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- Mar 5, 2013
- Updated: 3:59am
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In Pictures
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Huangpu is a district of pigeon fanciers and the skies over Shanghai have seen birds racing back to their coops for the best part of a century. Words and pictures by Jonathan Browning.
Phil Mickelson's five-iron shot sailed long and right on the par-three seventh, stopping centimetres from the fringe and leaving him in danger of losing at least a stroke to playing partner Brandt Snedeker.
Mickelson ended up leaving Snedeker shaking his head and went on to complete an all-the-way victory in the Phoenix Open.
Fifty-five feet away, with a mound and a 20-foot swathe of fringe between his ball and the hole, Mickelson decided to putt through the taller grass rather than chip over it. He had caddie Jim Mackay remove the flag stick so it wouldn't deflect the ball if it had too much speed, a move that proved wise when the ball raced into the cup.
"The challenge of that was to judge the speed where half the putt is through fringe and half is on the green," Mickelson said. "I got lucky to have made it, obviously. I was just trying to two-putt it. It was going fairly quickly when it got to the hole, probably would have been six to eight feet by. With Brandt in there close, that was a big momentum change."
Snedeker joked with Mickelson for a moment before holing his own birdie putt.
"Are you kidding me?" Snedeker said about his reaction to the putt. "I fully expected Phil to hit a flop shot from there. He didn't have much of a putt, and he putted through it.
"I hit a great shot in there close and I thought, 'Hey, I can get one on him here and put some pressure on him'. He makes that, and he let me hear about it before I putt, and he let me know that I needed to make that to tie. We had fun with it. That's Phil being Phil."
Mickelson shot a four-under 67 to finish at 28-under 256, two strokes off the PGA Tour record of 254 set by Tommy Armour in the 2003 Texas Open.
