On this week’s episode of GOLF’s Fully Equipped, Callaway Tour Content manager Johnny Thompson, who used to be Mickelson’s Tour rep when the six-time major winner was sponsored by Callaway, sat down to tell some of his stories working with him.
Thompson said his first interactions with Mickelson came in 2011. Thompson was in his first year as Callaway’s Odyssey putters rep at the Masters when Mickelson asked him to adjust the loft and lie of one of his 8802-style PM putters.
Those putters were notoriously hard to get into a loft and lie machine without many places to anchor the putter, and Thompson accidentally let it slip and scratched it.
“I was trying to get this thing in the fixture and then put enough pressure and it slipped out of the fixture that I had and it scratched,” Thompson said. “And I mean, I was mortified.”
When he showed him the putter, Mickelson was thankfully unbothered by the blunder.
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Thompson had a fun, but long night out the day before the tournament, as he described — and the following morning he received a call from Mickelson’s caddie, Jim “Bones” Mackay, a personal friend of his after being his childhood babysitter.
“He goes, ‘Hey, can you meet Phil on the putting green?’ And I’m like, yeah, no problem,” Thompson said. “Walk over. And he has a custom-made left-handed Sabertooth belly putter in the bag. And he’s trying to figure out how to use this belly putter.
“And he’s asking me all these questions about how to use a belly putter. And I mean, I’m in the deepest of fogs mentally from my night out. And I had to suck it up and just try to answer all these questions.
“And then finally we like finished up and I was just like, ‘Oh my God, how did, like, what just happened? Like, I cannot believe I just had to go through that and it was going 100 percent.’
“But yeah, I was watching him try, and I think he used it that way, he putted terribly.”
Luckily, Mickelson didn’t blame Thompson for his performance on the greens, but Thompson said it was one of the deepest conversations he had with him to that point.
“It was the first time he’s ever asked me, like my opinions on that stuff. And it’s the one night of that year that I probably had the longest night,” he said.
