Phil Mickelson Makes History In PGA Championship Win
The unpredictable career of Phil Mickelson dropped a huge surprise at the PGA Championship this weekend. Mickelson won his sixth career major but this one made history–at age 50, he became the oldest player to win a major in golf history.
When you’ve done something that no one else has done in the history of major championship golf it’s a big deal. We’re talking 161 years and a ton of great golfers including many that remained competitive well into middle age. Mickelson was cool, calm and in control making the right shots at the right time to beat Brooks Koepka and Louis Oosthuizen by two shots with a 1 over 73 in the final round.
Making Mickelson’s PGA Championship win all the more surprising–he hasn’t been in spectacular form of late. Mickselson had not finished in the top 20 of a tournament in nine months and hadn’t won a major since 2013. At the time he teed off for the PGA Championship he was ranked #115 in the world. Mickelson remained confident in his ability even if no one else did:
“One of the moments I’ll cherish my entire life. I don’t know how to describe the feeling of excitement and fulfillment and accomplishment to do something of this magnitude when very few people thought that I could.”
“This is just an incredible feeling because I believed it was possible, but everything was saying it wasn’t.”
The oldest player to win a major before Mickelson was Julius Boros who was 48 when he won the 1968 PGA Championship. Mickelson also became only the 10th player to win a major in three decades, a feat most recently done by Tiger Woods who won the Masters in 2019 at age 43.