The value of the late-career romance between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson

Tiger and Phil, long viewed as two unfriendly rivals, have developed a friendship that few saw coming. Now, after a week of needling each other, they will play together at The Players Championship.

The 2018 Players Championship has become the Tiger and Phil Invitational. From the moment the PGA Tour made the early announcement on Sunday that the two were paired together, it’s dominated the 45th edition of The Players. It’s the best field in golf at the season’s most recognizable non-Augusta venue and everyone and everything else has been peripheral to the Tiger-Phil pairing.

There are a few reasons for this.

1. Tiger is always going to be the primary story in any event he plays, especially after being out of the game the last two years.
2. Despite their careers overlapping, Tiger and Phil almost never play together. Their last pairing came at the 2014 PGA Championship and their only pairing at this event came 17 years ago.
3. After years of iciness, the two have some sort of midlife budding romance that’s full of PDA and the media and golf world (rightly) cannot get enough of it.

Once the shots start flying and the two either rise or fall and go their ways on the leaderboard, we’ll get less Tiger & Phil. But in the days leading up to a major or an event like the Players, there are hours and hours of air to fill and thousands of words to write. Most of it is fluff and it’s point No. 3 above that provided an unexpected feast for this time-filling fluff.

Phil led off on Tuesday morning at TPC Sawgrass joking that he didn’t think Tiger “wanted a piece” of him and that they should skip all the ancillary rounds and fast forward to Sunday for a high-stakes game. I, um, think that PGA Tour would take that. Tiger then responded later with more barbs about how Phil should look at the “big picture” of their career totals and that he’d play for “whatever makes him uncomfortable.” It was like two dads at the end of their driveways on the cul-de-sac exchanging jokes for their other dad buds about their upcoming weekend game. Except these two are Hall-of-Famers and worth hundreds of millions of dollars and used to kinda not like each other all that much!

The “banter” and “needle,” the terms used across the world in grill rooms and putting greens for this kind of thing, was enjoyable and the latest in this late-career detente between the two. It, predictably, became the story of all the pre-tournament show-and-tell festivities.

Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images

But it also buried the most important, truly revelatory moment from all their back-and-forth comments about the fun little game the PGA Tour has set up for them this week. In the middle of Tiger’s press conference, he relayed an anecdote that was the most instructive bit on where their relationship stands now in the sunset of their careers. I’ll just put it here, in full:

I think our relationship has certainly gotten a lot closer with me being a vice captain the last couple teams and sitting there and having very lengthy conversations with him about things, not just the pairings but just about things in general. You know, when I was trying to deal with the nerve in my back and trying to come back and trying to play and I wasn’t very good, he always texted me some very encouraging words, and then on top of that, when you guys all saw how I was chipping so poorly, my nerve and my back was not doing very good, and I was flinching a lot, and he offered numerous times to help me out with technique and just talk about it and philosophy, and I said, yeah, you know, you and I have the same philosophy in how we approach chipping and how we do it. I just can’t physically do it.

This is remarkable in several ways. Here are a few:

1. It’s no doubt easier to become friends late in a career when what’s done is mostly done and the threat from your opponent is dulled. But that Phil was at a point where he felt like texting Tiger during a moment when Tiger probably wasn’t a super happy or friendly person based on how things were going on the golf course is surprising to me.
2. That Tiger actually spoke about this publicly! It’s amazing Tiger shared that Phil came to him when he was chipping it all over the place. That’s usually a bit that would be left off the Tiger press conference answer, which would stop somewhere after the generalities about how the two have great banter and a friendly relationship and it was never as bad as the media made it out to be etc. Instead, he stopped, and added this very specific way in which the two have talked and shared a moment and it came during the most vulnerable and ignominious spot of Tiger’s golf career (to be clear, not his public life, just the golf).
3. To my recollection, Tiger has never talked about the reasons behind that horrendous chipping stage. He’s acknowledged that he had some short game struggles or wasn’t playing well, always using very general and soft terms while everyone else used “yips.” But Tiger has never gone into why that happened or much specifics about it at all. He didn’t go into a deep explanation here, but he did go further than I can ever recall and provided some context about how the nerve pain was impacting his motion. He also brought up that ugly period of his career voluntarily, not because there was a question about it. A question about the Phil relationship and the great de-frosting brought it out of him.
4. Tiger capped his comments in a way that clarified he probably didn’t need and didn’t actually take Phil’s golf advice. He just couldn’t do it physically. This was an amusing moment — yeah we may be bros but I’m not some pride-free uncompetitive hack now. Can you imagine if he publicly said Phil helped pull him out of his chipping embarrassments with some technique advice? I don’t think that’s what happened. But even if it did, I doubt we’d ever hear about it in public from Tiger himself.

Now we’ll get at least two full rounds of Tiger and Phil playing together at the PGA Tour’s marquee event. The shots will start to count and it’s not going to be a hit-and-giggle, but there will probably be laughs and some cute awww moments. The images from their surreal practice round together at Augusta, of the extended embraces and joint exhales after recent USA team wins, and the banter comments in the press have been entertaining and maybe even moving at times.

But another value in this budding romance may come from the comfort the two have now disclosing more details, whether essential or not, from the past. We saw it in Tiger’s brief answer about his past on Tuesday. Whether it’s a detail about the other, or themselves within the context of the relationship, here’s hoping 36 more holes together at Sawgrass will loosen things up further and enable even more to seep out about two of the most important careers in the sport’s history.