Phil Mickelson has been playing on the PGA TOUR for 30 years and has racked up 57 professional wins.
Although there is still one thing that Phil has not done yet, win the U.S. Open to complete the career Grand Slam.
On Wednesday Phil told Golf Digest:
“If I win the U.S. Open, I will retire. That would be my last tournament. I will have achieved the career Grand Slam and I won’t have anything more to prove.”
Wow. I can’t even believe that. The defending PGA Championship winner saying that he will retire as soon as he wins the U.S. Open was not what I was expecting to hear today.
He does have a point though, what else does he really have to prove? He has 57 wins and that U.S. Open win is really all that he is missing from his career. We’re all just lucky to be able to have seen him play these past 30 years.
Let’s just think about one thing though, how many more wins would he have if it wasn’t for Tiger?
Another factor weighing into Phil’s decision is how the PGA TOUR handles each players media rights.
Mickelson said:
“It’s not public knowledge, all that goes on, but the players don’t have access to their own media. If the tour wanted to end any threat (from other professional non-PGA affiliated tours), they could just hand back the media rights to the players. But they would rather throw $25 million here and $40 million there than give back the roughly $20 billion in digital assets they control. Or give up access to the $50-plus million they make every year on their own media channel.”
There are many issues, but that is one of the biggest. For me personally, it’s not enough that they are sitting on hundreds of millions of digital moments. They also have access to my shots, access I do not have. They also charge companies to use shots I have hit. And when I did ‘The Match’—there have been five of them—the tour forced me to pay them $1 million each time. For my own media rights. That type of greed is, to me, beyond obnoxious.”
Having to pay $1 million for his own media rights for a match for charity? That just doesn’t make sense to me.
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