News

At 48, Phil Mickelson’s driver swing speed rises 6 mph “overnight.” He’s outdriving some of the longest hitters on Tour

Published

7 years ago

Feb 12, 2019

Phil Mickelson is enjoying one of the best starts he’s ever had to a year, finishing runner-up at the Desert Classic before winning emphatically on Sunday at the AT&T Pro-Am. At 48, most people would expect Mickelson to be slowing down, but that certainly isn’t the case with Lefty, and one element of the 44-time PGA Tour winner’s game that is even picking up is his numbers with the driver.

Mickelson’s swing speed with his driver in 2019 has left many dumbfounded. On our forums, our members have been discussing Lefty’s driver swing speed numbers at length, his ball speed are reaching as high as the mid 180s, and while speaking at the Desert Classic earlier this year, Mickelson stated that his swing speed jumped a considerable 6 mph overnight.

“So at the end of last year, even though I played poorly, I had something happen where it seemed like overnight. It had really been a year in the works, where my driver speed, it shot up 5, 6 miles an hour, which rarely ever happens to anybody, yet alone somebody in their late 40s.”

As you would expect, the significant jump has led to spectacular results. With his 49th birthday fast approaching, Mickelson turned up at his first event of the year at the Desert Classic and led the field for driving distance. Lefty averaged a driving distance of 318.2 yards that week, beating off the likes of Jon Rahm and Justin Rose.

Then at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, even though he missed the cut, Mickelson had an average driving distance of 318.8 yards, over 10 yards more than Justin Thomas that week, one of the longest hitters in the game.

Explaining his reasoning behind the jump in numbers, Mickelson, who has been a user of the SuperSpeed Golf Training System in the past, credited both biometric swing studies and added time spent in the gym

“It was nine months of hard work, and then overnight I was swinging 6 miles an hour faster. … It was biometric swing studies of my swing, taking weaknesses, making them strengths. It was time in the gym. It was a whole workout process. It’s been a lot of work, but days like this make it worthwhile.”

On the equipment front, Mickelson is gaming Callaway’s Rogue Sub Zero Driver (9 degrees), just as he did throughout 2018. His Project X HZRDUS T1100 shaft is the same one which Lefty utilized in his driver for all of 2018, which adds substance to Mickelson’s claim that the added speed has been “a year in the works”, while the added time in the gym is unlikely to have done Lefty’s swing speed any harm.

The 48-year-old sat fifth this season for driving distance on the PGA Tour before four rounds at a soggy and cold AT&T Pro-Am dropped him down to T24, and his impressive start distance and swing speed wise mirrors that of last year’s hot out of the gate start by Tiger Woods. The 14-time major champ was second on the PGA Tour for average clubhead speed after the first half of 2018, clocking in at an average speed of 122.04 mph. That number eventually dropped to 120.24mph by the end of the season, but the fact that a 43-year-old could achieve those numbers after returning from spinal fusion surgery was a shock to almost all golf fans.

Now, it’s Mickelson’s turn to stun the golfing world. The 48-year-old’s clubhead speed to begin the new season is 120.92 mph, up from an average of 116.48 mph in the 2017/18 wraparound season. With the added driver swing speed, Mickelson has become once again, for the moment at least, one of the longest hitters off the tee in the game.

Whether Mickelson can keep these numbers this high throughout the year remains to be seen, as does a specific reason behind such a significant jump. But already at the AT&T Pro-Am, the 44-time winner on the PGA Tour has cashed in on those numbers. With a U.S. Open still to come at the site of that victory, Mickelson will undoubtedly, with his swing speed through the roof, be bullish on his chances of completing the career grand slam in 2019.

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Gianni Magliocco

Gianni is the Managing Editor at GolfWRX. He can be contacted at gianni@golfwrx.com

19 Comments

~j~

Feb 13, 2019 at 10:02 am

Distance was never his problem. Finding it in the bushes was.

Reply Report comment
Vas

Feb 13, 2019 at 9:49 am

Is it wrong of me for wanting Phil to credit deer antler spray?

Reply Report comment
Tyler Durden

Feb 13, 2019 at 1:50 am

This is not some phenomenon. Superspeed Golf has been saying this happens since they debuted their product

Reply Report comment
Tiger Lies

Feb 12, 2019 at 7:35 pm

Left the circle, right the circle! You must use pow’a from inside DanielPickleson! Yeah, I’m thinkin’ driver faces are gettin’ juiced to draw as much interest back to the game as possible. I mean $550 plus dolla’s for off the rack drivers?!! Really!

