Phil Mickelson: How far Away is Victory?

It took a while for Phil Mickelson to get off plane in his swing and it’s going to take a while for him to get back on.

We know that Phil Mickelson has been engaged in formulating a new swing that will allow him to get more drives in the fairway and play like the Old Phil, or at least like 35-year-old Phil. How long will it take before the changes turn into victory? He hopes it will come soon, and he’s playing six out of seven weeks in an effort to test his renovated swing in competition.

“I feel like my game is starting to come back to a level of play that I haven’t had in a while and I’m excited,” he said at the Waste Management Open.

No golfer ever gets every swing to 100 percent. Mickelson said at the CareerBuilder that he had won with his game no better than it was that week. But, over the years, the competition has improved.

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At that event, his first for the calendar year, he also said he had spent three months doing drills and using video to get his body back to the right positions in his swing. He was looking for the positions in his swing that he had in the early 2000s.

“What I was feeling and what I was doing were so far apart that it took a real effort,” he explained.

And in his case, what felt good to him and may have looked good to others just wasn’t producing the results he wanted. He made, by all accounts, a big modification.

“I’ve changed the shaft angle by about 12 inches throughout the swing, being more vertical back and shallower going through,” he explained.

So while he’s been close on a couple of occasions, his new old swing is just not grooved quite yet. But it was a change he felt he had to make because, as he explained it, sometimes when he thought he was going to produce a fade, the ball would actually hook and he didn’t understand why.

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“All the feel and touch that I’ve worked on for some decades doesn’t work if the plane is bad,” he summed up.

Now the great news in all this for Mickelson’s fans is that while he may be a little erratic in the process of completing the change, it is likely that someone with his gifts for golf will get back into the right position. He believes the right swing plane will allow him to do several important things which he’s not done in a while. The first is finding fairways with his driver.

“When I played my best golf in the 2000s I was on plane,” he insisted. “Sure, my swing’s a little long, but as the club, from waist-high to waist-high, it’s always been on plane, and it’s been a little bit steep with the driver.”

The steepness, he said, made it hard for him to hit the club as well as he wanted.   He said it was flat on the backswing and steep on the downswing.

“I’m trying to reverse that,” he added.

The result changing the swing back to the old is he now misses fewer fairways by miles. Now he’s hitting a lot of them in the middle or where he needs to be, strategically, for playing a hole.

The second benefit is making the subtle swing moves.

Having his swing on a better plane, Mickelson said, permits him to create the small changes in each swing and so allow him to hit fades and draws. He has recovered the “feels” he had in the past.

How did Phil Mickelson get so off? Anyone who has been coached in any physical activity can tell you how. It’s easier than you think to get into the wrong movements and have them still feel like they are right. What happened to Mickelson is his swing got off, and he didn’t know it because it still felt right. All he knew was he wasn’t producing the shots he was used to seeing. Over time, he got more off, and because it still didn’t feel wrong, he didn’t know why he wasn’t able to hit the shots he had hit in the past because it didn’t feel as wrong as it was. He had to relearn the right position and relearn the right feel for him.

“It’s been a lot more drastic process than I thought it would be,” he admitted.

Once his driver allows him a good position for his second shots, he believes he will be able to rely on the two strengths of his game which, according to him have always been his iron play and his short game.

“I’m starting to see glimpses of it, and I’m feeling glimpses of it, and now I just want to put it together,” he said earlier this week. “I know that I’m going to have sporadic moments early on because it’s been a little while since I have played at the highest level.”

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Maybe it’s working. Lefty’s on the front page of the leaderboard going into Sunday at the Waste Management. We can only watch and wait.