reputation as a much-loved figure in the sport for the sake of this extremely controversial new venture?
“Well certainly money, no one gets in bed with the Saudis if there’s not a lot of money involved. But there’s more than that. I mean, it’s a sense of grievance. Phil’s had his battles through the years with the PGA Tour, and he rarely prevailed.
“As he’s said, the top stars are outvoted by the everyday players. And so he just felt like he could never get traction for the things he wanted through the sport, it was a chance to finally get some of the things he’d always wanted, there was a little bit of payback for all the times he’d been ignored by the tour.
“And, you know, for Phil, he’s a very self-righteous guy. I mean, it’s important for him to be right. He had some scores to settle with the tour. But more than that, he wanted to reshape the whole sport in his image. And there were a lot of things at play there. So it starts with money, but everything else is a factor as well.
“I don’t know if it’s growing the game so much as just changing the way professional golf conducts its business. Where the players have more control, they get a bigger piece of the revenue and they can make their own content during tournaments.
“And they’re guaranteed a payday every time they show up. And so, I think it’s more about growing the professional aspect of the sport, as opposed to making new fans, and that’s what the players care about.”
The now-infamous interview in which Mickelson’s true feelings with regard to the LIV Tour emerged was not the only time when Shipnuck himself became part of the story to a degree.
Last month, he was “physically removed” from a Mickelson press conference after the golfer’s opening round at a LIV Golf event in London.
Did he ever get a proper explanation as to why this happened and who exactly was behind it?
“It’s conflicting,” he says. “The people at LIV golf said they had nothing to do with that. And I believe them in that they credentialed me for the tournament. What is the benefit to them of creating a whole scene like that? I mean, none. They’re trying to win hearts and minds and to toss a reporter in front of a bunch of other reporters where it’s guaranteed to become a story, that makes no sense.
“What I’ve been told is it was Phil’s overzealous handlers who just acted unilaterally and put the security goons on me, which was a massive overreaction. And I was just standing there in the back row, I hadn’t asked a question. I wasn’t sure if I was going to ask the question. I was just kind of assessing the feeling.
“And, of course, I went to one of these people who was standing right there, and when you see that video, he’s in the background. And I asked him in Portland, and he denied it.
“So once again, people are not being transparent. But it is revealing of a certain mindset, and a lack of accountability and all that stuff. So it was a bizarre episode. I mean, it was mostly ridiculous. It didn’t hurt my feelings. The whole thing was kind of laughable. But it does give you some insight into who these people are.”
Phil Mickelson celebrates after becoming the oldest major champion at 50 years of age. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
From the very start, Mickelson’s career has not been without controversy. Back in 1991, when part of the American amateur team playing in the Walker Cup at Portmarnock Golf Club, he landed himself in hot water when describing Irish women as “not that attractive”.
And while he survived that unfortunate moment along with multiple other bad news stories, the Saudi comments and his alignment with the LIV Tour are surely the gravest threat to his long-term legacy yet.
But then again, sport loves redemption tales and it is not difficult to imagine Mickelson being gradually forgiven for his latest indiscretion, as Shipnuck outlines.
“I still think there’s a good chance that the PGA Tour and the European Tour are going to cut a deal with LIV Golf and bring them into the fold. And to try to reunify the game. It just doesn’t serve either of those tours to lose so many of their biggest stars, and lose Ryder Cup captains. The fans aren’t happy about it, the sponsors aren’t happy about it.
“So I do think that we could still have some sort of rapprochement. And if that does happen, Phil’s going to be a hero to all of his peers, because he’s been the single biggest driving force in a lot of ways. And, I mean, that’s what all the players want. They want to be able to play wherever they want, whenever they want. So keep their tour cards in Europe or in the US, cherrypick the big-money Saudi events, they would love that. And so if that comes to pass, Phil’s brinksmanship will have worked.
“But for sure, he’s complicated his legacy, and it’s jarring how quickly everything changed. He walks off the final green at the Ocean Course [where he became the oldest major winner in history), it's one of the greatest moments of a legendary career and how it's all unravelled since then. So these are big themes, right? Greed, vengeance, betrayal. I mean, this goes beyond the sports page, now you're talking about Shakespeare. It's really a defining part of who Phil is, and how this all played out.
"But I was at the US Open, the fans are still cheering for him. When Phil gets to the Masters next year, the fans will cheer for him. I think they'll probably cheer for him at the Old Course [for the Open Championship].
