Phil Mickelson's attack on Tom Watson after US Ryder Cup defeat was a new low for American golf

After Phil Mickelson’s mutiny the Americans must be tempted to push for a new selection process so the captain can pick 12 gladiators who really want to break Europe’s dominance, rather than be bound by the old glamour-based qualifying system.

In this new world there would be no room for Lefty Mickelson, with his poor Ryder Cup record and seditious urges. The United States’ spiritually bereft team needs more than a functioning line of succession for the captaincy, which Europe has. It could do with purging players who have consistently displayed temperamental flaws in a competition that permits them to stay on the roster regardless of how many times they lose. Money and points pick the team.

Hunter Mahan’s face as Mickelson demolished Tom Watson’s capacity was a picture of awkwardness. Occupying the seat from hell – right next to the mutineer – Mahan knew he was in the same camera shot as Big Phil and began to writhe and twitch.

His mortification will be felt across American golf. Mahan was a one-man diagram of his sport’s internal state across the Atlantic. There, dejected fans were also waking to shots of the bare-chested Bubba Watson (lost 4 &  2 to Martin Kaymer) and Rickie Fowler (lost 5 & 4 to Rory McIlroy) dressed as the Krankies-gone-wrong in wigs and kilts at a Sunday evening party. How to explain the frat boy frolics of two players who were wiped out on the course? A party – yes, but a pantomime, with another heavy defeat still fresh?

A player cam on every face at the US’s Sunday-evening press conference would have offered rich entertainment. From Watson’s coldly fixed smile to Mahan’s squirming and Jim Furyk’s fury, Mickelson’s revolt prompted a range of facial expressions that would look good on a drama school curriculum. Even journalists, who crave these kinds of public flagellations, for the sales they bring, were stunned to see Mickelson trash the cardinal rule of team sport. A player never turns on a leader on prime-time television straight after the final putt.

Ah, but what about score-settling autobiographies? Surely revenge is an established literary form? Writing a book six months later is not comparable to eviscerating a captain in full view of the world’s media minutes after a defeat. Mickelson is not the elder statesman of American Ryder Cup golf. He is one of its foremost under-achievers: Furyk, but without the dignity.

All week Mickelson was in a filthy mood. His attempt to pass off the “litigation” jibe at Rory McIlroy and Graeme McDowell as banter was deeply unconvincing. On the course he berated a camera crew and backed off puts when camera phones gave off almost inaudible clicks.

Mostly he was in a foul temper because Watson benched him for both Saturday sessions: humiliating, for a player of his seniority, but hardly an outrage, given his general form. His whine about “pods” and a lack of dialogue in Watson’s world were a poorly disguised moan about his own exclusion, which he tried to reverse in a bizarre text exchange with the captain.

^{Rickie Fowler and Bubba Watson put the US defeat behind them}

Paul Azinger, the subject of Mickelson’s flattery, might be wrong to think Lefty burnished his claim to return in 2016. ‘Zinger’ is now indelibly linked with surely the most treacherous outburst in Ryder Cup history. If Azinger were to come back, the public would always remember Mickelson’s knifing of Watson to help make it happen.

This was a lone-wolf verbal strike in a team that lacks intensity and spirit. Brandel Chamblee, a former PGA Tour player, sounded the charge by saying Mickelson had “corrupted the experience of the Ryder Cup”.

Nick Faldo, who called the Sergio García of 2008 “useless” and then upgraded him to “lousy”, was on safer ground condemning Mickelson’s disloyalty. Faldo said: “That should have been a private conversation. Phil certainly doesn’t respect Tom Watson. He threw his captain right under the bus.”

By consent, Watson’s dictatorial approach backfired. And Mickelson is not the only American golfer who is nostalgic for 2008 and Zinger’s winning ways. Even this, though, raises doubts about the US’s mindset. If Mickelson needs to be in a “pod” to raise his game against Europe’s Monarchs of the Glen, you have to wonder why he is so needy, or at least incapable of adapting to each captain’s plan.

By attacking Watson on a press conference dais for “straying” from a winning formula, Mickelson also took down Corey Pavin and Davis Love III, the captains in 2010 and 2012. The Gleneagles crowd is, of course, right to wonder whether Mickelson would have opened his mouth had he not been benched for a whole day for the first time in his Ryder Cup career. There was also an unconvincing attempt on Mickelson’s part to project bafflement when a reporter pointed out to him that he was lacerating Watson’s leadership. “I’m sorry you see it that way,” he said, confusedly, as if there were any other interpretation.

The chill in the room was never greater than when he was asked whether the US players had been consulted on any decision. “No. Nobody here was, in any decision.” Plainly, Watson’s management style hails from an age when golfers were not one-man industries with entourages, millions in the bank and very modern expectations about having their voices heard. Old Tom’s top-down formula blew up in his face.

But Mickelson cannot be allowed to present himself as the speaker of truth to power, the man who wants to save America, because the route he chose was a betrayal. Any American captain who was allowed to scrap the qualification system and select all 12 players for Hazeltine in 2016 would be within his rights to draw a line straight through Mickelson’s name. It was hard to imagine American Ryder Cup golf at a lower ebb than it found itself when Jamie Donaldson secured Europe’s eighth win in 10. But Mickelson found a way to pull it lower.

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