I watched the back nine of the final round, and Mickelson's challenger, Jeff Quinney, wilted and Phil had a fairly easy win. Those two had run away from the rest of the field and it was a two-man duel all day.
33 career wins is very impressive in this era. Singh has about the same amount but is in his mid-40s so unless he is a true freak of nature he shouldn't have many morewins left. No one else currently playing (besides Woods of course) looks to be alock to win 20 tournaments much less 30 or more. Mickelson should end up in the top ten all time in career wins (he's 13th now), but as Van Slyke says he needs more majors to go with them to be universally acknowledged as one of the all time greats. Considering how long it tookhimto get his first major but how quickly the first one led to three within two years, Phil should be able to win at least 3 more, which would get him up in pretty rarified air. He should end up as roughly equivalent in the Woods regime to what Player and Palmer were during Nicklaus' long reign.
Mickelson has been easy to criticize at times, but he's been the best and most consistent threat to Tiger Woods over the past ten years. If only he could have pulled out a few of the many majors he nearly won early oninstead of doing his best Greg Norman imitation, but at least he's now learned how to win them and how to concentrate all his preparations for them as Woods does.
BTW I don't think Woods is ugly at all, as mentioned by a couple of posters in this thread. He is quite intelligent and that shines through in his countenance. I gained respect for him last year when I went to the U.S. Open at Oakmont and witnessed first hand the crushing media presence that surrounds him at all times on the course, along with the fans. It takes tremendous concentration to ignore everything going on around him and focus entirely on each shot in such conditions. I've always admired athletes that can dominate, not just once but again and again, and Woods does it with a fair amount of class. Or to put it another way, he could be far, far worse in his conduct and get a pass for it.
It should have been obvious years ago to all but the most die-hard black supremacist true believers that Woods, to the extent he has Negro blood, is a fluke. Blacks will never come remotely close to threatening white dominance of golf. Blacks' hand-eye coordination is noticeably inferior to that of whites and Asians on average and hand-eye coordination is a much more important element in the bigger scheme of things when it comes to athleticism than is short straight line bursts of speed.
Woods' golfing ability comes from his Asian mother first and foremost. Twenty years from now I expect that both the men's and women's tours will be roughly half white and half Asian. The women's tour is almost there now. The zero percent presence of blacks in golfing 12 years into the Tiger era in spite of it being their favorite sport after basketball and football, is downright comical. Swimming isn't the only sport where blacks naturally sink to the bottom. . . Edited by: Don Wassall