What Phil Mickelson taught me arrived early enough and settled deeply enough that no subsequent headline could dislodge it. The lesson outlasted the man who delivered it.
The first golf club I ever held felt unfamiliar in my hands because I held it differently from almost everyone around me. In India, golf is an uncommon language, spoken fluently only by a small fraternity scattered across military cantonments, old colonial clubs, and a handful of modern courses.
To be left-handed within that already uncommon fraternity was to occupy an even narrower corner of the sporting world. I learned my golf in books that addressed relentless tropical suns and monsoon skies, upon imaginary dusty grounds in the big towns where the scent of wet earth lingered long after the rain had departed.
The great championships, however, arrived through the glow of a television screen thousands of miles away, carrying photographs from Augusta, Pebble Beach, Muirfield, and St Andrews. Geography separated us, but imagination did not.
Among those distant figures, Phil Mickelson stood immediately apart. His swing obeyed a different philosophy, and he did not approach golf according to the prevailing orthodoxy. While others pursued certainty and possibility, he sought percentages and imagination.
Courtesy GolferGeeks
Watching him, I did not feel that I was observing a golfer overcoming the limitations of being left-handed. Rather, I felt I was witnessing someone who had transformed that supposed peculiarity into a language of artistic expression.
Perhaps every left-handed child searches instinctively for mirrors. We grow accustomed to inhabiting a world largely designed for right-handed habits, silently adapting without complaint. A familiar gesture performed from the opposite direction carries an unexpected comfort and tells us that difference need not become deficiency.
Yet my admiration for Mickelson gradually escaped the narrow confines of shared handedness: the left hand first caught my attention, and the man behind it sustained my admiration.
Diksha Dagar, India’s left-handed golfer (photo, ESPN)
Golf has always had a curious relationship with craftsmanship. Herbert Warren Wind understood that courses are read almost as texts, with each hole inviting interpretation rather than obedience. Bernard Darwin, whose essays elevated golf writing into literature, recognized that the finest players were artists confronting an ever-changing canvas.
Every round became an act of composition, and every recovery shot resembled a sentence revised at precisely the right moment. Within that tradition, Mickelson occupied an unusual place. He rarely seemed interested in writing tidy prose. His golf resembled poetry.
Throughout his finest years, there was a delightful unpredictability in his decision-making. A towering flop shot from impossible rough, a towering iron over water when prudence recommended retreat, and a driver unleashed where another champion might have selected a fairway wood. Risk, in Mickelson’s hands, seldom felt reckless, for it became an aesthetic principle. One was reminded less of the accountant balancing probabilities than of the painter willing to spoil an otherwise respectable canvas in pursuit of greatness.
Harold Bloom once argued that Shakespeare enlarged the possibilities of human consciousness by expanding what his characters could imagine themselves becoming. Great athletes, in rather different ways, perform a similar service. They enlarge the imagination of spectators. They reveal possibilities that ordinary experience seldom permits us to consider.
Bobby Jones transformed amateur excellence into an enduring legend.
Ben Hogan embodied discipline, elevated almost to the level of moral philosophy.
Seve Ballesteros discovered genius where others saw only inconvenience, recovering from impossible places with almost supernatural inventiveness.
Tiger Woods redefined the boundaries of competitive excellence itself.
Photo courtesy Rolex
And so, very rightly, Phil Mickelson belonged within this distinguished conversation because he demonstrated another equally valuable truth: imagination itself can become a competitive advantage. This mattered profoundly to someone learning golf in India.
There was, too, a certain courage embedded in his style that is easily overlooked in retrospect: the courage of the artist who refuses the safe canvas. Mickelson lost major championships in ways that would have broken lesser temperaments. He double-bogeyed the final hole at Winged Foot in 2006, and handed away the United States Open with an audacity that prudence would have forbidden. Most athletes, and most human beings, respond to such wounds by retreating inward and choosing safety over imagination. He responded instead by remaining himself. That refusal to be diminished by failure, and that stubborn insistence upon his own aesthetic, was itself a form of greatness that statistical records cannot adequately preserve.
