By Art Spander
For GlobalGolfPost.com
ARDMORE, PENNSYLVANIA — Oh yes, Merion, that 6,996-yard Rubik's Cube of a golf course. A beauty who wooed with a beckoning finger and holes out of the last century but when you tried to get too close smacked you with a wicker basket full of unfulfilled promises.
Poor Merion, we kept saying. They were going to ...
Copyright 2013 Global Golf Post
By Art Spander
Special to Newsday
ARDMORE, Pa. — Justin Rose pointed to the sky and shed a few tears. Phil Mickelson could only point to himself, swallow hard and talk about heartbreak again and again.
Rose won the 113th U.S. Open on a course that took willingly, gave grudgingly and left the bewildered Mickelson a runner-up for a sixth time in America's national golfing championship.
Copyright © 2013 Newsday. All rights reserved.
Justin Rose, Phil Mickelson, U.S. Open Email Article By Art Spander
Special to Newsday
ARDMORE, Pa. — Once more Phil Mickelson is on the brink, with the chance to win the championship he covets, America's national championship, the U.S. Open.
Saturday afternoon, with the lead slipping through one pair of hands after another, as if it was the white sand in the bunkers of famed Merion Golf Club, Mickelson eventually ended up where he had been at the end of the previous two rounds: in first.
Copyright © 2013 Newsday. All rights reserved.
By Art Spander
ARDMORE, Pa. — It began with a yawn, then a bogey. One was expected. For Phil Mickelson, down from the wild blue yonder, perhaps both were.
“Bones and I have a saying,” Mickelson mentioned in reference to his caddy, Jim “Bones” Mackay. “Some of my best rounds of my career have started with a bogey.
“We just kind of looked at each other and laughed.”
This round on Day 1 of the 113th U.S. Open not only was one of the best for Phil Mickelson, it was one of the most remarkable, recorded after a cross-country flight, after very little shuteye and after a weather delay that extended more than three and a half hours.
This is what Phil Mickelson on Wednesday evening in California and Thursday morning and afternoon in Pennsylvania accomplished:
“Yeah,” Mickelson said, “it might be abnormal, but it actually worked out really well.”
Worked out better than most dared imagine, but that’s Phil, a man who challenges the limits, whether hitting a driver off the tee of the 72nd hole of the 2006 Open and taking a double-bogey or commuting daily by jet the 120 miles or so from his home in Carlsbad to the Northern Trust Open at Riviera in Pacific Palisades.
“I might have used just a little caffeine booster at the turn,” confided Mickelson. “Just to keep me sharp. But that was our ninth hole or so, and I just wanted to make sure I had enough energy.”
The man will be 43 Sunday, which is both Father’s Day and the scheduled final round of the Open, a tournament in which Mickelson five times has finished second but never once has come in first.
Maybe getting away will be the trick. He had planned to return home for the graduation speech. “She did a great job,” said Phil of Amanda, “she even quoted Ron Burgundy.” That’s the character played by Will Ferrell in the film Anchorman.
“So,” said Mickelson, “it was funny.”
Others suggested there was nothing funny about Mickelson’s cross-continental journeys, but he can laugh last.
“I got all my work done on Merion when I was here a week and a half ago,” he said. Then, when storms inundated Merion, on Monday he returned home and worked on his game in great weather in the Golden State.
“I think mental preparation is every bit as important as physical,” Mickelson said, “and I was able to take time on the plane to ready my notes, study, relive the golf course, go through how I was going to play each hole, where the pins were, where I want to miss it, where I want to be.”
Where he ultimately wants to be is at the top of the leader board, and with three more rounds to go he could get there.
“This was as easy as the golf course is going to play,” Mickelson said of historic Merion, where Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and Lee Trevino all won an Open through the years.
“We had very little wind. We had soft fairways, and there were no mud balls . . . But we are struggling because it’s such a penalizing course . . . It’s a course that’s withstood the test of time.”
A course that shared a role in Phil Mickelson’s dramatic, indeed historic, travels and shots. Amanda told her dad not to make the trip, but he wasn’t going to miss her shining moment.
“She worked very hard,” he reminded, “and I’m very proud of her.”
Someone suggested maybe he would fly back to Carlsbad on Thursday evening.
“I don’t want to push it,” insisted Mickelson.
By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com
SAN FRANCISCO — Phil and Bubba? Bit players in this drama. Cameo roles. The Magnificent Three was in truth a Majority of One. The first round of the 2012 U.S. Open on Thursday became the domain of Tiger Woods.
In three days the whole tournament may belong to Tiger Woods.
© RealClearSports 2012
Bubba Watson, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods, U.S. Open Email Article