Phil Mickelson Biography

Known to golf fans as “Lefty,” Phil Mickelson has been one of the Professional Golf Association’s most successful players since 1992. Phil Mickelson was still an amateur when he won the PGA’s Northern Telecom Open in 1991. He turned pro the next year and in 1996 he stepped into the spotlight by winning four tournaments, including the NEC World Series of Golf. That same year Tiger Woods turned pro, and the two began a competitive rivalry that has continued for many years. Quick to smile and willing to play brashly aggressive shots with his big left-handed swing, Mickelson tends to attract boisterous galleries of fans. His early failures to win one of golf’s four major tournaments led to some calling him “the best player never to win a major,” but he ended that streak in 2004, when he won The Masters in Augusta, Georgia. He co-authored (with Donald T. Phillips) a memoir of the occasion, titled One Magical Sunday, in 2005. He won a second major, the PGA Championship, in 2005, and again won the Masters in 2006 and 2010.  He picked up a fifth major in 2013, finishing with a final-round 66 to win the British Open at Scotland’s venerable Muirfield course.