It was, really, a match race: a pair of thoroughbreds, separated from the field and cut loose from the gate, going stride for stride around the track with no need to look back. All that mattered was keeping one nose in front.
One hundred and fifty-six players began the British Open, and 81 played the weekend. There were 173,000 fans who passed through the gates at Royal Troon during the past week, and in the end, the spotlight illuminated just two men. There was no one in front, no one close behind, no one else in the frame. They were alone.
Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson played together on Saturday and then again on Sunday, and they were, quite simply, superior. Mickelson and Stenson were not so much in a different class from everyone else as they were in a completely different school district. Consider this: Mickelson made two birdies and an eagle in his first six holes on Sunday, made four bogeys in the entire tournament, shot 70-65 over his final two rounds and still — somehow — lost by three strokes as Stenson went 68-63 to finish at 20 under par. J. B. Holmes was the next closest competitor, 11 shots behind Mickelson or, put another way, the same distance back of second place that Jim Herman, who tied for 43rd, was of third.
The separation was so complete that at various points during Sunday’s round, Mickelson found himself thinking of the famous 1977 British Open, in which Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, miles adrift of anyone else on the leader board, waged a similar weekend sword fight just down the road from here at Turnberry.
Mickelson was certainly not the only one. The so-called Duel in the Sun is famous in golf lore, one of the sport’s greatest sequences. It involved Nicklaus shooting 65-66 in his final two rounds, Watson shooting 65-65, and nearly four decades later, it led to perhaps the only instance in memory in which a professional golfer longed, more than anything, not to resemble the Golden Bear.
“I know that I wanted to be more of Tom in that case than Jack, but unfortunately,” Mickelson said, his voice trailing off. He hesitated. “It’s bittersweet, I guess.”
Golf rarely delivers such theater, but the scattered instances of showdowns like these always linger in a special area of the sport’s institutional memory. Sunday charges, such as Nicklaus’s at Augusta in 1986 or Mickelson’s in 2013 at Muirfield, are thrilling, to be sure, but there is nothing quite like the clarity of a true one-on-one.
In 1999, Mickelson came up a shot short against Payne Stewart on the final day of the United States Open, and in 2001, he lost by one to David Toms at the P.G.A. Championship. In both cases, however, there was always at least one other player lurking, always the possibility that someone else might pop up and steal the glory.
At Troon, there was no need to look at the leaderboards. As Rory McIlroy, the four-time major champion and the former No. 1 golfer in the world, said after shooting a final-round 67 to finish tied for fifth: “Look what those guys have done. There’s no chance of me getting to that score.” By the middle of the front nine, when the leaders were already seven shots clear, even Mickelson — always wary of the unexpected — could acknowledge the anomaly here.
“By the sixth hole, it was pretty obvious it was going to be just us,” he said.
It was. And in that sense, some golf fans may be tempted to compare this day to 2000, when Tiger Woods and the largely anonymous (both before and since) Bob May ran away from the field on the back nine on Sunday at the P.G.A. Championship while waging a battle full of birdies that, ultimately, Woods won in a playoff.
But this day was different. Woods and May at Valhalla will always be remembered, if only because of how Woods chased one of his putts all the way to the hole. Yet the quality of golf on display here Sunday was perhaps even more sensational, particularly in light of the circumstances.
Stenson, 40, had never won a major. Mickelson, 46, had not won a tournament in three years. The weather at Troon had ranged from amazing to awful. The conditions on Sunday did not seem particularly conducive to record scoring. So there was, in short, little to indicate the duo would combine to produce a battle that, inevitably, prompted fans, journalists and even the players themselves to liken it to a heavyweight fight.
However hoary such a comparison might seem, it felt appropriate all the same. Mickelson birdied the first hole while Stenson made bogey, flip-flopping the one-stroke lead Stenson had held overnight. Stenson responded with a birdie on the second, the third, the fourth, the sixth and the eighth. Mickelson eagled the fourth and birdied the sixth, turning for home still trailing by one. There were six lead changes in the first 11 holes; if this really had been a boxing match, there would have been three knockdowns by the fifth round. Each.
Both players birdied No. 10. They were tied going to the 14th after Stenson had a bogey on No. 11. Stenson birdied to go up by one again, and then, on the par-4 15th, Stenson rolled in a 51-foot birdie putt, the rough equivalent of a fighter holding his hands at his sides before suddenly, lethally, landing an uppercut. He led by two; Mickelson could only gape.
Another birdie came on the 16th. And still another on the 18th that felt like Stenson dancing in the ring. Mickelson’s four-round total of 267 equaled the previous record low at the British Open and it was not nearly — not nearly — enough. Stenson made 10 birdies on Sunday; Jordan Spieth made 12 for the entire week and still tied for 30th.
When Stenson’s final putt hung on the lip and then dropped in on the 18th, the crowd around the green exploded. Stenson shook his arms and shouted. Mickelson offered congratulations and, quietly, stepped away.
