The PGA Tour may be in the rearview at this point for Phil Mickelson, but that doesn’t mean LIV Golf’s most famous player is afraid to share his opinions about his former tour.
Mickelson and the HyFlyers GC are gearing up for the LIV team championships in Michigan, and in a pre-tournament press conference, Mickelson took the opportunity to get in yet another dig at the PGA Tour.
Phil Mickelson Reflects on PGA Tour ‘BS’
“From the players’ experience, rather than going into every little detail, I would just say that I used to have anxiousness going to a Tour event with all the details that would go on. I would be anxious and not want to go. I’d go as late as I could.
“A LIV event, I can’t wait to get here. I come earlier. I can’t wait to get here. The experience from a player’s standpoint, it’s better than I could have ever imagined.”
By Mickelson’s standards, that’s fairly tame. But he wasn’t done.
His quotes were shared on social media, and after seeing the X account “Flushing It” tweet out video from the press conference, Mickelson — taking some time out from lobbing grenades at California governor Gavin Newsome — replied to the tweet with a little more mmph to his initial comments.
“The love I had for the game was being overshadowed by all the BS and I found myself dreading it,” Mickelson said in a lengthy tweet.
If there’s any sort of argument to be made in response to Mickelson’s latest critique, it’s that he was certainly compensated handsomely for the “BS.” The six-time major champion made nearly $97 million in on-course earnings over his prolific Tour career. Only Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy (and very soon, Scottie Scheffler) have made more on the PGA Tour than Mickelson, who obviously hasn’t played a Tour tournament since 2022.
It will be interesting to see whether Mickelson reverses course at all. In 2024, he offered a stern “FAAFO” warning to the Tour about more potential LIV defections. He eventually deleted that tweet.
Could Mickelson Return to PGA Tour Someday?
There has been some speculation or general wondering whether Mickelson would ever come back to the PGA Tour. His best golf is behind him, of course, and at this point in his career, a return might be ceremonial more than anything else. Perhaps the loquacious, insightful Mickelson could return for a TV analyst gig.
Yet, that seems highly unlikely — and comments like these don’t get it anywhere closer to happening. Longtime golf reporter Rex Hoggard said in March that while there’s a path for a return for some LIV players, not even an increasingly unlikely Tour-LIV unification might get Mickelson back in the good graces of the power brokers on the Sawgrass swamp.
“Speaking with people behind the scenes, it’s clear that people who were members before they left to go to LIV, it’s going to vary — it’s going to be a la carte,” Hoggard said on his podcast. “This is probably, along with a lot of other things, going to put Phil probably at the bottom of that category. As far as if he ever would want to come back to the PGA Tour, I’m not even quite sure — even if we ended up with an agreement, even if we ended up with unification — I don’t know that Phil would be welcomed back.”
That might be moot; Mickelson doesn’t sound like he’s eager to get back to the PGA Tour anytime soon.
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