Phil Mickelson has won six major championships, earned more than 45 PGA Tour titles and become a polarising figure in the PGA Tour-LIV Golf cold war. He has also, across three decades of post-round interviews, produced a catalogue of one-liners that is arguably more widely watched on highlight channels than most of his actual rounds. A compilation published by the PGA Tour of his best press conference moments remains a reliable way to spend a lunch break - and, taken together, it reveals a consistent comedic identity built on self-deprecation, strategic diplomacy and an almost defiant refusal to play the elder-statesman role.
Take his description of his own PGA Championship win in 2021, which remains the moment most often cited as the one-liner vintage Mickelson at his best.
"I didn't play well, I shot three over," Mickelson said at the time, "but I won the PGA so obviously I love the play."
The 50-plus-year-old lifting a major championship with a round most of his playing partners would have filed away as a bad Sunday was the exact scenario his deadpan thrived in. The honesty was the joke.
Much of Mickelson's comedic identity is built on his willingness to publicly embrace a nickname - 'Lefty' - and to double down on its associated behaviours. The great example is his eternal defence of swinging hard for distance, a strategy he has maintained even as analytics and coaches push tour players toward shorter, more controlled swings.
"You're not going to let anyone try to talk you into shortening your swing or tightening it up?" a reporter asked. Mickelson's answer was close to a stump speech.
"Why do you like to hit bombs?" he said. "I do. There's a lot more to winning than just hitting bombs. I have to have the ability to hit bombs. We talk about 'you've got to hit long out here, hit bombs'. When I stop hitting bombs I'll " - and he lets the sentence hang, daring the room to finish it.
On ageing, Mickelson has quietly leaned into being the oldest player in contention on tour weeks, and his best line on the subject has the relaxed rhythm of a stand-up comic who knows exactly where the laugh sits.
"I haven't been called young in a long time," Mickelson said. "Everybody out on tour calls me the old man. Kind of a funny deal."
The self-deprecation extends to his own non-golf abilities, and here Mickelson has long been an equal-opportunity critic of himself.
"I'm clearly the worst selfie taker," Mickelson said. "Who takes a selfie and crops himself out? I'm the worst 'Three Amigos' dancer. But Jimmy, I could putt."
The punchline, which is also a boast, is the entire Phil Mickelson press conference in compressed form: happy to trash everything else about his skill set, quietly unwilling to be modest about the short game.
Some of his best material sits around his relationship with Tiger Woods. Mickelson's willingness to articulate the mental gap between himself and the prime version of Woods was surprisingly candid.
"I feel like he brings out the best of me," Mickelson said. "It's only been the last five years. I mean, before, I got spanked pretty good. If he beat me on his own play well, then there's not much I could do about it. But I certainly wasn't going to just hand it to him, even though it looked like I was."
Other moments are more absurd, and more clearly improvised. On being asked about getting struck by lightning at a building he happened to be standing in, Mickelson produced a line that has become a running joke in golf internet culture.
"The building got struck by lightning right above me and blew out a brick chimney, and I guess caught fire a little bit," Mickelson said. "It was electric. Yeah. So I forgot the first part of your question."
And on an off-season detour into coaching his brother's college team at his alma mater, he delivered the kind of beat-level punchline that scripted comedy writers spend weeks trying to find.
"Yes," Mickelson said when asked about the assistant coaching role. "I recently got fired from that position. He needed some real help."
Mickelson's public posture has become less jovial over the past three years as his role in the PGA Tour-LIV battle has hardened, and as public tolerance for his riffs has shortened. The compilation is therefore not only a greatest hits reel but a piece of cultural history from a period when a reporter's question was, more often than not, a setup for a Mickelson punchline. The game is richer for the fact that he never felt he had to choose between taking the sport seriously and laughing at himself while doing it.
---
*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/phil-mickelsons-best-press-conference-one-liners-im-the-worst-selfie-taker-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
