Phil and Tiger could have been Arnold and Jack. They chose different paths

When Johnny Miller started winning as a young pro in the early 1970s and got to see Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus up close and personal, he made an interesting discovery about their lives: The King and Big Jack both had great big appetites. Their literal appetites, for plus-sized steaks and bowls of ice cream and the rest. But Miller could see their hungry nature in other ways, too — in their willingness to fly anywhere in their pursuit of golf or commerce or both. Nobody who knew Arnold Palmer confused him with Mister Rogers, another son of Latrobe. Arnold liked the ladies and the ladies liked him. Still, he went to his maker as American golf’s most popular and charismatic figure. As for Nicklaus, in his mid-80s, he remains golf’s most admired figure, leading an exemplary do-the-right-thing life, in every season of it.

In more recent years, and in this new and connected century, the closest thing golf has had to Arnold and Jack has been Phil and Tiger, or Tiger and Phil. Really, though, in the name of succession, they have proven to be not close at all. After Woods’s win at the 2019 Masters, I wrote a book called “The Second Life of Tiger Woods.” What are we up to now, his third life? Fourth?

There was Tiger in public again late last month, fresh from behavior rehab after another lucky-nobody-died roadside incident. This was at a PGA Tour show-me-the-future press conference near Hartford, Conn. Woods wore a dark suit and a bright tie and looked all shiny as he introduced the Tour’s newish CEO, Brian Rolapp. Out of happenstance and with stunning speed, an athlete for the ages and a sports executive on the rise are all bro-ey, so smiley, so huggy. You could almost smell all that new VC cash right through your preferred screen and platform. Woods and Rolapp are both in line for a nice piece of all that new money. Our money, at the end of the day.

Maybe there’s some kind of playbook for Phil Mickelson in all this, looking at Woods and his rise and fall and rise and fall and rise. It is true that he is the greatest golf talent that has ever lived. Even Jack Nicklaus acknowledges that. Woods’s next court date is Aug. 4. So there’s that, too.

Late in 2009, and late one night, Woods ran over a fire hydrant near his driveway, was rendered unconscious, became the subject of a frantic 911 call from his hysterical mother and rushed to a hospital. Almost overnight Woods’s private life became a public joke. It should be obvious to all that Woods is a reckless and dangerous driver and it seems obvious to me that he has abused his body with his huge appetite for weightlifting and practice but (to borrow a phrase) . . . his body, his choice.

Mickelson won a major at 50, the oldest man ever to do so. To those of us watching from afar, his future was so bright with a seal for shades already in place. Wasn’t hard to imagine Phil in a CBS swivel chair per terms he could dictate; a Ryder Cup captaincy and possibly a second one; Phil’s wife, Amy, to become, in her own way, a leader in various public works in the manner of Barbara Nicklaus and Winnie Palmer; $30 million a year in income for her husband; senior majors when he was in the mood to play in them; the first tee at Augusta as long as he could make a backswing; all that adoration. Phil Mickelson had the capacity to make people feel good. He really did. That gift can come with a massive payday. Taylor Swift, Jerry Seinfeld and Tom Hanks know all about that.

We knew a lot about Mickelson’s risk-reward golf and something about his appetite for gambling, for on-the-edge stock-trading, for good food and expensive wine. The extent of it we did not know. Golf Digest is not in the business of bringing down legends, but there it was, just last month, publishing a carefully worded news story about Mickelson leaving one of his San Diego golf clubs in the wake of a charge by a club employee that he made “inappropriate and nonconsensual physical contact.”

A sort of follow-up story, published by the golf website Skratch, included lurid, vulgar (and now disputed by Mickelson) details about Mickelson’s alleged unwanted personal overtures to Ashley Perez, former wife of the professional golfer Pat Perez. The Skratch story also maintained that Mickelson was required to leave not one but three private California clubs. In a recent public statement, representatives for Mickelson have disputed that claim. “Mr. Mickelson has never been expelled from a golf club,” the statement said. Okay — define expelled.    

Alan Shipnuck, the author of a bestselling 2022 biography of Mickelson that celebrates and critiques the lefthander’s never-a-dull-moment life and times, wrote the Skratch piece. Yes, the PGA Tour owns a piece of Skratch, and Phil Mickelson is persona non grata in the Tour’s offices, as he opened the door for other players to leave the Tour for LIV Golf after he bolted first. Would Skratch be willing to publish such a salacious piece about Tiger Woods, chairman of the Tour’s Future Competition Committee? Your real-world educated guess is a likely good one. Yes, Shipnuck and Mickelson have a complicated relationship. If you know Mickelson’s famous “scary motherf-ckers” quote about LIV’s Saudi backers, to Shipnuck and used by Shipnuck, you know that. But those factors, to say nothing of the vulgarity of it all, doesn’t discredit the report or diminish its newsworthiness.

