Mickelson flies to a 67 at Merion

By Art Spander

ARDMORE, Pa. — It began with a yawn, then a bogey. One was expected. For Phil Mickelson, down from the wild blue yonder, perhaps both were.
  
“Bones and I have a saying,” Mickelson mentioned in reference to his caddy, Jim “Bones” Mackay. “Some of my best rounds of my career have started with a bogey.
   
“We just kind of looked at each other and laughed.”
   
This round on Day 1 of the 113th U.S. Open not only was one of the best for Phil Mickelson, it was one of the most remarkable, recorded after a cross-country flight, after very little shuteye and after a weather delay that extended more than three and a half hours.
   
This is what Phil Mickelson on Wednesday evening in California and Thursday morning and afternoon in Pennsylvania accomplished:
   

• Attended the eighth-grade graduation speech given by his eldest daughter, Amanda, at a middle school in Rancho Santa Fe.

• Jumped on his private jet at Carlsbad airport, up U.S. 101 from San Diego, departed at 8 pm PST, studied his notes from the earlier practice round and managed an hour’s sleep. 

• Landed outside Philadelphia at 3:30 am EST (which would be 12:30 Pacific time), went to the hotel and dozed for another two hours or so before arising.

• Teed off at 7:10 a.m. at Merion, that gem of a wicked little course, beginning at the 11th hole because officials decided it was closer to the road from the practice tee than the 10th.

• Opened the Open with the bogey, then played four more holes before a storm out of the Old Testament swept in with bolts of lightning, cracks of thunder and pounding rain, halting play from 8:30 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. (he smartly napped during the break).

• Went out when competition resumed and, with two birdies on the front nine (his second nine), added one on the 12th hole, coming in with a 3-under-par 67.  

“Yeah,” Mickelson said, “it might be abnormal, but it actually worked out really well.”
   
Worked out better than most dared imagine, but that’s Phil, a man who challenges the limits, whether hitting a driver off the tee of the 72nd hole of the 2006 Open and taking a double-bogey or commuting daily by jet the 120 miles or so from his home in Carlsbad to the Northern Trust Open at Riviera in Pacific Palisades.
 
“I might have used just a little caffeine booster at the turn,” confided Mickelson. “Just to keep me sharp. But that was our ninth hole or so, and I just wanted to make sure I had enough energy.”
  
The man will be 43 Sunday, which is both Father’s Day and the scheduled final round of the Open, a tournament in which Mickelson five times has finished second but never once has come in first.
  
Maybe getting away will be the trick. He had planned to return home for the graduation speech. “She did a great job,” said Phil of Amanda, “she even quoted Ron Burgundy.” That’s the character played by Will Ferrell in the film Anchorman.
 
“So,” said Mickelson, “it was funny.”
   
Others suggested there was nothing funny about Mickelson’s cross-continental journeys, but he can laugh last.
   
“I got all my work done on Merion when I was here a week and a half ago,” he said. Then, when storms inundated Merion, on Monday he returned home and worked on his game in great weather in the Golden State.
 
“I think mental preparation is every bit as important as physical,” Mickelson said, “and I was able to take time on the plane to ready my notes, study, relive the golf course, go through how I was going to play each hole, where the pins were, where I want to miss it, where I want to be.”
   
Where he ultimately wants to be is at the top of the leader board, and with three more rounds to go he could get there.
  
“This was as easy as the golf course is going to play,” Mickelson said of historic Merion, where Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and Lee Trevino all won an Open through the years.
 
“We had very little wind. We had soft fairways, and there were no mud balls . . . But we are struggling because it’s such a penalizing course . . . It’s a course that’s withstood the test of time.”
   
A course that shared a role in Phil Mickelson’s dramatic, indeed historic, travels and shots. Amanda told her dad not to make the trip, but he wasn’t going to miss her shining moment.
  
“She worked very hard,” he reminded, “and I’m very proud of her.”
   
Someone suggested maybe he would fly back to Carlsbad on Thursday evening.
 
“I don’t want to push it,” insisted Mickelson.