Phil Mickelson's ball pitched near the front of
the 16th green and bounded eagerly up the slope.

The R&A don't like to make things easy on the last day of the Open, so the pin was tucked in on
the right side, 18 yards from the front and five yards from the edge.

The ball clearly wasn't happy
with the arrangement. "Stuff this," it said to itself. "I'm outta here." And it rolled 30 yards back down the hill.

Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Because what
I witnessed while following Mickelson at close quarters down the closing stretch at Muirfield yesterday afternoon was as close
to golfing perfection as makes no difference. By the time he rolled in his birdie putt at the finish I was well past the point of believing that he could make an error. The ball must have had a mind of its own.

It was a stunning passage of play. Mickelson covered the last six holes in four-under-par, a staggering achievement down such a brutally testing sequence. He left the field in his wake as the only man to finish the 142nd Open Championship under par. He was four-under for
the final six holes – four better
than Tiger Woods, six better than Lee Westwood, seven better than Adam Scott.

Or different class, to put it another way. So long as golf is played, and
so long as golfers gather after their rounds to shoot the breeze, Mickelson's perfect finish will be talked about. He had nudged himself into contention with a couple of front-nine birdies and he drove himself to the top of the leaderboard with relentless excellence.

You hesitate to call it a charge, because there was an aura of complete control about Mickelson during that hour and a half. He admitted afterwards that he had never played a better round, and most if its highlights were delivered in those 90 minutes.

The most famous quote in golf is the line Bobby Jones delivered when he first saw Jack Nicklaus at work. "He played a game with which I am not familiar," said Jones. It was
a sentiment that those of us in Mickelson's travelling gallery yesterday would be happy to recycle. That, or the description of Muirfield as "a punishing kind of perfection", a line that could just as easily be applied to the kind of golf Mickelson played.

He was on another tier yesterday. There was a sort of serenity in the way he played, an almost other-worldly degree of command. This was a man propelling himself towards a known destiny – winning a title he had long craved, the fifth major and the third leg of a career grand slam that only five other players have achieved.

One of them is Tiger Woods, Mickelson's nemesis on so many occasions. Yesterday was set up as Redemption Day for Woods but it turned out to be Mickelson's instead, the 43-year-old burying the memory of last month's agonising defeat at the US Open at Merion.

Woods, frankly, was never at the races. Famously, he has never won
a major without starting in the final group, and he looked out-of-sorts from the start. By the time he reached the seventh tee he had three bogeys on his card and his name had fallen off the leaderboard.

And, little by little, Mickelson's moniker was rising to the top. He took a share of the lead with a birdie at the par-3 13th, hitting his tee shot to six feet and draining the putt, and moved out on his own at the next hole when he sank a 30-footer for another birdie.

At this point, those of us who remembered the old Mickelson, flakey Phil, began to get a little anxious. You see, before 2004, when he made his major breakthrough at Augusta, and even for some time after that, Mickelson was peerless
in the business of fouling things up. Few players have ever turned certain victory into inexplicable defeat with the same resolute determination that Mickelson applied to the task.

Remember that old credit card advert which suggested that the world was a delicate balance between smart and dumb? That after every intelligent action its equilibrium could only be restored by someone doing something really stupid? Well, that was the Mickelson of yore in action, so back-to-back birdies raised the suspicion that some calamity was about to unfold.

But it didn't. This was flakeless Phil at work. He parred the next two holes – at the 16th, he gave his headstrong ball a good talking to, chipped to six feet and knocked in the putt – and then headed to the penultimate hole with confidence.

This was his moment. He put his tee shot into position A, then lined up his approach. He had 270 yards to the pin, so he reached for the 3-wood. His approach, in a capricious wind, stopped 35 feet from the flag. In the circumstances, it was one of the greatest shots this old championship has ever witnessed.

Another birdie ensued and, as
he walked through a corridor of cheering fans, Mickelson had a two-shot lead. Again, his tee shot was nerveless, finding the middle
of the 18th fairway. From 185 yards, he nailed it to 12 feet past the hole.

Now he was writing his own script. The putt went in and Mickelson was three-under for the Championship. He punched the air; he knew he could not be caught. 
And those of us who had seen him do it knew we may never see golf played this well again.