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No one has benefitted more from the Tiger Woods’ effect on PGA Tour purses than Phil Mickelson and he’s in line for another huge payout at Pebble Beach.
Phil Mickelson is second all time on the PGA Tour’s career money list. On the course, he has $94,627,691 in career earnings and much, much more than that in off the course earnings. The money is nice, and he would not have played that exhibition match against Tiger in the fall if the cash just did not matter. But on the PGA Tour, it’s a secondary pursuit at this point of his career. He does not exactly (or should not) need the cash, unless he really got carried away on Super Bowl Sunday.
But Phil is in line for another nice seven-figure payout on Monday morning at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. He will resume the final round with a three-shot lead and two holes to play. If this were up to Phil, he would have walked off the course in pitch black on Sunday night with another oversized check. He wanted to bag his fifth career win at Pebble on Sunday, leading to a slightly tense and entertaining exchange with his playing partner Paul Casey and PGA Tour rules officials.
Casey is one of two players three shots behind Phil. The other is Scott Stallings, who is already in the clubhouse at 15-under. Casey has a short putt on the 16th hole and then has to play the 17th and 18th, one of the best par-3s in the world and one of the best par-5s in the world. It’s unlikely Phil blows it, but we’ve seen him come undone before and he was absolutely rolling on Sunday night as he caught and passed Casey during the middle of the final round. The 17th can be brutal and there is an ocean you can hit it into on the 18th hole and who knows if he’s lost that form that had him rolling Sunday night.
But it is highly improbable Phil blows this kind of margin. He’s on the range most likely practicing the exact tee shot into the par-3 17th. It should take just 30 minutes and a win for Phil would bank a $1.368 million paycheck from a total $7.6 million purse. Even by PGA Tour standards, that is a hefty purse. This is not a WGC event or a major championship. Soon enough regular old PGA Tour events will cross the $8 million mark.
When Phil started his career, that $7.6 million would be an incomprehensible number. He’s stated before he wondered if they would ever play for a first-place million dollar check. And thanks to Tiger, that’s now occurring every week at even the most low-level PGA Tour events. Here’s what Phil said about the Tiger effect a couple years ago on Feherty:
“When I came out on Tour, in 1992, or when I won the Tucson Open, the purse — the entire purse — and the winners check was $180,000. I remember thinking in the mid 90s, ‘I wonder if some day we’ll play for a million dollar first-place check. I don’t know, probably not in my lifetime, but I hope we do.’ And now we do every week, and that’s because of Tiger.”
The $7.6 million purse will land Phil another check well in excess of $1M and push him closer to the century mark for on-course career earnings. Should he implode over the final two holes, he’ll get a high six-figure runner-up check. Here are your payout totals for the 2019 Pebble Beach Pro Am — some of these totals will be impacted by ties and we’ll update when results go final:
