Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy have had more successes in their chosen field than most active PGA Tour players but, as with any sport, so-called failures outpace the number of times each has entered the winner’s circle.
Phil Mickelson, Rory McIlroy reflect on golf’s ups and downs
Success and failure go hand in golf glove when you’re a professional athlete, so it’s not surprising that Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy are able to keep the ups and downs of their line of work in proper perspective.
Andrew Redington
On the diamond, Ty Cobb, at .366, remains the greatest hitter for average of all time and he was still unable to put the baseball out of reach of opposing fielders some two-thirds of the time.
Until the still-active Ray Allen surpassed him, Reggie Miller, who was 2,560 for 6,486, owned the record for the most three-point shots made in NBA history. Yet Miller missed the bottom of the net from beyond the arc 3,926 more times than he found it.
Tiger Woods, despite his latest DL stint, is still on pace to break Sam Snead’s all-time tour career victory mark of 82 and entered this season of his discontent with a winning percent of 26 percent that had Johnny Miller singing his praises earlier this year.
“It’s a crazy stat,” Miller said in January. “Nobody, I think will touch that [winning percentage] maybe forever.”
Woods’ overall numbers have taken a hit after three miserable starts in 2014, and though they continue to shock and awe, even the current world No. 1 loses a lot more than he wins.
Which brings us back to Phil and Rory.
Though Mickelson averred his “punishment” for missing the cut at the Masters in April would be to watch the action from home, the winner of three green jackets said Wednesday that bombing out of Augusta for the first time since 1997 did not weigh heavily on him.
“You have to deal with so much failure in this game, and it’s just part of it,” Mickelson told reporters ahead of this week’s Wells Fargo Championship. “It’s something I’ve become accustomed to now for decades and you move on.
“Last year, one of the lowest points of my career was at the U.S. Open,” recalled Lefty, who came in second last year to Justin Rose at Merion for a record 6th runner-up finish in the U.S. Open. He put the heartbreak of just missing out again on his national championship behind him when he won his first British Open just a month later.
“I was able to turn it around and have one of the highest points, so you just don’t want to look back,” said Mickelson, who came in third in 2013 at Quail Hollow. “You want to look forward and see what you can accomplish in the future.”
McIlroy, who will turn 25 on Monday, claimed he was not going to let his 11th place in the world rankings get him down.
“No, I think it’s the nature [of the rankings system],” he said about whether slipping out of the top 10 for the first time in three years bothered him.
“If you look at it, I’ve earned more world ranking points this year than the top three players in the world,” said McIlroy, who has four top-10 results in six starts in 2014, though his P2 at the Honda Classic occurred after he crashed and burned in Sunday’s final round.
“I’ve had chances to win, I haven’t quite won,” McIlroy noted. “I think [his slippage in the world rankings] because of the fast start and the great year that I had in 2012, all those points are just starting to come off, and that’s the reason.”
Though he was looking forward to this week’s event, which he won in 2010, as well as next week’s Players Championship and the European Tour’s BMW PGA Championship later this month leading into the U.S. Open in mid-June, McIlroy conceded he hoped to ascend back into the rarified air of the top 10 soon.
“It’s not nice to drop out of the ‑‑ over three years in the top‑10, and you sorta get comfortable there,” he said. “Hopefully I can get myself back up, you know, into the sort of territory I have been at the last few years.”
The two-time major champion got off to a good start on his quest to climb the rungs of the rankings ladder, with four birdies and a bogey on his first nine holes in Charlotte. Two bogeys in his first four holes on the back brought him back to 1-under through 13 holes -- five back of early leader Angel Cabrera (a scorching 6-under through 15).
Mickelson, for his part, will make his first start since missing the weekend at Augusta this afternoon at 1:25 p.m. ET.
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