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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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One
Magical Sunday by Phil Mickelson |
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Rating:
•• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Nice Since the publication of One
Magical Sunday, the story of winning his first major golf championship,
the 2004 Masters, Phil Mickelson has won a second tournament on One Marvelous
Monday. Whether there’s a sequel or
not, some readers will pleasure in reading Phil’s story in One
Magical Sunday. Golfers will
especially enjoy his recap of every hole at the 2004 Masters. The rest of the
text about Phil’s family confirms the impression of just how nice a guy he
is, but there’s nothing in the telling of the family stories that brings
insight to readers. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter (Hole) 3, pp. 19-26: Flowering
Peach Par 4 350 yards The
third hole at My
decision is to hit a 3-iron off the tee and play a low, knockdown, running
shot. That way, I’ll have a full wedge second shot that I can take high and
bring it in to the green more vertically (which will give me a better chance
of landing it on the green close to the hole). My
tee shot goes exactly where I want it to go—in the middle of the fairway. I’m
sure this surprises the golf analysts. Rarely am I in the top ten in driving
accuracy. But this week, I’m hitting it great and am tied for ninth in
driving accuracy going into today’s round. For my approach shot, I’m thinking that
I have to fly the ball all the way to the hole. I fly it too far,
however—about five yards over the green. But I missed it where I had to miss
it to make par. There’s a ridge between my ball and the pin, so I’ll have to
go up it and let the ball roll down to the hole. It’s funny. I’ve had this exact same
shot every year that I’ve played in the Masters. Yet I’ve never gotten it up
and down for par. I’ve tried chipping it with a sand wedge, hitting it high
with a lob wedge, and doing a bump and run with other irons. But I’m really
looking forward to this shot to see if I can do better. It’s a tough one for
me—but, even as a child, I loved challenging shots around the green. When I was nine or ten
years old, my dad built a putting green in the back yard complete with bunker
and flagstick. He also mounded the area so we could hit just about any kind of
shot that could be envisioned. There were plenty of slopes and, of course,
there were trees and bushes all over the place. Beyond the green, there was a
rather large canyon. So when we got tired of chipping, we could let some fly
out there—maybe up to 150 yards or so. And over the years, we hit garbage
cans full of balls out into that canyon. Most of the golf balls were given to
us by the local driving ranges before being discarded. Sometimes, I would play
out there by myself all day long and, when we added some lighting, well into
the night. After a while, I’d get bored with the same old monotonous shot, so
I started moving all around the back yard—around obstacles, under trees,
behind bushes, on the side of the bunker, in the sand. And I just kept making
shots up like that. I’d go back up against the fence and try to hit the ball
on the green. I’d hit it below
the tree, above the bush, and out to the flagstick. And then I’d move the
pins around. It’s easier on this part of the green; harder on that part. Hit
it from here and go over the trap. Chip it from a downhill lie, an uphill
lie, a flat lie. Put some spin on the ball and see
if I can back it up next to the hole. As I got better and
better, my dad would work with me and we’d devise all kinds of different
games. For instance, we’d take twenty balls each and, from different places
around the green, see how many shots we could knock within a flagstick length
of the hole. If we knocked one in the hole, we got two points. After a while, I began
to notice that the ball would react in different ways depending on how my
club struck it. So I started to experiment. If! hit
it just right, I could make it back up, or bounce right, or bounce left. I
could hit it fat and watch it loft very softly— de-loft the club and watch it
roll along the ground. I’d hit it below the equator of the ball and above the
equator just to see what would happen. Sometimes, my dad and I would try some
crazy shots and then talk about why the ball did what it did. It was just
fascinating to me. Before you knew it, I
was practicing all kinds of trick shots in the back yard. It got so I could
hit the ball high enough in the air to go over a man’s head standing three
feet in front of me and have it land in a bucket behind him. Usually, I practiced
these types of shots when I was home by myself, because they were pretty
risky. I remember one time when
I was facing our house and trying to make the ball go in a different
direction with a full swing. Well, I hit it wrong and it went flying off to the
right at full force and crashed into our neighbor’s sliding glass doors. When
I heard the glass shatter, I remember thinking, “Oh, no!” I ran back into the
house and sure enough, within thirty seconds the phone rang and I answered
it. “Hello?” I said. “Philip,” said Mrs. Peters, our next
door neighbor, “is your mother home?” “No, Mrs. Peters, ma’am, she isn’t. Is
everything okay?” “Oh, yes, Philip. Everything’s fine. I
just want to talk to your mother.” I remember it took me forever to pay for
those new sliding glass doors. The truth is that I broke a bunch of
windows in the Peters house. One time Mr. Peters came home and found one of
my golf balls on the floor of an upstairs bedroom. Of course, the window was
smashed to pieces. “Hmmm,” he said when he called my mother, “I wonder who
could have done this.” Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Peters did not get upset
easily. Despite the occasional broken window, I
was improving quickly. And I remember the first time I ever beat my father. I
was about ten years old and we were playing a round over at Well, when we got home, Dad started
messing around in the garage and I was hanging around my mom in the kitchen.
