As noted here earlier, Dan Jenkins is American’s finest sportswriter on golf. He has covered an incredible 53 Masters Golf Tournaments in a row, and here is his Golf Digest article on this year’s spectacular tournament that Phil Mickelson won in dramatic fashion. The entire article is a a must read for any golf fan, and here are a few tidbits of Jenkins’ wit and wisdom to give you a flavor for the piece. First, on the questionable ruling that allowed Ernie Els to take a drop out of a horrible lie in some debris:

Now all I have to do is try to avoid hooking a sentence into some cut-and-paste neighborhood that will closely resemble the spot where Ernie Els’ golf ball wound up on Saturday.
I mean that time in the third round when Ernie’s ball came to rest among the roots, twigs, leaves, sticks, rocks and limbs of a place that looked so strange and far away you’d have had a hard time getting a National Geographic photographer to go in there. This was after he’d hit a soaring golf writer’s hook off the 11th tee.
I fear there’s no silly rules official around who can rescue my sentence the way this guy did Ernie’s golf ball. It could have been the free drop that won the Masters. Els got out of the “ice storm debris” with a bogey 5 when a double or a triple was what he deserved.
The rules official who permitted the incomprehensible relief — and I shall withhold his name out of kindness to his family — must pardon me if I say it looked like a lift out of Uganda and onto I-20 near Augusta.

And what about Mickelson, the man who Jenkins had previously criticized for not having what it takes to win one of golf’s major championships?:

It was my 53rd Masters in a row, and I must confess that in all of those years I have never seen anything as thrilling, exciting or dramatic as Phil Mickelson’s victory.
Yeah, that Phil Mickelson. The guy with the enormous promise tainted by a record of failures in majors. He went out in the Big Heat on Sunday, and first he survived it, then he courageously stood up to the Big Easy coming down the stretch and sensationally won with golf shots instead of the mistakes of others, and thereby buried all of his past nightmares and, I hope, all of our bad jokes about him.

Masters Sunday was a feast of brilliant golf shots and clutch putting strokes, to be sure, and it was obviously the confirmation of Mickelson, but it needs to be said that the public couldn’t have lost no matter who won, Phil or Ernie. Which is why it was so memorable, so historic.
It came down to a battle between the other two best players in the world today. The battle of the anti-Tigers.

Jenkins goes on to put Mickelson’s performance on the back nine of Augusta National in the context of other great final day performances in past Masters Tournaments, and then points out what he likes about Mickelson in comparison to another top golfer:

To me, one of the nicest things about Mickelson’s victory is that he’s a guy who’s loyal, unlike another star we know. Phil’s caddie, Bones Mackay, and business manager, Steve Loy, go back more than a dozen years.
Other nice things about Phil are that he’s accessible, unlike another star we know, plus he’s talkative, he’s interested in other sports, and despite his fame and wealth, which were already in evidence, he was hard at work to trim his physique and improve his game long before he arrived in Augusta a week early, Hogan style.
Incidentally, Phil didn’t ask Mark O’Meara how to do any of that.

Then, Jenkins provides his theory on what might be going wrong with Tiger Woods’ game:

Nicklaus is the exception to the “window theory” on putts, having been the only guy to make them for 20 years. Every great the game has known, except for Jack, has enjoyed a period, a window, of making darn near every big putt for eight, nine, 10 years — then the door slams.
Tiger may have hit that wall. Forget the “swing plane.” Surely every good golfer realizes that when you start missing putts, it eats away at the rest of your game like a poison. Tiger was tied for 35th in putting at Augusta.
The only thing wrong with Tiger is, he’s gotten so bogged down in mechanics that he’s lost his intuition. It’ll be interesting to see if Tiger sticks with what he’s doing, whatever that is, or goes back and rediscovers what he did to become great.

Finally, in his inimitable style, Jenkins asks and answers the age-old question:

Meanwhile, here’s another question: Now that Phil Mickelson has done it, who’s the best current American player who has never won a major?
I look around the dismal landscape and see only one answer.
Michelle Wie.

Rim shot!