Mickelson is now where Woods was in early 2010. Next up is next up. It’ll be something, as nothing is not an option. The public’s demands are ultimately insatiable, too. Woods wrote a biography that never got published. Someday in the next half-century or so, some form of it will become public, if the lives and times of Ty Cobb and JFK are any example here.

Shipnuck and I are longtime colleagues and friends. About 15 years ago, in the aftermath of Tiger Woods and his sex life appearing on the front page of the New York Post for 20 consecutive days, we wrote a satire called The Swinger. Tree Tremont, the swinger in question, is a notoriously lousy tipper and his serial infidelity, in his view of his life, is a kind of hobby.

The book, from my vantage point, tries to make the case that the rich and famous have a fundamental right to a private life but that the public at large, always on the prowl for blood in the water, has run out of patience for that world view. I know my own thinking was shaped by Nicklaus. After Woods’s sex life became an SNL bit and the rest, Nicklaus maintained that Tiger’s private life was not his business. That carried the day for me, even though a wise late friend of mine, Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, had another view. Vincent felt once you used your good standing to sell Buicks and the rest, you forfeited your broad rights to privacy. In The Swinger, Shipnuck and I invented a newspaper editor who says, “It’s always the same. [People] want to know what the dude is, quote, really like, right.” Our invented reporter, in the end, can’t give the editor what he wants. It’s not in him. Mickelson gave me a short review of the book without reading it: “Not cool.”

Amy Mickelson and the three grown Mickelson children are innocent bystanders in all this. Tiger and Elin’s children — Sam Woods, now at Stanford, and Charlie Woods, bound for Florida State — are experts in navigating similar terrain. There is no map, not for them, not for anybody. Arnold’s path was not Jack’s and Jack’s was not Arnold’s. We all make decisions about what we do and how we treat people, every day. From such decisions a cast is filled and your life unfolds. It’s complicated and not. AI cannot help here. AI cannot work in the margins, figure out up and down when you’re surrounded by gray.

Woods’s greatness as a golfer has given him his current chapter, his next chapter, the chapter after that. You could say the same for Mickelson. We don’t know what’s coming next because we can’t know. Mickelson is 56. If his parents and grandparents are an example, 66 and 76 and 86 are coming. Life is weirdly long and famously short.

Nicklaus has said more than once that only a fool would bet against Tiger Woods. He was talking about Tiger Woods the golfer. Is there going to be another scary roadside event with Woods at the wheel? Is he ever going to tell us about . . . what it’s like to be Tiger Woods? Was this most recent rehab stint done chiefly to appease a judge who was going to require it anyhow? Has Woods found new and better ways to address the pain in his life, physical and psychic? I certainly have no answers here. I doubt Woods does, either. Because the questions are hard.

In the Golf Digest report, in the Skratch report, Phil Mickelson seems repulsive. Are there other aspects to him? Of course there are, and we’ve all seen peak Phil, either in real-time or via Golf Channel and YouTube highlight clips. Phil the Thrill. Appetites are hard to control, for any of us. Appetites are in our DNA, and then your life takes over.

With stardom comes entitlement. Not always, but often, and more so all the time. It’s the superstar politician, movie star, pantheon athlete. Bill Murray used to say that after somebody makes it there’s going to be a period of public and private boorishness, though he was more colorful. It’s a given. Then there comes a reckoning, or not. That’s when you find out who the person really is.

We wanted Tiger and Phil to be Jack and Arnold. That never happened. Not even close. They’re not even Tiger and Phil, not as they once were. This year, neither played the Masters or even the U.S. Senior Open, which is underway this week in Ohio. Neither has been fitted for a Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup captain’s uniform.

Still, Woods found a way to a podium a week or two ago, the pathway lined with bags of legal tender. Another form of everybody loves a winner. Some would say he played his cards right but I would not. Can Tiger’s path be instructive for Phil? That’s up to Phil. It’s hard to imagine him just retreating. The buffet table of life has always been piled high for him. After a while, it will prove to be irresistible. The colors, the smells, the melting ice below. More is a life force for some people, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson among them. It just is. The desire for more is one thing. You can control an appetite. With its cousin, greed, whatever you have is not enough.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.