“Most golf fans just want to watch their favourite players play golf, so the battle between these warring golf bureaucracies, I’m not sure how tuned into it they are. Golf fans just love to watch Phil Mickelson play golf. So I think he’ll survive this like he’s survived every other controversy.”
‘Phil: The Rip-Roaring (and Unauthorised!) Biography of Golf’s Most Colourful Superstar’ by Alan Shipnuck is published by Simon and Schuster. More info here.
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'I'll go to my grave knowing that Phil never asked me to go off the record'
WHEN ALAN Shipnuck first sat down to write the story of Phil Mickelson, the journalist and author did not know that he would, in a sense, become part of the narrative.
With 45 PGA Tour wins and six major championships to his name, the American star is widely considered one of the greatest golfers of all time.
And, as a new unauthorised biography by Shipnuck illustrates, Mickelson is also one of the sport’s most fascinating characters.
‘Phil’ paints a nuanced portrait of a complicated figure. There are several examples of the humanitarian side of the star, whose random acts of kindness and outgoing nature have endeared him to many fans and associates over the years. On the other hand, Shipnuck also does not shy away from exploring the controversies involving Mickelson, including the gambling problems and reported $40 million of debt he accrued between 2010 and 2014 alone, the insider trading accusations and of course, his decision to join the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf tour.
The book was nearly 30 years in the making, given that Shipnuck first started covering Mickelson in 1994, during the golfer’s second full season as a professional.
“I would say unlike most other modern golf superstars, Phil actually saw the value in reporters and building a rapport,” Shipnuck tells The42. “I think he enjoyed the jousting, but I think he also saw the utility in building his brand.
“He let reporters into his life more than other top players. It was just fun to be around him. He’s obviously really fun to watch play golf. So I’ve always just kind of followed him.”
After writing ‘The Swinger’ with fellow golf journalist Michael Bamberger in 2012, Shipnuck was signed on to write another book for publisher Simon and Schuster. With countless tournaments and events postponed, the pandemic provided the perfect opportunity to immerse himself into the world of Mickelson.
And yet for all the insight and detail in ‘Phil,’ Shipnuck says its subject remains a somewhat elusive and enigmatic figure.
“I certainly learned so much about Phil and his life, the people around him, the choices he’s made through the years and I do feel like I have a much deeper understanding of who he is.
“But he’s a very complex, contradictory character. In writing this book, I just wanted to understand Phil better and I wanted to present who he is to the readers.
“And ultimately, it’s not my job to tell people who Phil is, they need to decide that for themselves. I just tried to write a very fair, balanced look at a really big personality.
“Now that the book has been out for a while and people have had a chance to read it and digest it, it’s been fascinating to see the spread of reactions from golf fans. Some people say they like Phil more than they did before reading the book. He’s lost some fans, and a lot of people seem a little conflicted, they’re not sure how to feel about the guy, because he is just a unique personality in the sports world.
“So that tells me I probably did my job. I didn’t want to tell a story and say: ‘Phil is a bad guy and here’s why.’ That was never my goal. It was just to find out who he really is, present that to readers, and they’ll make up their own minds.”
Shipnuck had hoped to interview Mickelson for the book, but multiple requests were initially declined.
“I went to Phil three times, face to face, and asked him to sit for interviews for this book, starting at the PGA Championship in 2020 at Harding Park and then I approached him again at Torrey Pines, and then Pebble Beach early in 2021. He mulled it over and ultimately decided he wasn’t going to do interviews for the book. And that was fine, that’s his prerogative. I’d had so much access to [the people around] Phil, I didn’t really need him. But, as I explained to Phil, I thought it would make sense for him to tell his side of every story and to put his spin on everything. But he elected not to do that.
“So then I just plunged into the writing of the book. And in October 2021, Phil’s lawyer reached out to make that very unusual offer [which was declined] for me to be a paid consultant to Phil. The lawyer said that Phil was gearing up to take on the PGA Tour, to try and take possession of his media rights.
“And so that led to a dialogue with the lawyer. And ultimately Phil said he would sit for interviews, and ‘we’re working on a date,’ and then Phil’s agent put the kibosh on that.
“So this whole time, I’m still just working on the book, I couldn’t really wait around. And then, out of the blue, Phil texted me right around Thanksgiving of 2021 and asked to speak. And so it was kind of this long process.
