What will Phil do next?
By Tim RosaforteATLANTA -- I've heard all the arguments. He's an independent contractor. He's played more events than Tiger Woods. He shuts it down after the PGA. He wanted to take his kids trick-or-treating. There's nothing to play for this week other than money. Still, it looks bad for Phil Mickelson not to be at East Lake GC this week. Never mind the Tour, his fans, his sponsors. He owed it to the game.
Five years from now, we'll look at the record, see the PGA Championship, the 4-1 record in the Presidents Cup, the three other victories, and nobody will remember that he skipped the Tour Championship or the season-opening Mercedes Championship. It will be known as the year Phil backed up his Masters triumph, came back from horrendous back-to-back showings in the Presidents and Ryder Cups, to record the second-best season of his career.
But can you imagine if Tiger stayed home this week? Jim Rome, Tony Kornheiser & Mike Wilbon, Mike (Francesa) and the Mad Dog (Chris Russo) and every sports-talk show in this country would call him spoiled. Or if Terrell Owens skipped a Christmas Day game because he wanted to open presents with his kids? They'd run him out of Philadelphia.
Never mind that Mickelson won at East Lake GC in 2000. This is a case of putting on a happy face and taking one for the team. A payback week with guaranteed money, a $6 million purse that pays $1.08 million to the winner and $92,400 for last place. The commissioner is trying to sell a new TV contract. It's the year-end event. There should be some kind of payback for the $35 million he's made in his PGA Tour career. It's just showing a little respect.
"Personal reasons," is all Mickelson gave. That cryptic response leaves him open for criticism and speculation. Players at Innisbrook last week were saying it had to do with the pro-am rule. The Tour Championship has a Tuesday pro-am. Monday night was Halloween. Even with a private jet, it would have required a red-eye to be with the kids in San Diego and be in Atlanta ready to go the following day.
The Tour has a rule: You don't play in the pro-am, you don't play in the tournament. It cost Retief Goosen a spot in this year's Nissan Open. Mickelson didn't schedule The Memorial because of its Tuesday pro-am and practiced at Pinehurst instead.
Some respected writers felt that Mickelson was making a statement. If you go back to the Accenture Match Play in February, Mickelson said then that the season is too long. Tim Finchem listened and has devised a schedule that will accommodate Phil's belief that less will mean more for the Tour.
"I know what I'd like to do," Mickelson said at LaCosta when asked about the Tour Championship. "But what I'd like to do and what I will do are different things." At the time he was thinking about Player of the Year and the money title, but Woods locked those up.
"But what happens for me personally is my kids start school at the end of August," he said, "and it's a lot harder for them to travel and I'd rather be at home."
Family always comes first with Phil. You have to respect that, and the way he prepares for the season and the majors. With 27 career victories, including two majors, it's obviously a methodology that works.
It just looks bad for Phil when David Toms postpones heart surgery so he can be here, when Tim Herron makes it from Minnesota after celebrating Halloween with his children on Monday night, when Presidents Cup teammate Fred Funk takes his shots on "Cold Pizza," when Lucas Glover becomes the odd man in the field and has to go off in a single, when three guys paid $13,000 each for the pro-am and they don't get a chance to play with Phil Mickelson.
"I'm disappointed he's not here," Finchem said Wednesday, adding that it was not worth gnashing his teeth over. The commissioner was uncomfortable that one of his top box-office draws wasn't in attendance, especially since underwriting sponsors like Coca-Cola and the Southern Company were bummed out that Phil couldn't make it. "Players have to make their own decisions," he said, "and there's not much more worthwhile [for me to say] about it."
Finchem knows you don't tell Mickelson what to do. Mickelson has always done it his way, and it's the bullheadedness that has made Phil both the People's Choice and his own worst enemy, a lightning rod for controversy and one of the most well-paid athletes endorsing products. Even if his heart wasn't into it, don't you think Ford, Callaway and BearingPoint would have liked seeing their logos on Phil's body ambling down East Lake's fairways?
What will Phil do next? Work the clicker. Hang out with his kids. Maybe play the PGA Grand Slam. Then see us all next year, smiling, fresh and ready to go.
Tim Rosaforte is a senior writer for Golf World magazine