Reply Report comment
Tom

Feb 12, 2019 at 5:06 pm

“It’s jailbreak man, that technology is fantastic”…..Uncle Rico added 50 yards to his drives with it!” If only the coach had played him in the Paris Ryder Cup!

Reply Report comment
Tiger Noods

Feb 12, 2019 at 5:01 pm

Woods is 43, not 44.

Reply Report comment
15th Club

Feb 12, 2019 at 12:52 pm

I thought that I heard Ian Baker-Finch say during the Saturday telecast at Pebble that Phil had been making a lot of use of “the Speed Stik.” I am quite certain that IBF used those words, and I found it surprising since the network announcers are usually very careful about product endorsements within a broadcast.

Was IBF mistaken? Did he say, “the Speed Stik” when he meant “SuperSpeed System”? Did I mis-hear him? I don’t think I did, but I think IBF misspoke, because the two things (Speed Stik and SuperSpeed) are similar but not the same.

I am thankful for this story, and I trust that it is correct about Phil’s use of SuperSpeed. Anybody know more about what I heard on the telecast? I am not aware of IBF having product deals with either of the swing-training systems.

Reply Report comment
- The dude
  
  Feb 13, 2019 at 3:28 am
  
  “Anybody know more about what I heard??”…
  ….sorry dude….hard to say
  
  -mush
  
  Reply Report comment
- DS
  
  Feb 13, 2019 at 6:11 pm
  
  I heard what you heard. It was when he was whipping his driver through the air prior to a tee shot.
  
  Reply Report comment
  - SuperSpeed Golf
    
    Feb 14, 2019 at 7:30 pm
    
    Ian said speed sticks referring to SuperSpeed on the broadcast. We do not pay any players or broadcasters to use our product.
    Thanks!
    
    Reply Report comment
Smee

Feb 12, 2019 at 11:24 am

“beating off the likes of Jon Rahm and Justin Rose”

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha

Nice to see your J degree working for you.

Reply Report comment
- Distance Compression Dude
  
  Feb 12, 2019 at 12:26 pm
  
  LMFAO…Savage
  
  Reply Report comment
- Jack
  
  Feb 12, 2019 at 5:17 pm
  
  Work on your hand speed, and the clubhead speed will follow.
  
  Reply Report comment
- Tee-Bone
  
  Feb 13, 2019 at 12:22 pm
  
  And those boys game pretty stiff shafts.
  
  Reply Report comment
X

Feb 12, 2019 at 10:49 am

So it’s not just the club? lol

Reply Report comment
Gunter Eisenberg

Feb 12, 2019 at 10:33 am

Sam Snead 2.0.

Reply Report comment
salbo

Feb 12, 2019 at 9:43 am

Is this Gianni dude some disco holdout from the 70s?

Reply Report comment
JP

Feb 12, 2019 at 9:18 am

The d man strength has kicked in.
.
Doesn’t everyone have a Grandpa that crushes handshakes? This explains it. Haha

Reply Report comment
- JP
  
  Feb 12, 2019 at 9:06 pm
  
  *That was “old man strength”. Small phone typo
  
  Reply Report comment

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News

Testing Lorem Ipsum

Published

2 hours ago

May 13, 2026

Pro Shop

What is Lorem Ipsum?

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Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

News

2026 PGA Championship betting odds

Published

2 days ago

May 12, 2026

Gianni Magliocco

Scottie Scheffler leads the betting ahead of the second major championship of the year, with the World Number One a +345 favorite to get his hands on a second PGA Championship.

Rory McIlroy who won the Masters back in April is a +800 shot to complete half of the calendar slam at Aronimink Golf Club this week, while Jordan Spieth can be backed at +5900 to become a career grand slam winner.

Here is the full betting board for the 2026 PGA Championship courtesy of DraftKings.

