Phil Mickelson:From Fan Favorite to Pariah Overnight

Wow! With a few ill-chosen words and bad decisions, Mickelson (formerly compared to the great Arnold Palmer) has lost the goodwill of the his fans and is seeing his career go down the drain; while Tiger Woods, who I never expected to recover from his past scandals, is rehabilitating his reputation and becoming a more sociable golfer.  Who would have believed it?

Eamon Lynch describes his downfall in one paragraph:  "An old adage—often wrongly attributed to Sun Tzu’s 'The Art of War'—holds that if you wait by the riverbank long enough, the bodies of your enemies will eventually float by. That’s as good a metaphor as any for how some golf industry executives must have felt in the wake of recent comments by Phil Mickelson that incinerated his reputation, alienated most every constituency in the game, exposed him to disciplinary action, and otherwise cast him in a light so unflatteringly amoral that even Greg Norman might hesitate to be seen in his company."