CBSGolfBy Jay Rigdon on

In one of the most unlikely, unexpected results in a golf major in a very long time, Phil Mickelson won his second career PGA Championship at Kiawah Island’s Ocean Course.

Mickelson is 50 years old, and with the victory became the oldest player to win a men’s major championship, a record unlikely to be broken any time soon. (Unless Phil does it himself, to be honest; after this week it’d be hard to rule that out completely.) It had been eight years since his last major (the 2013 British Open), and there had only been a couple of close calls since (the 2014 PGA and the 2016 British, specifically.)

When Phil tapped in for a closing par and a two-shot victory over Brooks Koepka and Louis Oosthuizen, Jim Nantz invoked Mickelson’s age in a nod to just how improbable this win was.

CBS takes a lot of blows for their coverage choices and house style, though things have certainly improved of late. Today started a bit slow, with multiple ad breaks minimizing the impact of some crucial holes at the start of the round, but there was no denying that by the end of the telecast, CBS did a great job framing the magnitude of what we were seeing. The sight of fans pouring into the fairway on 18, with Mickelson and Koepka (and at one point a CBS camera operator) forced to push through the crowd that had enveloped them on all sides.

(In part thanks to drone shots, despite Phil’s run-in with a camera drone yesterday.)

Even earlier in the day, having a legend like Verne Lundquist on hand paid off when Mickelson found the bunker (sorry, “sandy area”) on the par 3 fifth, and then found the bottom of the cup with his next shot.

That final stretch, with the drama clearly focused on just Mickelson and a few chasers (who would have needed Phil to stagger down the stretch, something Mickelson threatened to oblige at a few points before recovering), gave CBS the opportunity to really blow things out by zooming the coverage in on Phil, offering long tracking shots in 8K between holes, putting viewers right there amidst the crowd. The golden hour oceanside light certainly didn’t hurt either.

We’ve been critical of CBS coverage in the past, for valid reasons; they do tend to struggle to keep up if the leaderboard is packed and compressed, with some contending players falling out of coverage in arbitrary fashion. That wasn’t a concern today, though, and for the final hour or so they delivered what a viewer would have wanted: chronicling Mickelson’s walk as he attempted to do something no man had done before. That was the story, and it was told well.

What a week, and what a win.

About Jay Rigdon

Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.

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