Field left behind as Mickelson blows hot

Golf  He's back, in a major way. In this part of New Jersey, some three timezones from his San Diego home on the opposite side of the continent, but the place where he has been adopted as a favoured son, the roars came in waves as Phil Mickelson – ice-cold in the majors since his breakthrough win in the Masters last year – bombed one putt after another on the parched greens to escape the logjam and assume the midway lead in the 87th US PGA Championship at Baltusrol.

This, unbelievably, was the same man who had gone awol in the majors thus far this year. But he chose the right time to get hot again.

In the environment he most cherishes, that of a major championship, Mickelson’s sheepish grin was back, so too his hunched shoulders, as he performed like an escape artist at times to conjure up a second-round 65 that put him on eight-under-par 132, four shots clear.

Lest anyone was escaping the present, Mickelson – who doesn’t have a good record as halfway leader in majors, never completing the job from a similar position on three occasions – remarked, "certainly, there’s a lot of golf left."

In many ways, Mickelson rode his luck. As Sergio Garcia, one of his playing partners, observed, "when you mix good putting with good lies every time you’re in the rough, that all adds up to a 65."

Still, Mickelson did what he had to do: get away from the logjam that had seen no fewer than 27 players within two shots of the lead at the conclusion of the first round.

If the gods looked kindly on Mickelson, it wasn’t so for Tiger Woods. With the Masters trophy and the claret jug already on his mantlepiece following his wins at Augusta and St Andrews, Woods was fighting manfully to avoid missing the cut in a major for the first time as a professional. The world’s number one suffered three successive bogeys from the second to make his precarious position even more perilous. But birdies at the 11th and 12th got him back to five over at a stage when the cut looked likely to be at four over.

Indeed, Woods had just played his tee-shot to the par-three fourth hole – which, as if to underline his struggles, plopped into the water that guards the green – when a bizarre incident occurred on the other side of the pond. A large limb on a red oak snapped, injuring three people. The most serious injury was to a television technician who had been working in an adjacent TV tower – he suffered a broken leg.

On another day of intense heat, with players’ shirts sticking to their bodies as if wrapped in cellophane, Paul McGinley – adding a 70 to his opening 72 for 142 – was the only Irish player of the quartet participating to survive the cut.

Yet, there was a semblance of a European challenge: Lee Westwood shot his second successive round of 68, to join Davis Love and Rory Sabbatini on 136 in the clubhouse.

Westwood has gone back to coach Pete Cowen and has started using a sports psychologist in recent months, but refusing to provide his name.

"I felt like I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I could do . . . he’s not really a sports psychologist, more of a lifestyle psychologist," he said.

While Westwood was to the forefront of the European challenge, his fellow-Englishman Greg Owen – who has Dubliner JP Fitzgerald on his bag – shot a second-round 69 to be on 137.

Mickelson, though, was the player who moved atop the leaderboard – having started the day in a six-way tie for the lead – as he produced an eventful round that had the roars reverberating around the course. The highlight came on the 18th hole, his ninth, where he hit a four-iron approach to 20 feet and holed the eagle putt.

In the old days, what happened next would have led to a freefall of sorts. Mickelson drove into the left rough on the first, his 11th, and ran up a doublebogey.

His response, however, was to cover his closing stretch in two under to sign for a 65.

Most of the work had been done on his first nine, which he covered in 31 strokes with four birdies, that eagle and a lone bogey. The bogey came on the 16th where he hit a fiveiron tee shot into the greenside bunker, chipped out to five feet and missed the putt. That transgression with the putter was to be a rarity. More often than not, he rolled in the succession of birdie chances presented.]

"I think the thing that I was most pleased with was the way I was able to let go of some bad shots and forget about it and move on," said Mickelson, who knows better than most that he has held the halfway three times in majors – at the 1996 US PGA and the 1999 and 2004 US Opens – and failed to complete the job. It’s time to put that statistic right.