Scottie Scheffler +345 – (Check 0ut his WITB here)

Rory McIlroy +800 – (Check out his WITB here)

Jon Rahm +1300
Cameron Young +1500
Bryson DeChambeau +1700
Xander Schauffele +1850
Matt Fitzpatrick +1950
Ludvig Aberg +2000
Tommy Fleetwood +2600
Collin Morikawa +3500
Brooks Koepka +3900
Justin Rose +4300
Russell Henley +4600
Si Woo Kim +4700
Justin Thomas +4800
Robert MacIntyre +5300
Patrick Cantlay +5300
Viktor Hovland +5400
Tyrrell Hatton +5500
Jordan Spieth +5900
Sam Burns +6000
Hideki Matsuyama +6200
Adam Scott +6400
Rickie Fowler +7000
Chris Gotterup +7400
Patrick Reed +7400
Min Woo Lee +7800
Ben Griffin +8000
Sepp Straka +8400
Shane Lowry +9000
Akshay Bhatia +9200
Maverick McNealy +9200
Joaquin Niemann +9200
Jake Knapp +9200
Jason Day +9600
Kurt Kitayama +10000
J.J. Spaun +10000
Harris English +10500
Nicolai Hojgaard +11000
Gary Woodland +11000
David Puig +11000
Michael Thorbjornsen +12000
Jacob Bridgeman +12000
Keegan Bradley +12500
Corey Conners +14000
Alex Fitzpatrick +15000
Sungjae Im +15500
Sahith Theegala +15500
Harry Hall +15500
Alex Noren +16000
Thomas Detry +16500
Marco Penge +16500
Kristoffer Reitan +17000
Alex Smalley +17000
Wyndham Clark +17500
Sam Stevens +17500
Keith Mitchell +17500
Daniel Berger +18500
Ryan Gerard +20000
Nick Taylor +20000
Rasmus Hojgaard +21000
Dustin Johnson +21000
Pierceson Coody +23000
Aaron Rai +24000
Jordan Smith +24000
Angel Ayora +24000
Bud Cauley +25000
Matt McCarty +26000
Jayden Schaper +26000
Brian Harman +27000
Taylor Pendrith +27000
Ryan Fox +27000
J.T. Poston +27000
Cameron Smith +29000
Ryo Hisatsune +29000
Michael Kim +29000
Max Homa +29000
Denny McCarthy +29000
Tom McKibbin +30000
Rico Hoey +32000
Matt Wallace +32500
Ricky Castillo +33000
Haotong Li +33000
Michael Brennan +34000
Max Greyserman +36000
Stephan Jaeger +37500
Christiaan Bezuidenhout +37500
Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen +39000
Aldrich Potgieter +40000
Andrew Novak +42000
Patrick Rodgers +42500
Daniel Hillier +42500
Max McGreevy +46000
Billy Horschel +48000
Chris Kirk +48000
Ian Holt +49000
Casey Jarvis +49000
William Mouw +50000
Steven Fisk +50000
John Parry +50000
Nico Echavarria +52500
Garrick Higgo +52500
John Keefer+55000
Matthias Schmid +57500
Austin Smotherman +57500
Sami Valimaki +60000
Andrew Putnam +60000
Lucas Glover +62500
Daniel Brown +62500
Jhonattan Vegas +75000
Emiliano Grillo +80000
Mikael Lindberg +85000
Adrien Saddier +100000
Bernd Wiesberger +100000
Elvis Smylie +110000
Stewart Cink +130000
Kota Kaneko +130000
David Lipsky +150000
Chandler Blanchet +150000
Andy Sullivan +150000
Joe Highsmith +180000
Adam Schenk +200000
Travis Smyth +200000
Davis Riley +225000
Martin Kaymer +400000
Brian Campbell +400000
Padraig Harrington +450000
Kazuki Higa +450000
Jordan Gumberg +450000
Ryan Vermeer +500000
Austin Hurt +500000
Tyler Collet +500000
Timothy Wiseman +500000
Shaun Micheel +500000
Y.E. Yang +500000
Michael Block+500000
Mark Geddes+500000
Luke Donald+500000
Bryce Fisher+500000
Jimmy Walker +500000
Jason Dufner +500000
Jesse Droemer +500000
Jared Jones +500000
Garrett Sapp +500000
Francisco Bide +500000
Zach Haynes +500000
Paul McClure+500000
Derek Berg +500000
Chris Gabriele +500000
Braden Shattuck +500000
Ben Polland +500000
Ben Kern +50000

Tour Photo Galleries

Photos from the 2026 PGA Championship

Published

2 days ago

May 11, 2026

GolfWRX Staff

GolfWRX is on site for the second major of 2026: The PGA Championship from Aronimink in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.

The tournament’s location, just outside Philadelphia, and its status as a major championship mean GolfWRXers are in for a treat: WITBs from a strong field, custom gear celebrating the PGA Championship, and the rich culture of the City of Brotherly Love — we have noted a relative absence of cheesesteak-themed items thus far this week, but most of the rest of the usual suspects are well represented.

Check out links to all our photos below.