Phil Mickelson: How to age gracefully

Accuracy

What we’ve seen to date is a mostly glowing skill set: Phil has held a shrinking but still modest advantage both off the tee and around the greens, and has learned how to it with his putter.  Are there any bad parts? Yes, there are, and we’re about to get to them.

Mickelson’s game has never stressed accuracy off the tee; his mantra essentially has been “hit it, find it and hit it again.” In fact, only three times in his 25 pro seasons has he beaten the tour average for hitting fairways. For the record, the last time was in 2001.

Since 2009, his accuracy percentage has fought, so far successfully, to stay above 50 percent, although bottoming out at 51.59 percent in 2018. He’s only produced two seasons when his accuracy stayed within one standard deviation worse than the tour average dating back to 2007.

The saving grace, for Phil and every other pro on tour, is that the correlation between hitting fairways and scoring barely registers. Since Phil’s rookie season, that correlation has averaged only 22 percent, explaining why in most tournaments the pros spend so little time actually worrying about the rough.

That was certainly the case this past week at Pebble, where the fairways have been narrowed in anticipation of hoisting this summer’s U.S. Open. For the tournament, phil averaged 60 percent of fairways hit…but that was entirely due to having had a perfect 13-for-13 day Thursday at Monterey. For the rest of the tournament, he hit only 20 of 42 fairways. Yet he still followed his opening 65 with rounds of 68-70-65 and pulled away.