The Fundamentals Matter

Age gets too much credit.

I (Coach Milo here!) am very lucid of the fact that Father Time is undefeated.

But, age, it grabs us by the hamstrings and clenches, not allowing us to contemplate anything beyond the number of flickering candles on our last birthday cake. Seriously, as a society we are severely hoodwinked by age and generational characterizations.

It was said that Coco Gauff should not have been doing what she did at Wimbledon, certainly not at age 15. She obviously was not old enough to compete with adults or stronger or more powerful or more experienced athletes.

Phil Mickelson just missed another cut. He obviously is too old to compete with younger or stronger or more powerful golfers.

Both thought processes are steeped in ripe bovine excrement and scream of a neophyte’s understanding of the human athlete’s psychology, sociology and physiology. 

Mickelson (49 in this picture) was not too old in February 2019 when he won by three strokes in Pebble Beach - over a then 41-year-old Paul Casey. So he has rapidly aged in four months? That February victory was also ahead of almost 70 other golfers (who made the cut) younger than Mickelson. I have not looked crazy close, but I think Jim Furyk and Ernie Els are the only golfers older than Mickelson who made the cut during that tournament.

Speaking of Furyk and Els, they made The Open cut in 2019, ahead of more than 70 younger golfers who did not make the cut. They too old, too?

This is more about Mickelson playing up to his level of expectation and competency. Gauff was no different, yet simultaneously the opposite of Mickelson. No different in that she had to play Wimbledon up to her level of expectation and competency. As a biologically mature 15-year-old, the “older” athletes had zero physical advantages over Gauff, and that showed.

The two were different because Mickelson did not play up to his level of expectation and competency.

Understand something folks, entering The Open, Mickelson was 18th on the PGA Tour in average driving distance – the most physically intensive part of golf. If there were something that would lead me to believe Uncle Time (Father Time’s younger and more athletically-driven brother) is calling Mickelson, it would be a non-injury or non-swing-change induced drop in this power number. Like Gauff, Mickelson’s challengers, as a unit, had no physical advantages

Accuracy off the tee has never been one of Mickelson’s strong suits. Hell, he even once said that he would like to be “average” off the tee because it’d make his whole game better. I would love to see what would happen if he did get more accurate off the tee. And I say that knowing the correlation between driving distance and the money list.

Mickelson is still one of the 30 best male golfers on the planet. Actually, before The Open, he had improved four spots on the world rankings since the end of last season, from 32 to 28, and still in front of a litany of younger golfers.

Sure, Mickelson is getting older in years, but his chronology is not indicative of his game. Maybe it is simply time for him to revisit the basics, time to reopen the vault to the fundamentals that have built him into a Hall of Fame golfer.

That is what the best athletes do – at any age.