The Match 2024: McIlroy comes out on top

PARAMUS, N.J. – Phil Mickelson has a lot on his plate these days. For one thing: Twitter. He just dove in with an account earlier this week at THE NORTHERN TRUST, where two closing bogeys dropped him out of the lead but still gave him a second straight 68 (6 under) at Ridgewood Country Club. He was within two of early second-round leader Sean O’Hair (69) with the afternoon wave yet to complete their second rounds. At the very least, the solid start promised to give Mickelson something benign to tweet about, which should put his kids at ease about Dad’s leap into the wild, wooly world of social media. “They are nervous (laughter),â€� said Mickelson, who birdied five of his first six holes Friday to jump into the lead. “And they should be, you know, rightfully so, because in time, I will mess up. It’s just my — I always kind of ride the line somewhere. Sometimes I cross it. Sometimes not.â€� On a more serious note, Mickelson is buckling down as he tries to atone for missing the TOUR Championship at East Lake last year. Things were looking good just six months ago. When he picked up his 43rd PGA TOUR win at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship in early March, it broke a nearly five-year drought and portended a big season. Or not. Mickelson finished T5 at the Wells Fargo Championship, but otherwise hasn’t really contended. He hit a moving ball at the U.S. Open, finished T24 at The Open Championship, and missed the cut at the PGA Championship. He’s 11th in the FedExCup, and has made more news with his newly announced made-for-TV match against Tiger Woods than with his play. Now, though, Mickelson seems to be on the comeback trail, again, at age 48. A day after he hit just three fairways but saved himself with his putting, he hit nine of the first 10 in the second round. Only a few late misses marred his effort, but he was encouraged. He badly wants to be on the U.S. Ryder Cup team that will try to be the first to win on European soil since 1993, but first he has to prove worthy of a pick from U.S. Captain Jim Furyk. “Yeah, it’s important,â€� said Mickelson, who has been on every U.S. Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup team since 1994, “because this started out to be a great year, and I want to finish it off right. And usually when I have a bit of a lull in the summer, I play well in the Playoffs. So I expect to have a good first two events and try to make it really easy for Captain Furyk.â€� In the process, he’s hoping to knock off one more thing on his to-do list: Finish the season ranked first in Strokes Gained: Putting. He got off to a good start at Ridgewood this week, making over 110 feet of putts in the first round, but knows he’s still got work to do. “I’ve been No. 2 in strokes gained behind Jason Day all year,â€� Mickelson said. “So either I’m going to have a phenomenal putting stretch and get to No. 1, or I’m just going to bend his putter a little bit so he comes back, because it’s been a great putting year.â€� OBSERVATIONS O’HAIR WINNING MIND GAME … Sean O’Hair says he doesn’t really set goals. He says making his way through the FedExCup isn’t the be all and end all. He says being a member at Aronimink in Philadelphia – where the third FedExCup Playoff event, the BMW Championship, will be held Sept. 6-9 – doesn’t burden him with pressure. Nope. Sean O’Hair is just happy to be here after a tough last few months. Believe him or not, but O’Hair has played inspired golf over the opening two rounds of THE NORTHERN TRUST. He backed up his opening 66 with a 2-under 69 to move to 7 under, good enough for the clubhouse lead after the morning wave. “I’m not really much of a goal setter,â€� said O’Hair, who at 121st in the FedExCup likely needs a top-30 or better here to survive to the Dell Technologies Championship at TPC Boston. “It’s always a bonus to get in the TOUR Championship and it’s always a nice way to end the year. “I think every week is just an opportunity,â€� he added. “Every day is an opportunity. And for guys like me, every day is, you know, kind of a do-or-die situation. I actually think that just takes the pressure off. You win one of these events, and all of a sudden, thing change, and if you get in the TOUR Championship and win the TOUR Championship, you have a good chance of winning the FedExCup.â€� While the scoreboards are constantly flashing projections, O’Hair said he is taking no notice. The four-time TOUR winner is just grateful to be in New Jersey and not at the Web.com Finals in Ohio. “The last thing for me that’s going to help me is thinking about what I need to do to get to Aronimink or get to TOUR Championship,â€� he said. “I feel like the last two days have kind of happened because I’m working on the right things, and I’m focused more on maybe the process of the game right now than the actual score and result of it. “This is the end of my 14th season out here, so I’ve done this enough to know that if I go out there trying to get results, whether it be finishing a certain position on FedExCup or win a golf tournament or shoot a score; that just doesn’t work for me. That’s not how I function.â€�

