Mickelson is leading purveyor of paradox

Phil Mickelson is a paradox. Here is a man who makes more birdies than possibly anyone else in the world, and yet makes just enough bogeys to prevent him realising his greatest ambitions. Here is a man who is hailed as one of the game's great putters, who misses more important three-footers than anyone in living memory.

He is a man who, as an amateur, was hailed as the next Jack Nicklaus and yet has failed to emulate him in any way, his record of no wins in 41 attempts in the major championships speaking volumes.

He is a man, too, capable of sublime golf, aggressively going for shots few players could consider, and yet, despite his undoubted intelligence, in 11 years as a professional he has failed to realise there are times when the right thing to do is throttle back.

He is a man who has made himself supremely rich, winning almost $20m (£13m) in about 240 tournaments on the US Tour, with a lovely wife and two lovely children, but not the thing he wants most out of golf, that elusive major.

In fact he wants more than that. He wants "a bunch of them". And he feels he will get them should he just get the first. "I don't know why it's so difficult," he will say. But, as Colin Montgomerie knows, there is always someone playing out of his boots, having the week of his life.

It is too early to give up on the 32-year-old Mickelson, especially as he can be expected to add maturity to his game eventually. But in the meantime he at least has a great Ryder Cup record with which to console himself. He has a 100% singles record and has played in all the fourball matches of his three Ryder Cups, winning 3 points out of six.

Interestingly, the man who is No2 in the world behind Tiger Woods does not see himself as a kind of ex-officio team leader here, the gaffer on the golf course, as it were. In fact, as the complete individualist, he does not really understand the concept.

"Curtis Strange is our captain," he said yesterday, "not just in the team room but on the course as well." That there could be room for a player among the other players to have a subsidiary role in the leadership of the team does not seem to have occurred to him.

During yesterday's chat with the press he made one surprising assertion, that he already knew with whom he was playing this week."We've known before the week has come who we're playing with, what matches we're playing, subject to change, based on how we play."

This, if true, is a tremendous departure by a captain, who normally makes up his mind only a day or maybe even an hour before the event. In fact later, when Scott Hoch was told what Mickelson had said, he was a mixture of puzzled and horrified. He said: "If he's done that I must not be playing. Phil might be privy to something or might be a mind-reader, I don't know. I haven't heard much."

"Phil has his opinions," one of his better friends, Mark Calcavecchia, said in Golf Digest. "Some of what he says is right on the money, because he's a smart guy. On the other hand, half of what Phil says is complete bullshit."

And here he is, an important member of his country's team and yet not quite able to get to grips with the concept of team."We use the concept of team and the closeness we develop over the week to bring out our best play. And it's important. But the most important thing is shooting low scores."

There speaks the total individualist, a man who agreed with Woods last week that the winning of a four-round stroke-play event was more important than winning a team event for your country.

A difficult man to understand. One day he will be captain of his country in a Ryder Cup, and it is to be hoped that the paradoxes in his nature will have become, well, less paradoxical.