“I think, in the final analysis, it’s been said many times about Phil, he likes to be the smartest guy in the room, and he just didn’t and couldn’t help himself. He had to explain to me how he outsmarted [the PGA tour commissioner] Jay Monahan and Greg Norman, and how he had gamed the whole system.
“The idea that I was going to write this whole book about him and I would miss things I would not know [was frustrating to him]. So he just picked up the phone and called me even though his agent didn’t want him to and Phil had already said ‘no’ a few times.
“So it’s a fascinating episode and reveals a lot about who Phil is. I mean, he has lived life the way he plays the game, which is aggressive to the point of recklessness and this whole high-stakes phone call that we had was just part of that.”
During the conversation in question, Mickelson chose to address the much-discussed sportswashing accusations in explaining his association with LIV golf, branding its Saudi Arabian backers as “scary motherfuckers to get involved with” on account of the country’s poor human rights record.
“We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights,” he said, in reference to Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate in 2018.
“They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it?
“Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.
“They’ve been able to get by with manipulative, coercive, strong-arm tactics because we, the players, had no recourse.”
Knowing the quotes were newsworthy, Shipnuck chose to publish Mickelson’s inflammatory comments in advance of the book’s release.
“With the Saudi question coming to a boil, Mickelson’s role in helping to organise the SGL [Saudi Golf League], and his true feelings about it, felt too important to the future of professional golf to leave buried in the pages of this book,” he writes in ‘Phil’.
“For over a year, one of the biggest questions in the sport had been: What does Phil want? Among professional typists, only I knew. In mid-February — three months before the release date for this book — Mickelson’s comments to me about Saudi Arabia and the PGA Tour were excerpted on the website of The Fire Pit Collective, at which I am a partner.”
The story subsequently blew up, with nearly 300 websites linking to the original piece. Mickelson responded by saying the comments he made to Shipnuck were off the record, but the journalist rejects this claim.
“It was definitely a little disorienting to be the centre of the story for so long and for it to be such an impactful thing to the whole sport. No reporter wants to be the story, our job is to tell stories. So that was uncomfortable, for sure.
“For Phil to say it was off the record was disappointing. It’s revealing of his character. He said what he wanted to say, and when the blowback got too hot, he tried to blame the messenger.
“Phil called me and I had asked him three times to do interviews for the book, anything he tells me is going straight into the book unless we expressly agree otherwise. And he never asked to go off the record. And if he had, I would have pushed back really hard, because this was my one chance to talk to him for the book.
“He rarely opens his mouth without an agenda. And I think this was just another example. He wanted to influence what I was going to write. He wanted to send signals to the golf fans out there. Because as this book was going to the printers, the whole Saudi thing was still unsettled. And so if he wound up taking the money, which he did, his comments to me were sort of a signal to golf fans that: ‘Hey, I know, these are bad guys, but this is just business.’ And if he wound up going back to the PGA Tour, it could look like a political defeat, but then he would have already enumerated for me all the battles he had won, and all the ways he had already changed the sport. And so he was just kind of working both sides of the street.
“And, it’s an interesting thing. When Phil picked up the phone to call me, did he mean to tell me all those things? I can’t say, but it was a long, somewhat emotional phone call. And sometimes when people start talking, they get carried away by the sound of their own voice and lost in the moment.
“Maybe he really didn’t mean to tell me all that at the start of the conversation, but in the end, he couldn’t help himself. And this is not a rookie doing his first interview, who was overwhelmed by the attention. This is a very cagey manipulator of the media and he’s spent his whole career jousting with reporters and shaping public opinion.
“So Phil told me exactly what he wanted to tell me. And when the reaction was different than he expected, then he kind of concocted this whole thing about being off the record. But I mean, I’ll go to my grave knowing that he never asked me to go off the record and that all those comments were always going to be for the book.”
So what does Shipnuck believe are the primary motivating factors behind Mickelson’s decision to risk his reputation as a much-loved figure in the sport for the sake of this extremely controversial new venture?
“Well certainly money, no one gets in bed with the Saudis if there’s not a lot of money involved. But there’s more than that. I mean, it’s a sense of grievance. Phil’s had his battles through the years with the PGA Tour, and he rarely prevailed.
“As he’s said, the top stars are outvoted by the everyday players. And so he just felt like he could never get traction for the things he wanted through the sport, it was a chance to finally get some of the things he’d always wanted, there was a little bit of payback for all the times he’d been ignored by the tour.
