ALERT: Phil Mickelson Is The Solo Leader At The PGA Championship After His 2nd Round Friday
Sam Greenwood. Getty Images.
Advertisement
This is not a drill!!!!!
There may be an entire afternoon wave of players just getting started, but just the fact that Phil has positioned himself this well is impressive as hell. Maybe even shocking. If you're an avid golf fan, you know well enough to know what kind of condition Phil's game has been in over the past couple of years. He's fallen off in a big way. He's missed 12 of his last 28 cuts and only has 2 Top 10's to show for it. Hasn't won on Tour since Pebble Beach in February 2019 either. Yeah, he shows his face at these major championships and gets it around and every once in a while he flashes some signs of brilliance (like that opening round at Quail Hollow two weeks ago). But he hasn't been able to string together multiple rounds of good golf in a given week. The result has been a tumble out of the World Top 100 and me more or less writing him a swan song of a blog commending him for an unbelievable run.
Something in Kiawah has brought it out of Phil. Yesterday he dropped a solid 70 and seemed extremely confident (as he tends to be) that he had better golf in him than that scorecard showed. Today he came out and backed it up. It's not even like he's got a scorching hot putter, which can come and go for any given golfer. He's been playing a complete game out here. As I'm writing this, he's 5th in the field Tee-To-Green with +4.32 strokes gained against the field, whereas he's 34th in putting with 1.00 stroke gained. Certainly things can change overnight (especially for a guy turning 51 next month), but that's a sustainable model for success. He's obviously got the advantage of experience and he's got the advantage of getting in the clubhouse early today as the wind really starts to whip this afternoon. We'll see where the chips lie at the end of the day but I wouldn't be surprised if the lead holds.
Things shaking up for a hell of a weekend at Kiawah.