ShareThisBe normal. Live life. This is what everyone says you're supposed to do during times like these.
Phil Mickelson is trying.
He normally plays golf for a living. He normally plays the week before a major.
He normally goes to the driving range to hit some balls. He normally smiles and shakes hands with his partners during the pro-am.
Mickelson did all that Wednesday at TPC Southwind. He reported for his normal pre-tournament press conference.
"If I'm driving alone or what have you, I'll just start crying," he said.
Phil Mickelson, afraid.
That's not at all normal.
It is the moment we dread, the moment that has touched too many of us.
"It's malignant," the doctor says, and nothing else matters.
Life stops. A cloud descends.
A treatment plan is settled upon.
"We think we caught it early," said Mickelson, but it could have been any of us.
Three weeks ago, Mickelson and his wife, Amy, revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Mickelson withdrew from competition indefinitely. Now he's returned to play in this week's St. Jude Classic in Memphis.
Why?
"Normalcy," he said, as if that's really possible.
There is nothing normal about playing golf with your heart in your throat. Nothing normal about playing two tournaments -- the St. Jude Classic and then the U.S. Open -- before leaving the Tour again for your wife's surgery and treatment.
And yet, what American family hasn't been faced with the same set of challenges? Mickelson didn't say anything Wednesday that most of us couldn't relate to.
"We're scared," he said.
"I think a lot of it is the unknown," he said.
"We have incredible doctors," he said.
"I don't know quite what we're facing yet," he said.
He sat there, a gazillionaire golf celebrity, sounding like any other husband and father would sound in the same situation.
Which is to say, he was scared. Openly scared. Scared he would lose the woman he had built a life around.
They met when he was a senior at Arizona State, at the apartment complex where they both lived. He told her he was going to be a golf pro.
Amy was not impressed. She knew zippo about golf.
"I thought he worked in the shop at a golf course," she wrote in their book, "One Magical Sunday."
They married, had three kids. They became golf's golden couple.
He had that winning game. She had that winning smile.
"She touches people," said Mickelson, which is absolutely true. "She has made my life so fulfilling."
It's not like they didn't have their trying moments, of course. In 2002, Amy nearly died during childbirth.
She suffered a major tear near her uterus. As Mickelson paced the halls, he overheard the nurses whispering.
"It's just so sad that those three little children are going to grow up without a mother," one nurse said.
"The next hour," Mickelson wrote in "One Magical Sunday," "was the longest, most agonizing hour of my life."
The next year -- the next five years -- will be like that hour, only infinitely more difficult. Mickelson didn't have to figure out how to live a regular life during that hour. He didn't have to play golf or tend to the kids or do anything but pace and worry.
He didn't have to get some sleep during that hour. He didn't have to play the St. Jude Classic or the U.S. Open.
"It is difficult to separate things," he said.
There is golf and there is cancer.
Mickelson's eyes were rimmed with red throughout the entire press conference. His voice caught in his throat several times.
He talked about "our fight" and "our treatment" but acknowledged his utter helplessness. "I would much rather be going through it and doing it myself than seeing somebody I care about so much go through it," he said.
That's not the way it works, of course. There is no trading places with cancer.
So Mickelson walked to the first tee Thursday morning, the way he always does. He shot an admirable 2-under 68 and is in contention after the first round.
But now and into the foreseeable future, nothing will feel quite normal.
(Contact Geoff Calkins at e-mail calkins@commercialappeal.com.)
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