Phil Mickelson: Seve, Tiger, and what drives him today

Phil Mickelson has been playing some tremendous golf this season, and he’s hardly showing any signs of slowing down. As he prepares to make a landmark start this week on the PGA TOUR, Lefty took some time to reflect on how two of the game’s biggest stars have driven him to his own success.

It seems like Phil Mickelson, starting his 600th PGA Tour event this week, has always been good. But even Lefty has people he has looked up to and found challenging to play against since he started playing in professional events. They are, no surprise when you think about it, Seve Ballesteros and Tiger Woods.

Mickelson played in his first PGA Tour event as an amateur in 1988. A friend of his, Ernie Gonzalez, arranged a practice round for him with the legendary Seve Ballesteros who was still in his playing prime.

“That was the guy I just looked up to and he meant so much to me,” Mickelson admitted. “It was awesome. He couldn’t have been nicer, he couldn’t have been more engaging.”

According to Mickelson, Ballesteros didn’t keep score during practice, and he hit a lot of practice chips.

“For a 17-year-old, it was an incredible experience especially given how much I looked up to him as a kid,” he added.

Since then, Mickelson has been known for his own incredible short game, and also for his occasional wild drives. However, he has yet to play out of the parking lot as Ballesteros did during the 1979 British Open. There’s still time for that.

What Mickelson has not shared before is that he credits Tiger Woods with his own recent resurgence. Now that Woods is back, now that Woods has won, he’s the golfer everybody else is looking at because they know what he can possibly do, even if he hasn’t done it in a while.

“It’s fun,” Mickelson said about having Woods back in the mix. “A big reason for my success is having him back and having him back playing well. It motivates me and gets the best out of me, too.”

While they have been rivals their entire careers, and while Woods has more tournament titles and more majors, they have both played at a high level against each other for more than two decades. He said that the losses he has had against Woods and others motivated him to improve.

“Overcoming losses is just as big a part of the game as being successful,” he said citing the recent 2013 U.S. Open loss. “I felt I had every opportunity to win it. Then came back and after being so disappointed, making a comeback and winning arguably the most difficult for me to win, The Open, the British Open there at Muirfield.”

As Mickelson readies to defend his title at the WGC Mexico event, he looked back at the most important shot in last year’s victory. It was on the 14th hole.

"“I had missed my drive to the right and there was a window–and I mean, it was the size of an actual window–through the trees that I had to go through, and if I didn’t hit that, it would have hit the trees,” he explained. “I could have easily made double. Instead it got through and I ended up making par.”"

He said that was the one shot that he had to make to win.

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Speaking to broader issues, Mickelson likes the new PGA Tour schedule, although he has had to make some adjustments, particularly before major championships. In addition, as he said late last year, if a course is not a good set-up for him, he’s not going to play it.

“For me personally there’s a few things that aren’t the best, and that is the weeks before the majors aren’t really the best courses to get ready for those particular majors,” he noted.

For example, in the past, he would play tournaments the week before majors to get into the feeling of competition and to get a set up similar to what he might face the next week.

The Houston tournament (which will move to the fall) was formerly played before The Masters and the course set up was prepared to have similar kinds of run offs, fast greens and conditions similar to Augusta National, although nothing is identical. This year, the Valero Texas Open is the week before The Masters, and Mickelson suggested there is too much wind at that event to make it good preparation for him.

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With the PGA moving to May and being held at Bethpage Black, he would need cool season grasses for preparation, and the tournament the week before is in Texas.

The week before the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach is the Canadian Open, which has cool season grasses. That may work for Mickelson, but he did not mention it as a possibility.

“I’m probably not going to play many of the weeks before, this year,” he concluded. “I’m not really set, to be honest. I’m kind of navigating through it as well to what works best for me.”

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