Phil Mickelson has already made his feelings clear on being Ryder Cup captain
Phil Mickelson has already made his thoughts clear on potentially being the Ryder Cup captain, while also opting to poke fun at Patrick Cantlay’s style of play.
Mickelson, the LIV Golf star, is one of the most prominent American Ryder Cup players, having played in 47 matches throughout his career. Overall, the 55-year-old has won 18 times, lost 22, accumulated seven halves, and won a total of 21.5 points.
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Despite his immense experience, Mickelson has only been named a vice captain once (2021) and never as a captain. Having never received that call, the star admits that he believes his time to be named captain is up.
“I don’t feel I’m the right guy to be involved with the team because I’m a very divisive character right now, if you will, and I understand that,” he said in 2024 [h/t The Golfing Gazette]. The LIV star believed that his jumping ship to the Saudi-backed circuit could have caused some fractures in his relationships.
“The players on the PGA Tour, there’s a lot of hostilities towards me, and I don’t feel I’d be the best leader for them,” he candidly admitted. “I knew I was going to take some hits going forward. I’m OK with that. And as a divisive individual. I don’t think I’m the best unifier going forward for the Ryder Cup, and that’s fine because I’ve had so many great memories with it.”
Despite stating that he would not want to be captain for fear of fracturing the team, the golf star is not one to hold back his criticism, even if it could be detrimental to the team’s performance.
In 2014, Mickelson spoke out openly against captain Tom Watson’s decisions on player pairings, with the latter telling reporters what he truly thought and called out his captain. “There were two things that allowed us to play our best, I think, that Paul Azinger [the previous captain] did, and one was he got everybody invested in the process,” he said at the time [h/t Talk Sport].
“He got everybody invested in who they were going to play with, who the picks were going to be, who was going to be in their pod, who — when they would play, and they had a great leader for each pod.
“In my case, we had Ray Floyd, and we hung out together and we were all invested in each other’s play… And the other thing that Paul did really well was he had a great game plan for us, you know, how we were going to go about doing this.
“How we were going to go about playing together; golf ball, format, what we were going to do, if so-and-so is playing well, if so-and-so is not playing well, we had a real game plan.
“Those two things helped us bring out our best golf. And I think that, you know, we all do the best that we can and we’re all trying our hardest, and I’m just looking back at what gave us the most success.
“Because we use that same process in The Presidents Cup and we do really well. Unfortunately, we have strayed from a winning formula in 2008 for the last three Ryder Cups, and we need to consider maybe getting back to that formula that helped us play our best.”
Mickelson and Team USA fell to Team Europe that year by a score of 16 1/2 to 11 1/2. Of note, that win punctuated European dominance, with the Europe winning eight of 10 competitions from 1995 to 2014.
