The Sunday Times April 3, 2022 17improved but their attack has not
ignited as it does when the heart of
the team is present. Tucked between
them is Danny Care, whose freedom
to run around the fringes is directly
linked to the threatening presence of
the puckish Smith. André
Esterhuizen has been outstanding
throughout the absence of the team’s
heartbeat but playing nearer the
gainline alongside Smith will make
him an even greater threat.
Suddenly, with those names
between No 8 and inside centre back
in the side, Harlequins appear the
most powerful of the title
challengers. We know what this team
are capable of, especially as the
ground firms up and the weather sets
fair (we can but hope) as we head
towards the early summer months
when the title will be decided.
Without doubt, Leicester areEngland’s team of the season. They
could lose the final and remain
England’s finest.
But Premiership titles are not
about durability or strength in depth.
The play-off system plays into the
hands of the team most capable of
winning a one-off. Saracens are such
a side. In their enforced absence last
season Harlequins proved
themselves capable of rising to
the occasion.
Borthwick is right to play down
Leicester’s chances. He may just have
been wrong to point the finger at
Saracens as the team to beat. A win
today could signal the beginning of a
repeat Harlequins surge.ON TV TODAY
London Irish v Harlequins
3pm kick-off, BT Sport 1 from 2pmThe return of
Dombrandt
and Smith
transforms
Harlequins –
they are now
the most
powerful of
the title
challengers
against London Irish would be a
boost. Irish won 22-19 in the reverse
fixture. Another loss would damage
any hopes of a home semi-final.
Indeed, it would leave them in a fight
to make the top four. Harlequins have
lost seven of their 19 games. Marcus
Smith was not playing when Irish
prevailed against them in November.
Of those seven defeats he has played
in only two.
The extended absence of Smith’s
giant sidekick, Alex Dombrandt, is
another problem that did not exist
with their surge to last season’s title.
Brilliantly as the entire team
performed against Exeter in the 2021
final, they would not have won the
match without the symbiotic “big
man-little man” combination working
close to the limit of its powers.
Their return transforms
Harlequins. Harlequins’ defence hasA spirited second-half
fightback from
14-man Cambridge
was not enough to
deny Oxford a 21-17
victory in the men’s
Varsity Match.
The lock Charles
Friend was sent off
early, leaving
Cambridge — with
the former England
international Toby
Flood at fly half —
facing an uphill battle.
Tries from Luke Wyllie,Nick Civetta and
Andrew Durutalo gave
Oxford a 21-0 lead at
half-time. Luke Parry,
Demi Obembe and
Alex King hit back,
but it was in vain.
In the women’s
game, Lauren Webb
scored what looked
like the winning try,
only for Vianney
Gomezgil Yaspik to
make it 10-10 late on,
allowing Cambridge
to retain their trophy.LATE REVIVAL CAN’T SAVE
CAMBRIDGE IN MEN’S VARSITY“If he was actually trying to help
the players, he did it completely
wrong. I don’t know how he could
have done it more wrong. You’re not
leveraging by using the Saudi group to
get us more money. You are trying to
fill your own pockets, you were trying
behind everybody’s back to get play-
ers to sign so that you could get a big
golden pay cheque in the end, so that
you can take off.
“For a guy like Phil to moan and
bitch about the $800-900 million he’s
made, it’s the same thing as when he
complained about California taxes to
the media. Nobody cares about your
problem when you make $60 million a
year. Here’s an idea, move. You’ve got
three million people in California who
don’t have a job, do you think they’re
worried about your $20 million tax
problem, because you got $100 mil-
lion in property?
“Now he’s on an island by himself
and he ain’t going to get that golden
pay cheque.” Perez seemed to speak
for America.
It is the suddenness of the fall that is
remarkable. Ten months before, he
had walked down the 18th fairway of
the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island in
South Carolina with fans cheering
every step. That was the 2021 PGA
Championship and he was on his way
to becoming the oldest player in the
history of the game to win a major
championship. It was his sixth, his
57th professional victory, and that
evening you may have said 50-year-
old Phil had the world at his feet.
But, perhaps not. Watch his post-
round press conference and there is
the sense of an experienced player
merely satisfied with his perform-
ance. This major arrived eight years
after his fifth and it should have been
joyous. Something he said in his Feb-
ruary apology seemed like an admis-
sion that his life has been nothing like
it seemed. “The past ten years I have
felt the pressure and stress slowly
affecting me at a deeper level. I know I
have not been my best and desper-
ately need some time away to priori-
tise the ones I love most and work on
being the man I want to be.”
