Phil Mickelson’s ego has given golfers leverage – but few moral lessons

A few weeks before what should have been his defining victory at the PGA Championship, Phil Mickelson was pondering his “greatest decision”. In Mickelson’s hubristic mind, you might suggest, that would be nigh on an impossible task. For one, because that is probably a daily occurrence, and to sift through such an immense pit of knowledge would be like asking a man to identify the biggest grain of sand in, to take a random example, the Saudi Arabian desert.

But alas, after surveying the annals of greatness, Mickelson arrived at the sort of grand verdict befitting his status as a licensed pilot whose head has always occupied a realm 35,000ft in the clouds. “The greatest decision I made after owning a plane for 20 years was selling it... because it has reduced my stress levels exponentially,” Mickelson surmised in a Forbes interview after parting with his Gulfstream V jet, which retails at around $40m (£30m). “When [my wife] Amy and I would travel to the mountains to go ski, I would need to know months in advance when I was going to go, so that I could get a hangar.”

In which case the stress on Mickelson’s broad shoulders now must be downright unbearable. Last week, he revealed that he had helped recruit lawyers to bring golf’s long-mooted breakaway league into reality, which would be backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, to combat the “dictatorship” of golf’s traditional powers. Mickelson, who has rarely shown any reservations in aggravating the PGA Tour, from whom he’s earned around £75m over the past three decades, has postured as a champion of players’ rights and railed against the “obnoxious greed that has really opened the door for opportunities elsewhere.”

It does not require a mind of Mickelson’s vast intellect to ascertain the true appeal of a breakaway tour. “I don’t do this for the money, which to me is the only appeal to go over there,” Jon Rahm, the world No 1, told a press conference this week. Nor is it any coincidence that the players yet to abandon the Saudi Golf League are headed into the twilight of their careers.

But then, it has been almost two years – 722 days to be precise – since Rory McIlroy became the first high-profile player to dismiss the breakaway, stating that he “didn’t really like where the money was coming from”. This week, McIlroy, whose sincerity afforded many of his colleagues undue credit, claimed the plotting has “all been smoke and mirrors”.

And yet, it has not so much been the reflection of Mickelson’s signature silver aviators that allowed the scheming to gather speed, but a collective willingness to turn a blind eye. The highest echelons of the PGA Tour are comprised of multi-millionaire athletes with some of sports’ smartest agents at their disposal. There could hardly be any illusions over the long-standing and well-publicised concerns that Mickelson quoted with a level of egomania that – even by his own lofty standards - was not so much sky-bound as bordering on the edge of the stratosphere.

“We know they killed [the journalist Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights,” Mickelson is reported to have told Alan Shipnuck, a journalist. “They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”

It was only once Mickelson had spelt out that self-serving drivel so unnervingly in black and white, prompting an unprecedented wave of backlash, that it became impossible for players not to acknowledge it. He was labelled “naive, selfish and ignorant” and a raft of the world’s top players came out systematically to hail the virtues of the PGA Tour. Albeit belatedly, even Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson, reportedly Mickelson’s chief co-conspirators, released statements reaffirming their dubious loyalties. Mickelson’s ego had, to no great surprise, taken him too close to the sun and the most ambitious version of the plans for the Saudi Golf League are, in the words of McIlroy, now “dead in the water.”

So, after what’s being hailed as a moral victory, who really stands to gain from all these machinations? Mickelson has permanently tarnished the reputation that saw him not only seal a historic major victory at 50 years old last year but collect an $8m (£6m) bonus from the PGA Tour’s inaugural Player Impact Program, which was introduced to better reward the sport’s most popular players. The Saudi project, with Greg Norman continuing as its smiling bobblehead, has been left with a bunch of players ageing towards irrelevance, as opposed to the star-studded roster it required. And what of the PGA Tour players, of whom many entered into negotiations or at the very least decided to remain tight-lipped?

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Well, ahead of the Honda Classic in Florida, the PGA Tour’s chief executive, Jay Monahan, will hold a mandatory players’ meeting. One of the topics that may yet be discussed, amid further threats to administer lifetime bans to players who join a breakaway league, is guaranteed money for competitors beyond their earnings from individual events – one of the key selling points of the Saudi Golf League. And so it was Pat Perez, a 45-year-old veteran of the PGA Tour, whose post-round press conference last week was, perhaps, the most revealing.

Perez agreed that it was difficult to understand Mickelson’s “hate towards the Tour”, although not before he admitted that, while he had not been approached by the Saudi Golf League, “throw me a $100m [£74m] (hundred [million dollars] and I actually get it, I’m gone”. But when asked to expand on the potential for guaranteed money, Perez said: “They’re doing a deal this year, but it’s not – it’s not what we’re talking about.” Pushed further about Mickelson’s claim that “the Saudi money has finally given us that leverage” over the PGA Tour, Perez added that he would be “all for that”, so long as Mickelson’s true intention was to “make the Tour better and maybe bring in more money”.

And so, as this latest insurrection of the PGA Tour recedes, it appears the players, many of whom remained silently complicit, are set to gain to the tune of millions of dollars, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. They are, after all, the talent that props up the PGA Tour. But against this backdrop, the sentiment of “obnoxious greed” spreads much wider. Meanwhile, Mickelson fancied himself a king but has ended up a pawn and a pariah, with golf now closing ranks around his damaged legacy. As Perez put it last Thursday, “I think Phil’s got a lot of stress in life right now”.