But I could not tell her what I had done because of a lesson I remembered
from a skiing trip a few years before. On
one of our family trips, we were riding a chairlift up the mountain next to a
guy who kept telling us he was the greatest skier in the world. And I
remember being real impressed with what he said he could do. But when we got
off the lift, the “greatest skier in the world” kept falling flat on his
face. It turned out he was a terrible skier. And that’s when my mom
and dad pulled me aside. “You see, Philip,” they said, “it just doesn’t sound
good when you tell a person how great you are or how good you are at
something. It just doesn’t come across right. It’s always better to hear it
from somebody else.” So when I got home, I waited until my
dad came in from the garage and we were all in the kitchen together. I
thought he was going to tell Mom what had happened, but he didn’t. And Mom
was too busy cooking to ask how our round went. Well, I just couldn’t take it
anymore, so I finally burst out: “Dad! Aren’t you going to tell Mom what
happened? C’mon!” “Oh, yeah,” my dad said finally.
“Philip beat me for the first time—by eight strokes.” He was
just beaming from ear to ear!
What a smile! He was so proud of himself at that moment. And yet, he did not
want to sound conceited. He just would not tell me himself. It had to be his
dad who told me. Mary Mickelson, Phil’s Mom A few years later, I started playing in
junior golf tournaments. I’ll always remember my dad driving me all the way
to We had a six-hour drive back home and,
instead of laying into me (like I had seen many fathers do to their sons in
junior golf), Dad simply said: “What can we learn from today? Let’s look at
the bright side. There are a lot of things we can pick out and work on so
that you’ll be better next time.” At the time, we had a little pickup
truck with a camper top on it. During the long ride home, I rode in the back
and climbed up near the window—and my dad and I talked for the entire ride
home. We analyzed each shot and what I was thinking. He asked me where I went
wrong and what I thought I could do to get better. He made suggestions. And
together we talked about what to practice when I got home and how to play
smarter in the next event. After I started winning some of those
junior golf tournaments, I announced to my dad that I wanted to play golf for
a living. “Well, that’s great, Philip,” he said. “I just want you to realize
how many people try to play on the PGA Tour—and how many actually make it. So
let’s make sure you go to college to set up some other options if that dream
falls through.” Back then, playing professional golf
was just that for me—a dream. It’s all I wanted to do since I was about nine
or ten. I was in the kitchen cooking during Sunday’s
final round of the 1980 Masters Golf Tournament. Philip was in the living
room watching television when, all of a sudden, he started yelling: “Mom!
Mom! Come here! Come here!” I went in to see what was going on and there on
the television was the leader of the tournament (Seve
Ballesteros) walking up the fairway to the 18th
green. People were cheering for him and he was waving back. “You see, Mom,” said Philip, pointing to the television,
“one day that’s going to be me—and they’re going to be clapping and yelling
for me! I’m going to win the Masters and be walking up to the 18th green just
like that!” Mary Mickelson Off the green on #3,
I decide to use my putter for this tricky little shot over the ridge. It’s a
prime example of one of the facets of my game that I’ve been working on in
the off-season with my short-game coach, Dave Pelz.
Two weeks before each major tournament, when nobody else was around, we’d go
out to the courses and play all kinds of shots. And before the Masters, we
had played here at Augusta National and practiced, among many others, this
very shot with the exact same pin placement. So I know precisely what I need
to do. I’m about five yards
off the green. I have to be careful because the blades of grass are leaning
toward me. When the ball gets up on the green, I don’t want it to be going
too fast. All I want to do here is to stop the ball within my three-foot
putting circle where I feel very comfortable. In hitting the shot,
I judge the speed well, but I hit it farther to the left than I want. It
comes to rest about three and one-half feet from the hole—just outside my
circle. The problem I have now, however, is that I’ve left myself a putt that
is downhill, very fast, and breaks three or four inches to the right. I’ll
have to hit it tentatively or it will go five or six feet by. Then I’ll be in
worse shape. This putt is for par.
I start it outside the left edge, but it breaks across the hole, catches the
lip of the cup and rolls about a foot past. Feeling disappointed, I tap in
for a bogey. It’s my first bogey in 34 holes. Well, I missed the putt. It’s not that
big a deal. Let’s go to the 4th hole. As I walk off the green, people are
applauding. I give them a smile and nod. Phil’s approach to golf has involved
hard work, and fans who have rooted for his success
will savor One
Magical Sunday. Nice guys sometimes finish first. Steve Hopkins,
August 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the September
2005 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/One
Magical Sunday.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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