The morning after

Unbelievable. I actually lost sleep over Mickelson's melt-down yesterday and woke up ill with exhaustion. Times like these, I turn to great sportwriters for some context; the first among a series of very good ones is Tom Boswell's account in the Washington Post. Boswell:

To be fair to Australian winner Geoff Ogilvy, Mickelson might have lost his golf mind at a more sedate venue than Winged Foot, which Mickelson compared to "a Yankee Stadium of golf."

But probably not. If you walked every step with Mickelson, you could sense that something entirely different was at work. If Mickelson wants to know "how I did that" or why he feels like "an idiot," perhaps he would understand better, and forgive himself more, if he had been standing among the reporters who watched all his diabolical trouble shots from a few yards away. He was like a man trying to focus on brain surgery in the middle of an Attica jailbreak.

Yelling crowds engulfed him as he played dastardly recoveries after wild drives on the last three holes. Four times on those holes, Mickelson ran full speed through the crowd, pushing people aside so that he could get a clear view of where his desperate shots had finally landed. A golfer can run once, like Sergio Garcia and Corey Pavin did famously, but by the final crazy hole, Mickelson was playing golf in a state of barely controlled agitation, literally running to his fate.

The whole thing is here.