Phil Mickelson: How to age gracefully

Driving distance

Compared with when Mickelson joined the tour at age 23 a quarter century ago, he’s driving the ball 11 percent farther. His average distance in 1993 was 269.2 yards; last season it was 300.7.  In raw distance, that matches the second-best season of Phil’s career, 2006. His only better driving average, 306 yards, came in 2003, when he was 33 years old.

That kind of increase can only be attributed to some combination of conditioning and equipment. And as might be expected, when we run a five-year rolling average of the standard deviation of Phil’s driving distance as compared with the tour field, his current numbers come up pretty ordinary.

In 2018, Phil’s 300.7 yard average did indeed beat the tour’s 296.62 average…but only by about one-half a standard deviation. That’s far off the 1.7 to 2 standard deviations by which a more youthful Phil routinely out-drove the field back in his twenty-something days.

In fact, Phil has been losing ground to the field off the tee since about 2012. In 2011, when Mickelson was 41, his 299.8 yard average still measured 1.04 standard deviations better than the average of his competitors. Since 2013, he has only exceeded a one-half standard deviation edge on the field once. He’s still longer than normal, but not as dramatically so.

In his win at Pebble Beach, Phil joined most  of the rest of the field in de-emphasizing raw power on the ultra-wet surfaces. For the week he averaged a relatively modest 275 yards per  drive, but that still ranked a credible 25th among the nearly 160 pros.