“And, you know, for Phil, he’s a very self-righteous guy. I mean, it’s important for him to be right. He had some scores to settle with the tour. But more than that, he wanted to reshape the whole sport in his image. And there were a lot of things at play there. So it starts with money, but everything else is a factor as well.
“I don’t know if it’s growing the game so much as just changing the way professional golf conducts its business. Where the players have more control, they get a bigger piece of the revenue and they can make their own content during tournaments.
“And they’re guaranteed a payday every time they show up. And so, I think it’s more about growing the professional aspect of the sport, as opposed to making new fans, and that’s what the players care about.”
The now-infamous interview in which Mickelson’s true feelings with regard to the LIV Tour emerged was not the only time when Shipnuck himself became part of the story to a degree.
Last month, he was “physically removed” from a Mickelson press conference after the golfer’s opening round at a LIV Golf event in London.
Did he ever get a proper explanation as to why this happened and who exactly was behind it?
“It’s conflicting,” he says. “The people at LIV golf said they had nothing to do with that. And I believe them in that they credentialed me for the tournament. What is the benefit to them of creating a whole scene like that? I mean, none. They’re trying to win hearts and minds and to toss a reporter in front of a bunch of other reporters where it’s guaranteed to become a story, that makes no sense.
“What I’ve been told is it was Phil’s overzealous handlers who just acted unilaterally and put the security goons on me, which was a massive overreaction. And I was just standing there in the back row, I hadn’t asked a question. I wasn’t sure if I was going to ask the question. I was just kind of assessing the feeling.
“And, of course, I went to one of these people who was standing right there, and when you see that video, he’s in the background. And I asked him in Portland, and he denied it.
“So once again, people are not being transparent. But it is revealing of a certain mindset, and a lack of accountability and all that stuff. So it was a bizarre episode. I mean, it was mostly ridiculous. It didn’t hurt my feelings. The whole thing was kind of laughable. But it does give you some insight into who these people are.”
From the very start, Mickelson’s career has not been without controversy. Back in 1991, when part of the American amateur team playing in the Walker Cup at Portmarnock Golf Club, he landed himself in hot water when describing Irish women as “not that attractive”.
And while he survived that unfortunate moment along with multiple other bad news stories, the Saudi comments and his alignment with the LIV Tour are surely the gravest threat to his long-term legacy yet.
But then again, sport loves redemption tales and it is not difficult to imagine Mickelson being gradually forgiven for his latest indiscretion, as Shipnuck outlines.
“I still think there’s a good chance that the PGA Tour and the European Tour are going to cut a deal with LIV Golf and bring them into the fold. And to try to reunify the game. It just doesn’t serve either of those tours to lose so many of their biggest stars, and lose Ryder Cup captains. The fans aren’t happy about it, the sponsors aren’t happy about it.
“So I do think that we could still have some sort of rapprochement. And if that does happen, Phil’s going to be a hero to all of his peers, because he’s been the single biggest driving force in a lot of ways. And, I mean, that’s what all the players want. They want to be able to play wherever they want, whenever they want. So keep their tour cards in Europe or in the US, cherrypick the big-money Saudi events, they would love that. And so if that comes to pass, Phil’s brinksmanship will have worked.
“But for sure, he’s complicated his legacy, and it’s jarring how quickly everything changed. He walks off the final green at the Ocean Course [where he became the oldest major winner in history), it's one of the greatest moments of a legendary career and how it's all unravelled since then. So these are big themes, right? Greed, vengeance, betrayal. I mean, this goes beyond the sports page, now you're talking about Shakespeare. It's really a defining part of who Phil is, and how this all played out.
"But I was at the US Open, the fans are still cheering for him. When Phil gets to the Masters next year, the fans will cheer for him. I think they'll probably cheer for him at the Old Course [for the Open Championship].
“Most golf fans just want to watch their favourite players play golf, so the battle between these warring golf bureaucracies, I’m not sure how tuned into it they are. Golf fans just love to watch Phil Mickelson play golf. So I think he’ll survive this like he’s survived every other controversy.”
‘Phil: The Rip-Roaring (and Unauthorised!) Biography of Golf’s Most Colourful Superstar’ by Alan Shipnuck is published by Simon and Schuster. More info here.
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Alan Shipnuck book liv golf PGA Tour Phil Mickelson scrutiny