Oh, Phil. Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil. How are you greasing your way out of this one? PGA fan favorite-turned-LIV wrestling heel Phil Mickelson is in the news again for his gambling habits. In an upcoming book by Billy Walters, the professional gambler alleges Lefty wagered more than $1 billion, with losses surpassing $100 million, over the past three decades. In addition to that, Walters said Phil tried to wager $400,000 on Team USA in the 2012 Ryder Cup, a tournament in which he played, and the US lost.
Walters claims in his book, Gambler: Secrets from a Life of Risk, that between 2010 to 2014, Mickelson made 858 bets of $220,000 and 1,115 bets of $110,000. What in the holy fuck, Phil? That’s a level of degeneracy apparently only topped by Walters.
“The only other person I know who surpassed that kind of volume is me,” Walters writes.
Nice, bro. Regale us with more tales of your gambling greatness and tell everyone about the time you talked Phil out of risking his career.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” Walters said he told Mickelson when the golfer tried to wager on the Ryder Cup. “Don’t you remember what happened to Pete Rose? You’re seen as the modern-day Arnold Palmer. You’d risk all that for this? I want no part of it.”
Wow, explosive stuff. Not the attempted wager so much as the claim that Phil is a contemporary Arnold Palmer. They may have a similar number of majors (Palmer has seven, Phil has six), but Arnold had an army, and a timeless beverage.
Phil has a flock of pudgy New Yorkers, and the only lasting contribution he’s made was convincing a bunch of his peers to defect to Saudi Arabia. He’s the antithesis of Palmer.
Where Arnie grew the sport, Phil jeopardized it. Palmer was a righty, Phil is sinister. (Wordplay!) While Palmer apparently enjoyed a casual wager during practice rounds, Phil tried to lay 40 stacks of high society on a cherished team event.
Also, Billy, sneaking in a little flattery at the same time that you’re delivering yet another hit to Mickelson’s “legacy” isn’t going to get you invited to Phil’s next big blowout with Greg Norman and MBS. (I wonder where the world’s power brokers vacation now that Jeffrey Epstein’s rape island got shuttered?)
However, I guess that bridge has already been torched, too, because in 2014 Lefty cut ties with the gambler/businessman after Walters got in hot water over insider trading. (Phil did as well, but he was never convicted of anything.)
“Phil Mickelson, one of the most famous people in the world and a man I once considered a friend, refused to tell a simple truth that he shared with the FBI and could have kept me out of prison,” Walters writes. “I never told him I had inside information about stocks and he knows it. All Phil had to do was publicly say it. He refused.”
Ahh, yes, woe is the white-collar criminal who couldn’t skirt a five-year sentence that was eventually commuted by then-President Donald Trump. I feel guilty giving Walters, or Mickelson, any air at all. The former is about to drop his version of Way of the Wolf, and the latter is an approved merger away from shirking all accountability for the entire LIV fiasco.
So, I guess what I’m saying is don’t buy Gambler: Secrets from a Life of Risk. Simply wait for someone like me to aggregate the juicy bits — if there are any left — so this schmuck has to go back to grinding out four-teamers with the rest of the degenerates.