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Tiger out of birdies as Mickelson shows real class
Date Published: {J}
It hasn’t been a great year for Tigers – of the Woods or Celtic variety – but while our economic version is most definitely under par, it’s the exact opposite for the man with the addiction to birdies.
He came back for a few days to bid for the Masters as though this was some kind of walk in the park for which he only had to turn up to win – but the man who couldn’t keep his trousers up doesn’t have a new green jacket either.
Instead Phil Mickelson, a man who has spent the past year side by side with his sick wife Amy as she battles breast cancer, showed that the nice guys can finish on top.
As if he wasn’t burdened enough, Mickelson’s eldest daughter, Amanda, broke her wrist while rollerskating on Saturday night. Mickelson took her to hospital for x-rays at 10pm, and reported that he got to sleep at 1am. Tiger used to be up at one in the morning as well, but then the cocktail waitresses don’t get off until late.
Mickelson did not know for sure Amy would make it to the course. She and their three children had arrived last Tuesday but for most of the week she was too weak from her medication to leave their rented house.
That’s why her presence on the eighteenth green was such a lift and that’s why he shed a genuine tear – because as well as Amy, Mickelson’s mother, Mary, was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after his wife, and he had not had his family travel with him to a tournament in eleven months.
That might seem like the perfect result for the Tiger, who found comfort from wherever it came on the road – but Mickelson is made of sterner stuff.
And while Woods crawls back under whatever tree he recently emerged from, he might look to his old foe for a few hints on how to win friends and tournaments by behaving himself on and off the perfectly manicured greens of Augusta.
Not that it will make or break my day if Tiger re-emerges as the best thing since sliced bread (or sliced tee-shots for that matter) because frankly golf is up there with curling as sports I’d run to avoid; and if you’d seen me running you’d know how big a judgement call that is on them.
I tried playing it a long time ago and once my shoulders eventually returned to their sockets from all the shuddering misses, I accepted that the quickest way for me to get around the course in the least number of shots was to kick the ball in front of me.
In my defence I did once win a prize for having the longest drive, which was a matter of pride and surprise in equal measure; surprise because all of my work was done at the nineteenth hole … pride that my drive from Cork to Galway was recognised by my peers in such a meaningful way.
Watching golf on telly has always mystified me as well because you’ve no idea how undulating the greens are and it just looks like a putt has taken on a life of its own as it veers off at a right angle halfway towards the hole.
But any sport that sees the good guys come out on top has to be viewed in a new light and – in victory or defeat – Mickelson is everything that Woods is not; a family man, loyal, modest, charming … a man with a sense of perspective on life that doesn’t revolve around his own massive ego.
He knows that a real battle is for your life, not without another man in outrageous clothes beating a small ball into a hole before a crowd of thousands.
He’ll celebrate his wife’s victory more than he ever would his own – and that’s why his Masters win was about an awful lot more than golf.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.