Phil Mickelson predicts Tiger Woods will have the ‘last laugh’

Phil Mickelson has played much of his career in the shadow of Tiger Woods, and this week at Torrey Pines is no different since the struggles of the five-time major champion have taken a back seat to those of Woods and his short game.

Lefty, with three missed cuts and three withdrawals in 21 PGA Tour starts in 2014, at least had one top-10 finish, a runner-up at the PGA Championship. That was a far cry from Tiger’s injury-wracked abbreviated campaign of three MCs (including the MDF at Torrey) and two WDs in only seven events.

Still, last year was the worst of Mickelson’s professional life, and the short-game maestro said he could not only relate to what Woods was going through, but that he had no doubt his rival would rebound soon.

“It’s happened to me a number of times where I have gone through spells where I had trouble chipping the ball close, chipping it solid,” Mickelson said Wednesday ahead of the Farmers Insurance Open.

“But it comes back. It’s not like it’s a big concern,” said Mickelson after playing just a nine-hole pro-am because of the fog. “As long as he’s healthy and as long as he can swing the club the way he’s swinging it, with the speed he’s swinging at, I think his game will come back pretty quickly.”

“When you haven’t played, [the short game is] the first thing to feel uncomfortable and the quickest thing to get back,” said Mickelson. “I don’t think he’s going to have any problems, I really don’t. I think we all, myself included, have had stretches where we feel a little uncomfortable, we don’t hit it solid, and usually it’s just a small tweak. Because it’s such a short swing that it’s not a hard thing to fix. I just don’t see that lasting more than a week or two.”

To Mickelson, Woods’ chunking and blading wedge shots all over Isleworth and TPC Scottsdale in the two tournaments he’s played since returning from a back injury likely resulted from a technical issue that had sapped his confidence.

“That’s what it did for me,” said Mickelson, who, along with Woods, missed the cut last week at Scottsdale. “But once you make the slight technical adjustment, the confidence comes back instantly.”

Mickelson did disagree with Woods’ contention that he had to sync the swing “patterns” of his long and short games.

“You can swing [a golf club] a million different ways and be effective. I think that you can putt a million different ways and be effective, but there’s only one way to chip effectively,” he said. “There’s three or four fundamentals on chipping that everybody has to do to chip well, no matter who you are, and it has nothing to do with your swing.”

As for himself, Mickelson, who underwent a rigorous weight-loss and workout regimen during the offseason, was pleased with the resulting increase in clubhead and ball speed.

“I feel good,” he said after a year in which he was unhappy with just about every aspect of his game. “I had a great offseason.”

The ever-optimistic Mickelson sought to temper expectations a bit by noting he also “felt good” before the Humana Challenge, in which he finished in a tie for 24th.

“I’m not going to put my stock into a week or two,” he said about the season that’s more of a marathon than a sprint. “We’ll see how it goes this week, and then I’ll have a couple weeks off and I’ll take it over to Florida and see. But this feels totally different to me than last year.”

Mickelson will tee it up Thursday on No. 1 on the South Course with Bill Haas and Jimmy Walker.