Favorable Treatment for Mickelson?

The PGA Tour has a rule: If you miss your pro-am tee time and fail to play in the pro-am, you don't get to play in the real tournament either. You're disqualified.

Sounds harsh, but the tour has to do it for one simple reason: if there wasn't a harsh penalty for missing the pro-am, all the players would start missing them. They hate playing pro-ams.

Phil Mickelson missed the pro-am on Wednesday at the Byron Nelson Championship. But he wasn't disqualified. And that has some players grumbling about a double standard. The Tour DQ'd Retief Goosen in 2005 when Retief missed the pro-am after oversleeping.

What happened to Phil was a little different. Mickelson was in Little Rock, Ark., on Tuesday, planning to fly to Dallas on his private jet that evening. But Dallas Love Field airport was closed due to terrible weather. So Mickelson spent the night in Arkansas.

His pro-am tee time in Dallas was 7 a.m. But Mickelson didn't get up early and try to be there on time. Instead he took his time Wednesday morning and got to Dallas around 11 a.m. He offered to play in the afternoon, but that would have required the Tour to rearrange all the tee times. Mickelson did have lunch with the people who paid big bucks to play the pro-am with him.

Not enough, said Stuart Appleby:

Good point. Perhaps a better point is that the PGA Tour will do what it can to give the player the benefit of the doubt. Disqualifying Mickelson would be disqualifying the biggest draw the tournament has.

DQ'ing Goosen in 2005 was an easy decision. He overslept. No excuse for that. You can make a strong case that Mickelson should have been disqualified, because he didn't "make every effort" to get there. But I understand why the Tour would let it slide in this case: he did try, there were extenuating circumstances, and he is the biggest draw in the field.