Distance has curious consequences. Those of us who grow up admiring athletes from distant continents often inherit them differently from those who share their culture. An American golfer does not merely remain American once his image reaches another shore. He enters another story entirely. Across oceans and time zones, freed from local rivalries and familiar prejudices, he becomes part of another young person’s private education. The golfer who walked Californian fairways gradually found companionship upon Indian driving ranges. That quiet exchange remains one of sport’s least celebrated miracles.
Golf itself is sometimes dismissed as a game of affluent leisure. Such judgments misunderstand its deeper character. They always did.
At its best, golf resembles a civilization of manners. It rewards patience over haste, integrity over surveillance, craftsmanship over brute force, and self-command over spectacle. The player competes against fellow competitors and against temperament itself. Every poor shot demands composure, every fortunate bounce invites humility, and every round becomes, in miniature, a moral education.
It is hardly surprising that literature and golf have so often recognized one another as kindred disciplines. Neither tolerates shortcuts, and both reward patience. Both ask practitioners to cultivate memory, judgment, rhythm, and restraint. And the finest novels, like the finest rounds of golf, reveal themselves slowly, with their essence emerging from accumulated decisions.
It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that admiration requires blindness. Phil Mickelson’s public life has, particularly in recent years, become more complicated than the uncomplicated heroism of childhood memory. Decisions have been questioned, judgments criticized, and loyalties debated.
Such controversies belong to the historical record and deserve neither dismissal nor exaggeration. Yet adulthood gradually teaches a distinction that childhood seldom recognizes. Human beings rarely offer such comforting simplicity. The greatest literary figures possess contradictions; so too do many of the greatest sporting figures. Indeed, maturity consists partly in learning to hold these truths together without allowing either to erase the other.
Yet one must ask, as any honest admirer eventually must, whether the man who chose LIV Golf and made remarks that struck many as careless and self-serving was the same man who had enlarged so many imaginations. The question is genuinely difficult. Heroism, when examined closely, rarely survives unchanged. What survives, if one is fortunate and if the admiration was ever truly earned, is instruction. Mickelson taught me how to approach difficulty with invention and appetite in their untidiness. That instruction remains a teacher even after the lesson has concluded and the classroom has changed beyond recognition.
When I think now of the left hand, I no longer think merely of grip, stance, or swing path. I think instead of perspective. The left hand becomes a metaphor for seeing familiar worlds from unfamiliar angles. It reminds us that conformity has never possessed a monopoly upon excellence. Throughout history, originality has often first appeared as a peculiarity. The unconventional artist, the unorthodox thinker, the daring explorer, and the imaginative golfer all begin by refusing to see exactly what everyone else sees.
Courtesy: theaposition.com
That, perhaps, explains why Phil Mickelson continues to occupy a stubborn place within my imagination. Not because he won major championships, though he won many, not because he produced miraculous recovery shots, though he produced countless memorable ones, and not even because he happened to swing from the same side that I do. Rather, he taught me that imagination itself has competitive value.
England gave Shakespeare its language, and Shakespeare returned that language transformed. Every civilization produces figures who eventually transcend the circumstances of their birth. California produced a left-handed golfer. The wider world inherited a reminder that artistry recognizes neither nationality nor geography. Between the fairways of America and the practice grounds of India, between a television screen and a young left-handed golfer learning his craft, an invisible conversation began. It continues still.
Heroes, properly understood, were meant to be instructive. The Greek tradition understood this long before modern celebrity culture confused heroism with sainthood. Achilles was vain and wrathful, and Odysseus was cunning to the point of deceit. What elevated them was the scale of what they revealed about human possibility.
Phil Mickelson, in his own considerably less mythological way, revealed that the unconventional path, the improbable shot, and the refusal to accept another person’s definition of the possible could carry a man all the way to greatness. I came to golf in a country where it was from a side the world considers secondary, and found in a Californian professional my first real evidence that difference, handled with imagination and nerve, could be the whole point.
He remains my hero because what he taught me arrived early enough and settled deeply enough that no subsequent headline could dislodge it. The lesson outlasted the man who delivered it. That, I suspect, is precisely what the finest lessons always do.
