New York's love affair with Mickelson continues at Liberty National

JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Phil Mickelson grew up in San Diego and went to school at Arizona State, but he's become the New York area's favorite golfer.

An incident in the middle of the first fairway at Liberty National Friday morning shows why.

After making five bogeys through his first eight holes, Mickelson made a 61-foot putt from the fringe on the 18th (his ninth) for a birdie. The crowd roared and high-fives were exchanged as Phil strode to the first tee. He then crushed a 335-yard drive that stopped in the fairway, 51 feet from the pin.

As his playing partners — Kenny Perry and Lucas Glover — sized up their approach shots from near the 100 yard marker, a fan called out to Mickelson, "Hey Phil, I thought you were Kenny!"

Phil turned toward the fan and laughed along with the crowd.

Then, with his left thumb in his pocket, he subtly extended his left middle finger downward and kept laughing.

The fan that had yelled out to him, along with the dozens of fans braving the rain alongside the fairway, exploded in laughter.

Mickelson totally understands and accepts the New York sports culture. He's always played a go-for-broke style that is exciting to watch, and his disappointments (Winged Foot), family challenges (wife Amy's breast cancer) and triumphs (Baltusrol) have humanized him in their eyes. The ribbing on the first hole Friday was good-natured, and Phil knew it. Like the guys at your club, sports fans around here love to jab with athletes they consider friends. By playing along, Mickelson shows that he's one of the guys.

The athletes New Yorkers really don't like are either ignored or taunted. The difference is not subtle — just ask Sergio Garcia.

Mickelson followed that drive up with a stubbed chip that stopped six feet from the hole and his birdie putt missed. What had seemed like the start of a Mickelson run turned out to be a disappointing par.

But regardless of his score, one thing is certain: Whether he's wearing pinstripes (as he did today) or not, Mickelson is an adopted New Yorker.

(Photo by Rich Schultz/AP Photos)

Perry's local knowledge doesn't pay off on Thursday

Each year during the FBR Open, which is played at the TPC Scottsdale, television announcers make a big deal out of the Valley Effect.

The idea is that all putts break away from Pinnacle Peak and toward the city of Phoenix, which sits in a valley several miles away. Putts that look like they should roll straight actually have a subtle break.

Kenny Perry thinks that there is a similar effect at Ridgewood. "I have the secret out here, and if I tell you, everyone is going to know," he said earlier this week.

Nonetheless, Perry went on to explain what he's learned. "You know the ridge that runs through the middle of the golf course? It's true, everything breaks away from the ridge to matter where you are."

According to Perry, his caddie spoke with some locals around the club and got the information. "If you understand the Ridge Effect, you can get a feel for the speed of the greens. Knowing that, it may not look downhill if you're going away from that ridge, but it's going to be a fast putt no matter what."

Unfortunately for Perry, his local knowledge did not pay big dividends on Thursday — he needed 30 putts to complete his round.

(Photo by Chris Condon/Getty Images)

Ridgewood 1, Westchester 0

Ridgewood Country Club, site of this week’s Barclays Classic, looks a lot like Westchester Country Club, site of last year’s (and perhaps future) Barclays. Both have swooping greens, doglegs and narrow fairways shaded by towering trees — typical Northeast stuff.

But Ridgewood apparently has something its New York counterpart doesn’t. “I like Westchester,” Phil Mickelson said yesterday at the Barclays. “I think it's a great golf course. I do feel as though Ridgewood is a step up in quality.”

Oh, snap! Wait 'til the folks at Westchester catch wind of this …      

Ridgewood was buzzing the day before the Barclays

PARAMUS, N.J. -- Glamour alert, glamour alert! This FedEx Cup thing might actually be working! Having Tiger out for a few months is helping too!

Few were more dubious about the FedEx Cup than I was, and it's still way early, but pro-am day at Ridgewood was spectacular. Yes, pro-am day! First off, the course is an old-fashioned, rich-people country club with an elegant clubhouse. It has a real veranda where you can order real food (if you sneak in, as I did) and watch Players You've Heard Of doing their thing on the massive practice green. The weather was positively shipped in from Maui--blue skies and low humidity and 75ish. With school and camp out, the course was loaded with kids, many of whom requested autographs. Phil signed forever, and Padraig Harrington was right behind him, and somewhere else Vijay Singh was practicing long bunker shots. There's so much more golfing celebrity to spread around when Tiger is not around. Look, pa--isn't that Steve Stricker?! Yes it is, son. You can tell your children someday you saw him.

One forty-four in the field, and chances are you've heard of all of them, if you're an agate reader. Certainly the top 30. There's the guy you saw at the Masters, Brandt Snedeker. There's the guy you saw at the British Open, the one who wears pink. (Ian Poulter, son.) Where's the other guy from the U.S. Open? Rocco, Rocco--there was an APB out for Mr. Rocco Mediate, Esq. (And I don't care what you say about his name, Johnny Miller.)

