SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France – For the U.S. side, one of the biggest question marks heading into this week is the state of Phil Mickelson’s game.
Mickelson was all out of sorts last week at the Tour Championship, where he finished last in the 30-man field, shooting 13 over par and finishing 24 strokes behind Tiger Woods.
Part of that poor play likely can be attributed to Mickelson looking ahead to this week, where the Americans will try to snap a 25-year winless drought on foreign soil. But Mickelson conceded Tuesday that his game still needs plenty of work before the Ryder Cup begins on Friday.
“I’m going to spend more time with the putter,” Mickelson said. “It’s Tuesday. We have two more practice rounds.”
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Mickelson’s putting has been one of the strongest parts of his game this season – he was ranked 10th in strokes gained: putting – but he had two of his worst weeks of the year on the greens at the BMW Championship and Tour Championship. In each of those starts, he ranked nearly the bottom of the field in putting and lost an average of 1.3 strokes to the field each round. (His worst putting tournament of the year was the PGA Championship, where he lost an average of -1.6 strokes a round.)
But there were larger concerns. Of the 30 players in the field at East Lake, he was better than only two in the strokes gained: tee to green category.
Overall, Mickelson doesn’t have a top-10 on Tour since early May.
“I don’t want to put too much time into it,” he said. “I’m not trying to get fine-tuned. I’m just trying to get posture, alignment, basic fundamentals matched up for the swing, so I have a little bit of work to do. I didn’t strike it the way I wanted to, but the last two weeks were the worst putting weeks of the year, and hopefully I can turn that around.”