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Johnson. Rahm. Thomas. McIlroy. Predicting who will raise the trophy at the 120th U.S. Open at Winged Foot is easy. Winged Foot will win. It always does. "It was really hard," Justin Thomas, coming off a three-win PGA TOUR season, said after an early scouting trip before THE NORTHERN TRUST last month. He then went on to rave about how much he loved it. That's not an atypical response to this Tillinghast gem that dates to 1923, which has been lengthened 213 yards and will play as a 7,477-yard par 70. Hard but still great. Padraig Harrington, who needed three pars to win the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot but made three bogeys, calls it, "A great, classic golf course." See? No hard feelings. "You have to hit all the golf shots," Harrington says. "It does ask a lot of questions." Not everyone has the answers, but the U.S. Open grades on a curve. Hale Irwin won the so-called Massacre at Winged Foot in 1974 at 7 over par. An aberration? Nope. Geoff Ogilvy won the 2006 U.S. Open at 5 over (71-70-72-72) after late gaffes by Harrington, Colin Montgomerie, Jim Furyk and, most famously, or infamously, Phil Mickelson. [Desk: please link to Sean's story about the players who had the trophy in their grasp only to drop it.] "The word in the locker room was, ‘How hard is this thing going to play?'" Irwin says of the '74 U.S. Open. "It was not an optimistic locker room, let's put it that way. Forget birdies. My plan was to accept par at face value and be very happy with it. Also, don't make double-bogeys, because there were just no real obvious opportunities to get those back with birdies." Jim Colbert was so wrung out by '74, when he tied for fifth, that he later told ESPN he considered Winged Foot, "Probably the hardest golf course of all time." Narrow fairways. Thick rough. Long par 3s. And steeply pitched greens that slope and move like Augusta National's and are so nuanced that the Golf Channel's Arron Oberholser (T16 in '06) predicts they will be very hard to learn in a matter of days, or even over the course of the week. Then there's the finishing stretch of 16, 17 and 18 - three exceedingly difficult par 4s. "Of the three U.S. Opens that I played before I hurt myself," Oberholser says, "there was no finish like it, nothing that difficult. If you get it done at Winged Foot, you are earning it." The thing about Winged Foot, say Oberholser and others who know it, is that it can be very hard to stop making bogeys once you start. (Harrington can attest to that.) "It was your typical old-school U.S. Open," Furyk says of '06, when he missed a 5-foot par putt on 18 that would have forced a playoff. "Tight fairways, heavy rough, have to get the ball in play. It puts stress on you over and over and over again. It's going to withstand the test of time." Thomas calls Winged Foot really hard but also fair and "not tricked up" and "right in front of you." Webb Simpson, who lost in the first round of match play at the 2004 U.S. Amateur at Winged Foot, sang a similar refrain when asked about the course. "I love it," Simpson said. "I feel like it’s just a brutally hard golf course, but they do it the right way. We come to a lot of these courses and they’ve got bunkers, you carry it at 295 or 300. Winged Foot, it’s like Harding Park, it’s right in front of you. It’s long, it’s hard, there’s really not a whole lot of birdie holes, so I think that’s a perfect venue for a U.S. Open golf course." Of the five U.S. Opens at Winged Foot, '74 was probably the hardest (especially with old equipment), but '06 was hardest to watch. Other than the 1999 Open Championship (Jean Van de Velde) it might be the most "lost" major ever, a sort of golfing five-car pileup from which only one man walked away. Not for nothing was it dubbed the Massacre at Winged Foot II. Few remember the misadventures of Harrington, Furyk and Montgomerie. They just remember Mickelson making double-bogey on the last hole of the tournament after hitting his tee shot off a hospitality tent, then trying a crazy second shot that turned out more die than do. "I am still in shock that I did that," he said. "I just can't believe that I did that. I'm such an idiot." Now 50, he has been U.S. Open runner-up a dispiriting six times. Winged Foot is just 30 minutes north of New York City, about which Frank Sinatra crooned, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere." A Winged Foot U.S. Open is the golfing equivalent of that - take crazy weather out of the equation and there's just no tougher test. "I hit a lot of fairways and consequently hit a lot of greens," says Irwin, who would win two more U.S. Opens among his 20 TOUR wins. "So those kinds of courses were less problematic for me than they were for other people, and my career showed that. "But that kind of a win can propel you on," he added when prompted by the Sinatra line about New York. "Once you've come through a Winged Foot situation, other than coming up against terrible weather, you're not going to encounter much that's more difficult than that."

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