I've never been to a post-PGA Championship event that had the kind of--someone give me a better word here--buzz that the Barclays had on Wednesday. Now comes the hard part: a tournament with guys puking and choking and making charges and knocking down flagsticks and rubbing their hands when they look at the pile of money. This could be the real deal, and marketing had only the slightest something to do with it. Pro-am day was the kind of day when a kid could come to the course and, with his head on the pillow that night, be swamped with a single thought: "How do I join the circus?"

The secret to Paddy's success? Be afraid. Be very afraid.

You gotta love Paddy Harrington.

The more the world’s hottest player reveals about how he thrives on fear and the terrifying possibility that his next shot might well be his worst yet, the more he sounds like he could use a self-help session with Stuart Smalley. ("I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!")

Yesterday at the Barclays, Harrington once again expounded on his demons within. “Most of my life I’ve been motivated by fear,” he said, “When some people play their best golf, they stand over every shot and don't see a miss. I’d love to be able to be the guy who doesn’t see the miss, and stand there and play with that confidence.”

But Harrington isn’t that guy, and likely never will be, he said.

“I took no confidence out of winning the Open last year,” he said. “I still played the same way. I'd love to say that I will turn up and play this week and stand on the first tee and strut my stuff, but that's just not what I'm like."

Paddy, please. If a three-time major winner can’t do a little peacocking, who can? Rich Beem, 2002 PGA champion, any thoughts?

“What Padraig said is absolutely brilliant, because you don’t want to lose that edge, and you don’t want to lose ground to your fellow competitors,” said the Beemer, also on hand at the Barclays. “If you get too relaxed in what you're doing, it's harder to get that back.”

Beemer should know. He’s 114th in the FedEx Cup points race. 

PGA Tour stages cheers for commuting New Yorkers

Real New Yorkers are easy to spot on the streets of Manhattan. While tourists gawk at skyscrapers, neon lights and knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags, locals silently walk with their heads down. It's like an invisible musher is relentlessly driving us through the maze of concrete. Maybe, if the coffee smells especially good, we'll make eye contact with our favorite vendor as we thank him.

That's why it was jarring, and funny, to see the PGA Tour's latest promotional gimmick this morning as I was heading for my train to Ridgewood Country Club, site of this weekend's Barclays. About 40 people were sitting on bleachers outside Madison Square Garden. As commuters walked by, the makeshift gallery applauded with a controlled-but-enthusiastic golf clap. (Click the image above for a better view.)

With white iPod cords dangling from their ears, many people never noticed the cheers. Others froze before looking around to see if they had accidentally walked into a movie set. Will this promotion get more people to buy tickets for the first event of the FedEx Cup playoffs? Probably not. But it was nice to hear a splattering of applause mixed in with my Amy Winehouse.

Harrington dines in midtown Manhattan

Padraig Harrington, who’s in New York this week for the Barclays at Ridgewood Country Club in nearby Paramus, N.J., was spotted having dinner last night at Bobby Van's Steakhouse in Midtown. (Our source? David DeNunzio, managing editor for instruction at Golf Magazine.) Harrington got a brief greeting from fans at the bar and then quietly went to his table, no doubt planning his strategy for this week’s tournament. If he were  a boxer, like his buddy on the Irish Olympic squad, his nickname would be “the Silent Assassin.”

Welcome, Ridgewood

PARAMUS, N.J. -- The Tour has come to a new old place this week, Ridgewood Country Club, in the northern corner of the Garden State, not even 10 miles from the George Washington Bridge. Near Exit 18, if that means anything to you.

What a place. Ridgewood is an old-line club with 27 holes and a regal clubhouse, and for the Barclays tournament--Phase 1 of the four-part FedEx Cup series--they are using holes from here and there to piece together the full 18. (The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., has also created a composite course for the Ryder Cup and various U.S. Opens.) Par for Padraig Harrington and the boys, 144 of them all together, is 71. All stretched out the course measures more than 7,300 yards.

Not that that means anything. The modern course would need to be well over 8,000 yards if the three-shot par-5 and the long two-shotter of the Hogan Era were ever to become meaningful again. Seventy-three hundred and change, and that's with a drivable par-4, the fifth, checking in at 297 yards. That's a four-iron for Bubba Watson, is the guess here.

But the beauty of the place is that it's real golf on a real golf course: dogleg holes (remember them?);  swoopy greens; gorgeous oaks and maples but nothing like a forest of them. A.W. Tillinghast was a genius.

For years and years, the Tour went to a place much like this one, just over the G.W. Bridge (and the Hudson River): the Westchester Country Club. An old-school gem. There was some kind of feud between the club's bosses and the Tour bosses and that brought about the change of venue. Some will say the move to Ridgewood is an upgrade, and others will say it's an even trade, but any player who doesn't like the place is spending too much time playing desert golf.

Next year, the event moves to a new new course, Liberty National, where everything's sparkly and you can see Lady Liberty. For 2010, who knows. Liberty or  Ridgewood or Westchester or one of the Trump courses, anything's possible. But for this week, anyway, along with Harrington and Lefty and Veej, the course will be one of the stars. The guy who wins will be somebody who is in control of his golf ball. That's what these old courses, bless their golfing souls, always demand.