(Provided by Tennis World USA)
Put it on a Monday afternoon at the airport, right after the Memorial Tournament. Imagine being in line at check-in. Suppose you see in the row next to Hideki Matsuyama, who is about to board a flight of Spirit Airlines, the leading US airline in the ultra-low-cost segment.
Add to that the fact that there’s a LIV Golf fan in the next row, posting everything on Twitter, and you’re done.
Phil Mickelson, statements
The Saudi League fan refers to the mammoth offer made by Greg Norman and declined by the Japanese champion.
$400 million, double the ticket Phil Mickelson collected. And it is precisely the left-handed Californian who replies to the fan’s tweet. Mickelson, with a play on words, invites Matsuyama to fly with a different airline, that of Team LIV HIFLYERS GC, of which he is Captain.
The invitation is clearly a provocation, but it must be borne in mind that the Japanese is always in Greg Norman‘s sights. The CEO of LIV Golf would like to have Matsuyama among the players of the League not only for his value as a player, but also for the strategic value that his presence would have in terms of development of tournaments in Japan, a country which is already in the area of influence of the Asian Tour, a circuit with which LIV has established a partnership that is becoming increasingly solid.
Philip Alfred Mickelson (known as Lefty for his left-handed swing even though he is right-handed in everyday life) (San Diego, June 16, 1970) is an American golfer. He is one of the best players of his generation and has won six major tournaments: the Masters three times (in 2004, 2006 and 2010), the PGA Championship twice (in 2005 and 2021) and The Open Championship once in the edition of the 2013.
He is one of 13 players in golf history to have won at least 3 of 4 majors and has also finished as runners-up in the US Open Championship six times without ever managing to win this tournament. With his victory in his second PGA Championship on May 23, 2021, he became, at 50 years, 11 months and 8 days, the oldest player to win the record in one of the four major tournaments.
The exceptional performance on the Kiawah Island course – where he beat his compatriot Brooks Koepka and the South African Louis Oosthuizen, twenty years younger after an exciting three-way duel – came eight years after his last major win in the 2013.
Mickelson, who had gradually slipped beyond the hundredth position in the world rankings, has thus risen suddenly to number 32. During his almost thirty-year career he was for over 700 weeks in the top 10 in the world according to the Official World Golf Ranking, arriving on several occasions to occupy the second place, but never the first, in a period dominated by Tiger Woods, of which Michelson was one of the few rivals able to put him in trouble.
