Mickelson never cracked

GULLANE, Scotland - His coach was all business before the round. His caddie was in tears afterward. Only Phil Mickelson seemed to know how many magical moments he was capable of unfurling in between.

“I said, “Even-par or 1 under could win this thing.’ He said, ‘I’m going to be better than that,’” coach Butch Harmon recalled.

Harmon was standing near the 18th green in the fast-fading light of a cool Scottish summer afternoon at Muirfield. The roars from one of the great closing rounds in major championship golf was still ringing in his ears. He paused long enough to crack a wide smile.

“He wasn’t lying.”

Little more than 10 yards away, just after exiting the front door of the Muirfield clubhouse, caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay was asked about the tears he kept choking back. Instead, they started falling again.

“Because,” Mackay began, then turned away for nearly a half-minute. “When you work with someone for so many years, it’s pretty cool when you see him play the best round of golf he’s ever played in the last round of the British Open.”

This was the one major championship Mickelson never thought he could win.He came out on tour in 1992 oozing talent, a prodigy who won his first pro tournament while still in college, only to become another golfer once labeled the “next Nicklaus” who couldn’t break through in a major. Mickelson was 0-for-42 in that department and a dozen years into an otherwise stellar career when he finally won the Masters in 2004, the first of four major victories in 6 years.

Mickelson knew he had a shot on any golf course where booming drives and sky-high lob shots could decide the outcome. Playing on this side of the Atlantic for 20 years, though, he struggled trying to keep the ball under the wind and his temperament in check whenever he got a crazy bounce - and there were dozens of those.

“It’s been the last eight or nine years I’ve started to playing it more effectively, I’ve started to hit the shots more effectively,” Mickelson said. “But even then it’s so different than what I grew up playing. I always wondered if I would develop the skills needed to win this championship.”

Just last week, 3½ hours drive up the coast from here, he won the Scottish Open, his first victory on the continent. But even an opening-round 69 on the fast, firm ground here failed to erase nearly two decades of doubt - especially when Mickelson complained about the condition of the course afterward.

But Mackay saw things differently.

“When he got to 18 on Thursday, he hit the best shot he hit all day and then three-putted. I think that kind of reinforces that stuff happens over here that you really can’t control,” Mackay said. “That you’re going to hit good shots and it’s not going to work out, and you suck it up and you move on.”

Yet if Mickelson was going to crack, it would have been at the par-3 16th, where his 6-iron landed on a ridge and nearly slipped into a bunker.

“That was a bad break, but I was probably more bothered by it than he was,” Mackay said. “We walked up there. He saw it and said, ‘I can get it up and down.’ Pretty matter of fact. So I went, ‘Cool.’ ”

Mickelson did, then birdied No. 17, and walked up with a chance to do same at the 18th. A crowd of thousands packing the grandstands on either side of the fairway rose to their feet as one, clapping wildly. Mickelson made that curling left-to-right 10-footer to slam the door on the field behind him. Somehow, at 43, Mickelson isn’t simply holding his own, he appears to be turning back the clock.