Once upon a time, everything in professional golf seemed to revolve around Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. Then they got older, fell off with age and ceded the spotlight to an array of younger stars. The future was bright, golf people would nod in agreement.
Now that future has arrived, in the form of two players breathing new life into golf in 2018: Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.
In the midst of a Woods comeback that has been shockingly legitimate, Mickelson on Sunday won his first tournament since the 2013 British Open. At 47 years old, he beat 23-year-old Justin Thomas in a playoff at the WGC-Mexico Championship in Mexico City.
Thomas, who was born more than two years after Mickelson’s first PGA Tour win, is the kind of player that has been dominating the sport in recent years. He’s exceptionally long off the tee and barely above college age. Just a week earlier, he had won the Honda Classic.
But Thomas bogeyed the first playoff hole, allowing Mickelson to win after missing a birdie putt. And with that, Mickelson put a bookend on a four-year stretch in which he played some of his worst golf, became ensnared in a federal investigation into insider trading and fired his longtime caddie.
“I don’t know what to say,” Mickelson told NBC afterward. “It’s been a tough go the last four years.”
Ditto that for Woods, 42, whose last full season coincided with Mickelson’s previous win. His back injuries had lingered to the point where even he wondered if he would ever play competitively again. But Woods has done more than merely play this year.
In three starts in 2018, he has finished in the top 25 twice, and he is showing signs of improvement. Woods finished 12th at the Honda Classic. He didn’t qualify for the WGC-Mexico Championship on account of his world ranking—he’s still just 388th after barely playing in recent years. But Woods is scheduled to play both this week in the Valspar Championship in Palm Harbor, Fla., and next week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando.
“The more I play tournament golf, the better I’ll get at it,” Woods said after the Honda. Those words were no doubt a delight to the Tour and its television partners. Merely by being in contention on the weekend, Woods drove a 38% ratings increase for the tournament from the prior year.
The only other PGA Tour event that drew as well this year was the only other event in which Woods played through the weekend: the Farmers Insurance Open in January.
Mickelson’s struggles in recent years have been largely overshadowed by Woods’s decline. He has been agonizingly close to winning—never more so than in his final-round duel with Henrik Stenson at the 2016 British Open— and at times painfully far. Last year marked the first since 2007 in which Mickelson did not record a top-10 finish at a major and the first since he turned pro in which he failed to record a top-3 finish on Tour.
But Mickelson has gotten better this year at everything except driving. He ranks second on Tour in strokes gained putting. And he has logged four consecutive top-10 finishes, a first for him since 2005. He’ll be a contender at the Masters next month—alongside Woods, assuming he’s still healthy enough.
“I believe that more is to come,” Mickelson said. “I’m starting to play some of my best golf.”
The future of golf is here. It feels a bit like the past.
Write to Brian Costa at brian.costa@wsj.com
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