Phil Mickelson stole a sign at the 2005 and 2006 Masters in Augusta (Image: GETTY)
Golf star Phil Mickelson is one of the most successful players in history after winning the Major on three occasions. But he avoided a ban at Augusta earlier in his career after sneaking into the club to steal a sign.
Mickelson lifted his first Masters trophy in 2004, before clinching success for a second time two years later.
The blockbuster star then won another title in 2010 as he illustrated his prodigious talents in Georgia.
Explaining his reasons for stealing the sign during a video he (formerly Twitter) in August 2023, the 54-year-old began: “I’m going to tell you a little story. I’m going to take you back 20 years to the Masters of 2004 – my first Major win.
“Just prior to that I just started working with Dave Pelz and we would do a towel drill, where I would lay towels down at specific yardages all the way up to 175 yards and hit those shots over and over to build a reference point.
“And I ended up winning the AMEX – my first tournament since I started doing this – and then I went into Augusta with a lot of momentum. And the week of the Masters I wanted to continue doing this.
“So there was an east range and a west range – totally different ranges to what we have now.
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Phil Mickelson won the first of his three Masters titles in 2004 (Image: GETTY)
“And so as you’re looking out at the club down Magnolia Lane, the left side, the west side, was for the driving range and then the right side was just this big open field with a chipping green. And I would lay the towels and hit shots up to 165, 170 yards.
“So I go on and I win the Masters. So this is kind of now my routine. So I get there in 2005 and I show up and I’m going to go out and do my towel drill out on the east range.
“And there’s a sign there that says: ‘East practice range is for short game only’. So I can no longer hit those shots like I was doing.
“After the champions’ dinner, I let all the champions leave first and I go down Magnolia Lane. And I park the car and I kind of crawl under the magnolias and I take that sign and I wiggle and I wiggle and I lift. And I yank it out and I throw it into the back of my SUV, and off I go.
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“I show up the next morning and there’s no sign there. I start hitting my shots, I do my towel drill and I do it all week long.”
Mickelson then revealed he was caught out the following year when he attempted to pull off the trick for a second time. After stealing the sign once again, he returned to the course the next morning to discover it had immediately been replaced.
And he added: “So I show up the next day to do my towel drill and there’s another sign there. It never dawned on me there were cameras everywhere and there’s some video of me crawling under the magnolias with the guy (a security guard) saying, ‘Look at this idiot. What is he doing?’”
Mickelson, who once about money, then ended the video by pulling one of his stolen signs into camera shot to show he kept the placard as a souvenir.