It’s love at first sight as Phil gets into full flight

Phil Mickelson is an all or nothing kind of guy. He turns up at the Barclays Scottish Open and he becomes half-Scottish, a strange hybrid of part-golfer and part-tourism rep. When this tournament was held at Loch Lomond, Phil used to marvel aloud at the mountains and the castles and the countryside, and now that it has moved further north he’s talking with the same kind of wonderment about the hiking and the fishing and the sight-seeing. His family are here, taking in all the “amenities” this place has to offer. “It seems like it’s incredible,” says Phil, like he’s seen a vision of heaven in the Highlands.

He’s only getting started on how magnificent it all is. He doesn’t talk about the rain or the cold or the forecast of the foul weather ahead. He eulogises the golf course and you’d swear that he’s living in some kind of Mickelson micro-climate where the rain don’t fall, or that he’s had some kind of religious experience out there.

He’s drained the bank of superlatives by the time he’s done describing how thought-provoking and exciting this golf course is, how it should be written into golf law that anybody even thinking of building a new layout anywhere on the planet should be taken by the scruff of the neck and dropped by the Moray Firth to have a look at how it should be done. Phil would say: “There you go, this is the template, this is the way it has to be.”

You gotta love Phil. You gotta will him on. God knows he needs the help because despite his oft-expressed love of this part of the world his results have been abysmal. That’s another part of Mickelson’s character that you have to admire. Throw some stats at him that show how poorly he has performed in big tournaments in Scotland and England in his career and he says, yeah, he’s not played well, but he’s loving the challenge all the same, loving the quest to become “the complete golfer”.

Phil’s record? It’s ugly. Six Scottish Opens and one decent performance, a second (beaten in a play-off by Gregory Havret) in 2007 to go with the 37th and the 33rd and the 35th and the two missed cuts in 2003 and 2010. And at The Open? Gruesome. Eighteen attempts and one top-ten. On 13 occasions he has finished outside the top-20 and four times he has missed the cut. And yet so much love in his heart. Those mountains and lochs must mean an awful lot to him.

“It’s something that I’m really starting to enjoy,” he said of his drive to conquer Britain. “It’s a real challenge for me to overcome the obstacles. It’s gotten me more determined to try and overcome this because this is exciting golf over here. I enjoy my time here. I enjoy the challenge of links golf. It’s fun. I haven’t performed to the level that I have played, week-in and week-out in the States, and I want to change that. I’m planning on doing it.”

He was down at Royal St George’s on Monday and Tuesday, reacquainting himself with a golf course he doesn’t have fond memories of from the last time he played it at The Open of 2003. He shot 74, 72, 73, 78 and finished 59th. He reckons he sees the nuances of St George’s now, he can see the subtleties and the strategy a lot clearer than he did eight years ago. Not many did back then, of course. The set-up that week was a dismal failure. They’ve taken away a lot of the rough this year and the tournament should be all the better for it. So says Phil anyway.

Here’s the masterplan for next week: “The wind is about 10-20 per cent of the reason why I haven’t played well [in The Open]. I’m going to combat that by hitting more draws which are going to have a proper spinning and penetrating flight. The biggest reason [for his Open malaise] is the greens. I have not putted the greens well. The grass is a little bit more coarse, a little thicker and you need to putt with less break and more aggressive. I’m going to try and do that. If I have a good putting week I think I’ll be in contention on Sunday.”

First-up in the preparation for St George’s, though, is Castle Stuart, a track that has been taken to the heart of every player here this week. The other day, Padraig Harrington love-bombed the place, but Mickelson went even further. He practically ravished it. “This is great golf course architecture,” he said of Gil Hanse’s creation. “Most of the greatest holes that have ever been designed have been designed 60-100 years ago. I don’t see that type of greatness in a lot of modern-day architecture. But with Gil Hanse that type of thought-provoking, fun golf course is being brought back.

“Our modern-day architects have this feeling that equipment has changed the game and therefore they must make every hole long and hard and totally unplayable for the average player. And unfortunately that has driven a lot of people away from the game of golf. I think it’s one of the leading reasons why a lot of participation has been down, because they are not fun. It’s unplayable. A lot of these courses are unplayable for us.”

Cue the endorsement – and it sure looked like it was heart-felt admiration rather than commercially driven praise – that will have had the folk at Castle Stuart worshipping at Mickelson’s altar. Honestly, you could almost smell the tourist dollars in the air while Mickelson was talking. “Everybody is going to enjoy their round here. They don’t hit it in the bunker, take four or five swipes and have to pick up. They can get it out. You have all these different options that are being brought back into play and that is what golf is about. Hanse recognises that golf is not about longer and harder [holes]. Longer and harder is just longer and harder. It’s monotonous and ultimately not very thought-provoking. [The game] is about fun and creativity and it doesn’t have to beat you up all the time. It should almost be a prerequisite to play Castle Stuart before you’re allowed to design courses nowadays.”

In a word, he said Castle Stuart had “memorability”.

Cranking it up a notch he reckons that the winner at St George’s is somewhere in the field at Castle Stuart. “It’s such an advantage to play here the week before,” he says.

“So Rory [McIlroy, absent this week] is not going to win The Open?” the American was asked.

Phil is smiling now. He hasn’t studied the field yet. Too much fishing and sight-seeing, no doubt. “You know you have a remarkable way of putting words in my mouth,” he responds, in that charming way of his. “I did not say that and, of course, I must have thought that he was in the field!”

Nice up and down right there. If Phil can get out of trouble as deftly on the golf course as he did in the press room then he’s got a big chance this week – and next.