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Or like cards that your sister might select from the "Encouragement" rack at the Hallmark store.
"LUV YA, Phil! Can't wait for your next tournament. I enjoy watching you so much, my stomach is in knots all the time because I want so much for you to win!"
They read like birthday cards from mom.
"I'm so proud of you, Phil. You work hard at this game but you also show others what life is all about. You're the greatest guy in the world!"
And like secret missives from a clandestine lover.
"I can't stop sending messages to you! I don't know what's wrong with me!"But these cloying words addressed to Phil Mickelson are the schoolgirl gushings of grown men who have never met him, grown men who, regardless of not knowing him beyond what they read in magazines and see on television and scour for on the Internet, think Phil Mickelson is a paragon among human beings. They tell him so endlessly on his web site, and they tell him about their own lives — how many kids, who celebrated a birthday, who died — as though they're certain he checks it daily, and certain he cares. Does he? "We're on the site from time to time," he says. "We update it often."
His message-board fans tell him he's not just a great golfer, but "the greatest guy in the world." Perhaps the Dalai Lama's e-mail inbox was all filled up that day.
Those words and more, as though June 18, 2006, played out the way it should have. As though, on the final hole of the U.S. Open, Mickelson didn't hit a tent, and didn't ding a tree, and instead did something right besides go home. His own words about himself were not so blind: "I am such an idiot." This was after the world saw the image of Mickelson, touted by this magazine as The Man Who Could Be Number One, crouched on the green, hands on his head, hiding a face that might've been poker-red pissed, or puckered for a childish wail. The man who might h ave been the new king, who just two months before had won his second Masters — who should have won the U.S. Open, then the British, then maybe the PGA — played the final hole of the major that means the most to him like a blind bull in a china shop, like The Man Who's Comfortable Being Number Two.
Getty Images
Agony at Winged Foot.
Yes, Mickelson really blew it. Endorsed the winner's check over to an unknown Australian who held his hands out for the victory in disbelief. Holy s---, Phil, you imagine Geoff Ogilvy must have been thinking. I mean, are you sure?
"It was weird," Ogilvy says. "A very strange way to win a golf tournament."
It must have been an even stranger way to lose one.
HAD YOU been sitting across from Phil Mickelson in a tent at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in January, where the cold winds made you doubt you were in the middle of the Palm Springs desert, you'd have noticed a second anomaly: This amazing athlete before you, 30 pounds lighter and better-looking in person, is not the wrecked man you may have expected to see. His smiles aren't as fake as you might've heard. Studied, maybe. But fake?
That's a stretch. And really, he doesn't have that much to hide. It's not like it was his last tournament. Or his first major.
"I've won three majors now," says Mickelson. "So it doesn't quite feel so desperate."
But the rest of us have made it seem that way. Desperate. Last chance. Blow up.
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