So far in 2015 I have tipped Roger Federer to win the Australian Open, confidently asserted Bayern would overpower Barca and opined that Frankie Dettori is a busted-flush. A hagiographic ode to Rory McIllroy here a couple of weeks ago immediately prompted the world’s best golfer to shoot an 80 in the Irish Open.
For someone whose brief supposedly includes finding winners, the predictive fates are hardly playing ball so while it's self-regarding to talk about a hex, in these counterintuitive circumstances, I really, really hope Phil Mickelson doesn't win this week's US Open. In fact it's worth betting he won't clean-sweep golf's major titles, if you see what I mean.
That is certainly the smart bet. Just five players have completed golf's grand slam, a tiny elite which run the personality gamut from Gene Sarazen's doughty grit to Tiger Woods's sleazy opportunism, with dour Ben Hogan, egomaniacal Gary Player and the blessed Jack Nicklaus in between. So the odds are against it, and "Lefty" knows his odds.
Mickelson is famous for liking a little betting action on the side to make practice rounds more interesting. When on this side of the pond he loves nothing more than doing his dough in our betting shops, queuing up with every other sad-sack devotee behind the tinted windows of shame and bad coffee.
In fact legend would have it that one fly going up a wall is enough for Mickelson’s gambling instincts to emerge: after all, how hard can it be for someone who made a reported $50 million last year to bet on the distance-spread?
Attractive figure
No doubt such habits are widely “poo-pooed” off the course but it is those same instincts on the course that help make Mickelson such a attractive figure, and which will make his ascension to the clean-sweep squad so popular if he were to actually beat the odds on the shore of Puget Sound this week.
Not that Mickelson is universally popular. There is such a sizable dollop of aw-shucks, apple-pie to the man that it can get people’s backs up, including fellow professionals. The instinct, and it is normally a sound one, is that anyone so diligently signing autographs, playing the media “quotability” game and flashing that all-American smile so much must be hiding something a lot less savoury.
However, his ruthless vivisection of Tom Watson’s captaincy credentials at last year’s Ryder Cup surely dispelled any two-faced suspicions.
Watson might have felt stabbed but no one can say it didn’t come front and centre, with Mickelson no doubt fully aware he was going to cop a lot of flak for bucking the etiquette golf is notoriously hot on, but prepared to stick his head over the parapet anyway. Even those of us, who reckon golf captaincy is hugely over-rated, recognised the merit in the argument.
But there has always been an underlying resilience to Mickelson which has dispelled any suspicion he might be too flash, too naturally gifted, even too glib – professionally – to be the real deal.
The man laboured for over a decade under the dreaded label of best-player-never-to-win-a-major, a horrible title made even more horrible by the inescapable and hardly insubstantial subtext that the ability might be there but the gumption may not.
Often those toiling under the pressure it creates break their duck almost by default, falling over the finish-line. Mickelson cracked the code in the 2004 Masters with a final round of 69 and an 18 foot birdie on the last. He then greeted his kids with the impossibly saccharine line “Daddy won” which only proved how corn and grit can come from the same cob.
What was wonderful about that victory though, and the two more Masters, and the PGA and the 2013 British Open, is how they were rooted in a fundamentally adventurous instinct around the golf course. There are soporific degrees of golfing boredom but no one could ever accuse Mickelson of boring golf. All that natural skill is rooted in a gambling gene that makes every round unpredictable.
Blocked drain
Of course there’s a danger in ascribing performance to personality. Fizzing grandeur on the pitch is often the preserve of those who, off the pitch, have all the charisma of a blocked drain. But a conflux of outrageous ability and shaky vulnerability has always made predicting Mickelson’s form a weekly toss-up that is the very opposite of golf’s slow-and-steady ideal.
The fact the clean-sweep isn’t already in the bag indicates that. Six times he has finished runner-up in the US Open. The list of those who beat him include Retief Goosen, Geoffy Ogilvy and Lucas Glover, a trio that can safely be tagged in the “where are they now” category while the man they beat continues at the top of the game, 24 years after his first pro victory.
He will be 45 tomorrow, hardly in the form of his life but still capable of plucking a performance out of thin air on raw ability and a willingness to have a go. And Mickelson still cuts an unmistakable figure out there, possessed of a belly that testifies to a reliance on skill rather than gym-bunny fitness, but most importantly of all a readiness to back himself no matter what the odds.
Even those of us mostly immune to golf’s charm can readily identify with the skill and those of us who like a bet can understand only too well the urge to gamble on your own judgement. Plus, there’s something reassuring about someone outrageously rich, famously tipping $100 at a time, who gets a kick out of having that judgement vindicated for mere tip-money. So, Mickelson; a million to one roughie: no chance, right?
