Phil Mickelson: How to age gracefully

Phil Mickelson’s victory at Pebble Beach shows that his game has evolved, but hasn’t lost much.

Phil Mickelson’s slightly delayed victory Monday at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro Am demonstrated that, even at age 48, he retains a serious game. Mickelson overcame Paul Casey’s three-shot lead entering the final round with a closing 65 to win by three.

Mickelson’s career is a superb illustration of how to age gracefully. He won $4.5 million last year alone; from a dollar standpoint it was his best season since 2013, also the last season he had won a tournament in the United States. Victory at the 2018 WGC Mexico helped, but so did his 70.09 stroke average, his best since 2016.

But any analysis of his current abilities must begin with an acknowledgement that Mickelson is not the player he once was. Any mechanical improvements – and there have been improvements – are compensations for slippages elsewhere rather than pure advances.

The PGA Tour provides literally hundreds of measurements of every player’s performance, meaning plenty of data exists to assess exactly how Mickelson has managed to maintain a championship-level game just two seasons from Champions Tour eligibility.

But to keep it as simple as possible, five numbers will suffice. Those five are Mickelson’s year-to-year averages in driving distance, driving accuracy, percentage of greens hit in regulation, scrambling percentage, and putting.

What we can’t do, however, is simply eyeball those numbers in isolation. On the next page, we’ll discover that Phil is driving the ball as long as he ever has. But if we don’t also look at what Phil’s competitors are doing, we risk overlooking the possibility that he may still be losing ground compared to everybody else.

For that reason, we’ll look at the changes in Phil’s skills both in terms of their raw value and also in terms of the standard deviation of their variance from the tour norm. The latter will tell us whether  Phil is staying abreast of his competition.