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Phil Mickelson may be aging out. He might be riding the gravy train straight to YouTube, but make no mistake, he’s still a surgeon with a 60-degree in his hands.
We got ample evidence of that at LIV Virginia last weekend, where Mickelson stopped the golf world in its tracks with one last (?) unforgettable highlight. That’s what makes this next clip so terrifying.
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On Wednesday at Oakmont, a fan captured footage of Mickelson just beyond the fringe of one of the 2025 U.S. Open venue’s tight, tricky greens. Mickelson dropped several balls in the Internet famous rough and was working on a few delicate pitch-and-runs. Unfortunately, the devil’s lettuce had other plans. Watch it and wince.
— NUCLR GOLF POD (@NUCLRGOLFPOD) June 11, 2025
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By our count, this is the bajillionth viral rough video of the week, but it’s possibly the most disturbing. A short-game player of Phil’s calibre simply doesn’t whiff three of five chips from a foot off the green unless there’s some sort of glitch in the matrix. That aberration seems to be Oakmont’s sadistic setup, which has veered dangerously close to mini-golf levels of cruelty 24 hours prior to round one.
We’ll have to see how things shake out once the tournament begins and we have more to go on than a handful of cherry-picked videos from around the course, but perhaps the filmer of this clip said it best:
“I don’t even feel bad anymore,” they whispered as Phil swiped through his second consecutive ghost ball.
Something tells us we’ll all be feeling a little better about our own games after watching carnage unfold this weekend.
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Main Image: PAUL ELLIS