Why has he not been the man he
wanted to be?
Mickelson has often spoken about
his love of a bet. There was a $20,000
pre-season flutter on the Baltimore
Ravens to win the 2001 Super Bowl
that he and some friends made. They
collected $560,000. Today’s winnings
though, were the forerunner to next
week’s, next month’s losses. There
was a story, never admitted, that atone point early in his career, he
needed Callaway to help to pay his
gambling debts.
Along the way Mickelson became
friendly with Billy Walters, who had
made a fortune making and laying
bets. Walters was also Mickelson’s
bookie. Mostly, it seems, the golfer
was a losing client. Once the losses
climbed to $2 million or $2.5 million,
Mickelson settled the account and
started again.
In early July 2012, he had run up
another $2 million debt. At the same
time he was investing $2.46 million in
Dean Foods, a big dairy processor
based in Texas. He sold his shares in
the company the following month for
$931,000 profit. A month later he set-
tled his $2 million debt with Walters.
The FBI, though, was tracking Wal-
ters’s movements, listening in on his
calls, and it knew the bookie was also
a friend of Tom Davis, a board mem-
ber at Dean Foods. Davis, too, was a
gambler and to settle debts, he bor-
rowed from Walters. He would latertell the FBI that instead of repaying
Walters, he gave him inside informa-
tion about Dean Foods. By the end of
2012, Walters’s trading in Dean Foods
stock netted him more than $43 mil-
lion.
In July 2017 Walters was sentenced
to five years at a low-security prison.
Mickelson told the FBI that he had not
received inside information from the
bookie. Walters believed his chance of
avoiding a custodial sentence
depended upon his friend getting in
the witness box and telling the court
what he’d told the Feds. Mickelson
refused to testify.
Before Walters went to prison, he
told an ESPN journalist how he felt
about his former friend. “Here is a guy
that all he had to do was come forward
and tell the truth,” he said. “That was
all he had to do. The guy wouldn’t do
that because he was concerned about
his image. He was concerned about
his endorsements. My God, in the
meantime, a man’s life is on the line.
He’s going to go to prison.”
With his extraordinary ability to
chip and play the most imaginative
shots with his lob wedge, Mickelson
has been an escape artist on the
course. At the time of Walters’s sen-
tencing, golf ’s Houdini had made his
greatest escape. The Securities and
Exchange Commission ordered him
to repay the $931,000 profit he had
made on his Dean Foods trade, plus
$105,000 in interest, but that was it.
In one of the final acts of his presi-
dency, Donald Trump pardoned Wal-
ters, who still had a year of his sen-
tence to serve.
Walters wasn’t Mickelson’s only
bookie. In 2016, ESPN reported his
connection to an illegal offshore gam-
bling operation. Federal court filings
revealed an intermediary had acted as
a conduit to pay a $2.7 million gam-
bling debt Mickelson owed to one.
Through the course of a successful
career, just how much of Mickelson’s
huge earnings went on losing bets?
Like every gambler, Mickelson was
holding out for one big pay day and so
he spoke with the Saudis and then
admitted to the cynicism that under-
pinned his involvement. The man
who liked to portray himself as the
smartest in the room had made his
dumbest move. After that he lost the
support of his fellow players, his spon-
sors and the PGA Tour. Ultimately, he
lost America.
At some point he will return to the
game. Hopefully not as the Phil we
thought we knew but more like the
man he says he wants to be.Like every gambler
he was holding out
for one big pay day
and so he spoke
with the SaudisRory McIlroy’s US Masters
preparations were dealt a blow
when he missed the cut at the
Valero Texas Open on Friday.
Rounds of 72 and 73 left the
Northern Irishman two shots off
the cut-off mark. England’s Ian
Poulter suffered the same fate, as
did the American Bryson
DeChambeau, who was five over
for 36 holes.
Scotland’s Russell Knox held
the first-round lead after an
opening 65 but was 11 shots worse
on Friday. Knox went into the
weekend in a tie for 27th, along
with England’s Luke Donald and
Richard Bland, and trailing the
halfway leader, Ryan Palmer, by
seven. Palmer, on ten under, led
South Africa’s Dylan Frittelli and
fellow Americans Matt Kuchar and
Kevin Chappell by two strokes.
It was a better day, however, for
Knox’s compatriot Rob MacIntyre.
He compiled a second successive
round of 69 to lie four off the pace.MCILROY MISSES THE
CUT AT TEXAS OPENON TV THURSDAY
The 86th Masters
Sky Sports Golf, from 2pm