Guess I need to work on my delivery. As for delivering the goods on his personal front, Mickelson is within 18 holes of collecting his first WGC trophy, an odd hole in a career resume that includes three majors and a Players Championship among his 34 PGA Tour victories. He's 0-for-24 over his decade of competing in the big-money WGCs, for those of you not keeping score at home.
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Of course, for years, he was hammered with questions about his winless skein in the majors, so even Mickelson smirked when he fielded this one after the round: "How does it feel to be the best player never to have won a WGC?"
"Thank you," he said, laughing again.
His third round included some of the trademark theatrics and escapist shots that have endeared him to fans for years. He only found six of 14 fairways and on the 13th hole, punched a running 3-wood shot under a tree that scooted onto the front of the green. He saved par from 160 yards after punching out of the trees on the ninth after making a birdie from the rough a hole earlier.
For the week, he's hit 21 of 42 fairways and should be sending a note of thanks to the PGA Tour setup crew that, as an experiment of sorts, trimmed the rough back to a more playable 2 ½ inches this week. Otherwise, he might have needed a scythe or sickle to hack his way out of the taller grass.
He birdied three holes in succession on the back nine -- which included blowing the ball over the green in two shots on the 620-yard 16th hole -- to reclaim the lead.
Mickelson, who spent the previous week grinding hard on improving his ailing short game, will play in the penultimate pairing on Sunday with Stuart Appleby, one group ahead of Singh and Westwood. Woods, by comparison, has 15 wins in WGC competition, including six of them at Firestone.
"It would be nice to win a WGC, it really would," Mickelson said. "I haven't really thought about it too much. I think maybe 20 years from now or 30 years from now they'll have prestige, much like I think the guys who first won the Masters had no idea what this tournament was going to become.
"I have no idea where the WGCs will be 30 years from now. They started midway through my career, so I haven't given them the priority like I do a major or care about like a major.
"But they are always the best fields in the game, they're always on great golf courses, they're always on tough tests of golf, so I think there's a lot of merit to whoever wins those, yeah."
