Elise Amendola / AP

Phil Mickelson celebrates after winning the Masters in 2004 — his first of two green jackets.

Of course, the great Tiger challenge puts another dimension of pressure upon Mickelson. While others can go about their duties with no expectations, Mickelson is square in the spotlight. He’s the defending champ. He’s won two of the last three green jackets. He is on a course for which he has groomed a game plan and a swing. There is a great many golf fans who simply don’t want Woods to win because he always wins; that’s only human nature. Those people gravitate to Mickelson; he’s their man.

There’s also the matter of what happened at the 72nd hole of last summer’s U.S. Open. In possession of a one-shot lead at a major championship he craves, Mickelson hit a poor tee shot at the dogleg-left 18^th, mishandled the recovery shot, slammed his third into a bunker, made double-bogey, and lost to Ogilvy by one. He’s been crucified by the media, but it says here that much of it has been unfair. Mickelson’s only choice off that 18^th hole was driver; he didn’t carry a 3-wood that day and couldn’t have gotten into a reasonable part of the fairway at the long and narrow hole with a 4-wood. The second shot? OK, maybe he could have played it more safely, but hadn’t he only moments earlier hit a brilliant second shot out of a nasty lie and around the corner of the dogleg right 17^th? Hasn’t he made a career out of Houdini-like shots? Yes and yes.

The story has followed Mickelson like a black cloud. He hits a drive that leaks a little bit at the 72nd hole of the Nissan Open, makes bogey, squanders a one-shot lead and loses in a playoff, and all of a sudden it is treated as Winged Foot revisited.

Spare me. The fact is, that drive at Nissan wasn’t that bad, the angle for his approach was fine, and good gracious, just one week before hadn’t Mickelson steamrolled the field to win by five at Pebble Beach? Yes he had, yet the critics rolled out the carpet and called the lefthander upon it in the aftermath of his finish at Riviera.

Not that it matters to him, because if there’s one intangible thing about Mickelson that doesn’t disappear, it’s his conviction to his methods, his enormous self-belief. They have paid off with two Masters wins in three years, but so, too have they applied layers of pressure to make it three in four.