It”s March, a pretty exciting time in Major League Baseball with spring training in full swing, and a very exciting time in college basketball as 65 teams whittle all the way down to one over the next three weekends. Golf”s PGA Tour is in the midst of its Florida swing, visiting such name courses as Jack Nicklaus” PGA National, Doral”s Blue Monster, and Arnold Palmer”s Bay Hill.
While March is all about the beginning of baseball and the conclusion of basketball, in the world of golf it”s merely a lead-in to the start of the major championship season, with the playing of the Masters at Augusta National in April. While I don”t necessarily want to sound like the folks at CBS, the Masters really is “a tradition like no other.” Forget about the Fed Ex Cup, the Race to Dubai or any convoluted thought about a fifth major in May at Sawgrass. Great golfers are defined by their performances in the Grand Slam events and the Masters kicks off the major championship season.
It hasn”t been an easy first three months on the 2009 PGA Tour. Television ratings are down. Full-field events with $5 million purses and $1 million first-place prizes don”t attract first-rate fields anymore. Congress is upset with Northern Trust, a sponsor of the longtime Los Angeles Open, for their extravagance and largess, including a Sheryl Crow concert for tourney and corporate bigwigs. U.S. Bank will be dropping its sponsorship of the Greater Milwaukee Open, and it looks as if the same may be true with FBR and the Phoenix Open as well as Wells Fargo, which recently took over Wachovia and may end its affiliation with the tour”s North Carolina event.
Yet hope springs eternal with the Masters just around the corner. Better yet, in a sports world that loved the rivalries of Ali-Frazier, Russell-Chamberlain, Red Sox-Yankees and Celtics-Lakers, it just might come to pass that we”ll be treated to a handful of installments of major championship drama with Tiger-Phil. If last weekend”s World Golf Championship event at Doral in Miami was a portent of things to come, then the 2009 Masters just might be the perfect stage for a Tiger Woods-Phil Mickelson major title shootout.
Woods has played in just two tournaments since he underwent season-ending knee surgery following last summer”s U.S. Open triumph. He got in two rounds at the Match Play Championship and played four rounds at Doral last weekend. Tiger finished ninth at Doral with an 11-under-par 277. He claims he is striking the ball as well as he ever has and that his reconstructed left knee is more stable than it has been in more than five years. The scary thought about all this as it relates to his follow competitors on the PGA Tour is that he was dead last statistically in putting last weekend at Doral. Historically a big-time money putter when a championship is on the line (just ask Rocco Mediate), Woods was 80th out of 80 with the flat stick. That probably won”t be the case once the Masters rolls around.
While Tiger Woods is the world”s top-ranked golfer, the No. 2-ranked linkster, Phil Mickelson, has already won twice in 2009. He won in February in Los Angeles at Riviera, an old-style course that reeks of golf history and once upon a time was called Hogan”s Alley, and he won last week on the Blue Monster.
Phil”s 19-under-par 269 total was worth $1.4 million. A power player who wins when he can control his driver, Mickelson has an uncanny knack for brilliance around the greens. Evidence of his short-game skills were on display at Doral as he chipped in four times during the course of the tournament. Mickelson has also worked with former Masters and PGA champion Jackie Burke Jr. and is a much-improved short putter. What makes Mickelson most dangerous is that his two years of work with golf instructor Butch Harmon is finally paying dividends.
Harmon has been most effective at tightening Mickelson”s swing. While Phil publicly acknowledges that “I”m not going to play 18 flawless holes ? never have,” he also told the press at Doral that he”s “playing without fear of the big mess.” That”s a major statement when you consider that Mickelson played in last summer”s U.S. Open at a course he grew up on and yet didn”t have the confidence to carry a driver.
So is all this Tiger-Phil at the Masters just the hopeful babbling of some aging golf writer yearning for the days of Nicklaus-Watson, or, for that matter, Faldo-Norman? I think not. Tiger Woods has been in the top 10 of the world rankings for 623 consecutive weeks while Mickelson has been there for 267 straight weeks. The next two in line are Sergio Garcia at 41 weeks and Padraig Harrington for 36 weeks. No doubt Harrington is very good and one would think that Sergio will someday break through, but Tiger and a new, improved Phil are heads above the rest. Harrington might get Tiger mano-a-mano on a links-style course, but when Phil is on his game, he is very close to being Tiger”s equal.
We won”t know any of this until the azaleas are in full bloom at Augusta next month. However, since the last time Nick Faldo and Greg Norman battled it out at the 1996 Masters, we just might have a real golfing rivalry at a major championship. After all, it goes without saying that it would be something all golf fans could look forward to.
