What’s up with Tiger & Phil? Questions persist as another major looms

Now and again, a reader will write in with this existential riddle: What’s up with Tiger and Phil?

It’s beyond weird, that golf’s two most dominant figures over the past three decades have all but vanished from the sport’s landscape and even its screen-scape.

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The most recent Woods update came courtesy of People magazine. (Telling.) The news was that the 15-time major champion is in a residential treatment facility outside the United States for what appears to be to a three-month stay to address his addiction issues. This return to a rehabilitation center — he sought treatment in a Mississippi facility in 2010 for addictive behavior — came in the wake of his late-March roadside arrest near his home in South Florida. Woods is expected to complete the treatment by the end of June, though he did, per People, return briefly to Florida after his girlfriend, Vanessa Trump, former daughter-in-law of the current president, announced she had breast cancer.

Tiger Woods is the last person who would want to turn himself into a character in a real-life version of “As the World Turns,” but he has.

On Wednesday, Golf Digest reported that Mickelson’s membership at the Farms Golf Club, his longtime and regular hangout in northern San Diego County, had been revoked after “a female club employee accused the six-time major champion of inappropriate contact with her before a round of golf.” Mickelson, for some months now, has receded from public life due to, as Mickelson said on the eve of the Masters, a “personal health matter” involving a family member. In follow-up stories to the Golf Digest piece, different news outlets have cited a statement from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department saying that an investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing on Mickelson’s part and that the office would further investigate if evidence materialized.

Neither Mickelson nor Woods is in the field at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills next week. That’s not at all surprising. Woods is 50 with a body compromised by numerous surgeries, the most complicated of them following his single-vehicle car crash in Los Angeles County in February 2021. Mickelson is nearly 56 and his LIV Golf performances have been broadly mediocre from the start of league play in 2022.

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What’s shocking is that neither has been a Ryder Cup captain, that neither is a regular presence as a TV pitchman, that neither is an éminence grise of the game, as Ben Hogan was in his 50s and beyond, as Arnold Palmer was, as Jack Nicklaus was and is. Golf’s long succession plan has been disrupted beyond repair here. What’s shocking is that we never see Tiger and Phil. They have vanished.

Woods, famously bland in his limited public outings through the years, typically at sporting events, is on a variety of PGA Tour committees and boards. But his pressing legal and mental-health issues, in the wake of his recent arrest, have surely superseded those commitments. Mickelson, for years and decades, has been almost goofy in his public life — his “Phireside with Phil”interview series and the rest. He had stunts, bits, comical diatribes. Those sides of the many-sided lefthanded golfer have not been seen in years as he turned from fun Phil to renegade Phil to disappeared Phil.

Rick Reilly, in a 2008 ESPN column, wrote this:

Rooting for Tiger Woods is like rooting for Justin Timberlake to get lucky, Exxon to hit a gusher, Bill Gates to find a twenty on the sidewalk. It takes no imagination. It takes no courage. What’s the point? It’s 1-to-5 he’s going to win anyway, whether you cheer or not. Makes no difference to him. It’s like rooting for erosion.

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Rooting for Phil Mickelson, on the other hand, is like rooting for the salmon to eat the bear. It takes faith. It takes forgiveness. It takes Tums. Mickelson is a roller coaster in an earthquake. One shot will be so inspired you’ll cover your mouth in astonishment. The next will be so Spam-brained you’ll slap your forehead in disbelief. It’s like watching a blind guy jaywalk across Hollywood and Vine. Your fist is in your mouth the whole way.

I bring all this up because Woods and Mickelson will play side-by-side Thursday and Friday at the U.S. Open. You must choose. You cannot root for both. It’s un-American.

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That 2008 U.S. Open was at Torrey Pines in San Diego, where both Woods and Mickelson, children of Southern California, had played often, as kids, as elite amateurs, as dominating professionals. Woods won that U.S. Open in a playoff and, per the legend of the week, on a “broken leg.” (It was more like a hairline fracture, though Woods was clearly in deep pain.) Mickelson had a T18 finish.

The “Tiger & Phil Show” couldn’t go on forever and it didn’t. In November 2009, Woods ran over a hydrant outside his home in a gated development near Orlando, after a dispute with his then-wife, Elin Nordegren. In the aftermath of that event, his private life was exposed and his public life was never the same. The 9-iron that Nordegren used to smash the windows of Woods’s Cadillac Escalade after he toppled that front-yard hydrant is one of those odd golf artifacts that is part of game’s macabre lore, famous for all the wrong reasons.

In 2018, when the U.S. Open was last at Shinnecock Hills, Mickelson played hockey on the 13th green in the Saturday round, turning his ball into a puck and his white Odyssey putter into a hockey stick, at least for one whack of a ball in motion. Curtis Strange, on the TV broadcast, said then, “I’ve never seen anything like that from a world-class player in my life.” Strange’s real-time commentary is open to extrapolation into the off-course lives of both subjects here, Mickelson and Woods. It is also true that the two golfing giants have played, and lived, in an era of extreme scrutiny that Nicklaus and Palmer never even imagined. Nicklaus has talked about that, over the years. Still: who would have guessed any of this in 2008? Mickelson’s flatstick, on that Saturday at Shinnecock, was a blade, a cousin to the hockey stick. You remember blade putters, don’t you? As Woods used to say, Father Time is undefeated. Dusk arrives eventually for every day in the sun.

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Their talent is their talent. Woods, amazingly, won the 2019 Masters at age 43. (Nicklaus won it at 46 and people still talk about that.) Mickelson, amazingly, won the 2021 PGA Championship at age 50. (Palmer never won the PGA Championship at all and people still talk about that, like it’s a missing tooth.) Both Woods and Mickelson won those majors as barrel-chested, physically imposing middle-aged men able to hit killer drives while chomping on wads of gum. (Winning while smoking, back in the day? That was once common. But while chewing gum? Not really a thing, pre-Woods. Mickelson’s gum was bright blue.) Each found a way to turn back the hands of time. Each was exuberant in victory, in every way, including in their post-tournament commentary. Now we hear from them chiefly through crafted statements on their social-media platforms, or from those who speak for them.

This is an actual quote from the recent Golf Digest report about Mickelson’s situation with the employee at his now-former club: “`Any misunderstanding has been cleared up.’”

That sentence would maybe mean something had it come directly from Mickelson, and would mean far more had it come from the club employee. But it comes from neither. It’s just another parsed statement from another PR person representing another famous person stuck in another bad spot.

Phil became Phil speaking for himself. As for Woods, his clubs did his best talking. In both cases, it’s been years since we’ve seen them do their thing. Golf has moved on. The gaping hole, in between Arnie-Jack and Tiger-Phil, will never be filled. Too much has happened, and we know too much.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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