Tiger Woods mends fences with fellow golfers at British Open

It’s no secret that Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson have never been friends, even before Mickelson left for LIV Golf a few years ago.

There has always been a rivalry between the two, with Tiger winning the most times, so when Mickelson said he spoke to Woods when they were at the British Open, it surprised some.

“We said hello,” Mickelson said (via the Golf Channel) after shooting a 72 in the third round. “Yeah, we said hello, but we were both getting ready. It’s not like we’re going to sit there and chat. But we said hello, yeah.”

When Mickelson was asked if it was possible for the two to work together, given the merger between PGA and LIV Golf, he answered without a doubt.

“I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll see. I don’t know anything about that stuff,” Mickelson continued. “I’m not involved in it. I’m not in those rooms. I enjoy where I am and what I’m doing and playing. I let other people figure that stuff out.”

Relations between LIV and PGA golfers have been tense since several top names in the sport left the tour.

Another relationship that Tiger has cooled off recently is with Bryson DeChambeau. Unlike Mickelson, Woods and DeChambeau were friends, but have had little contact since he decided to leave for LIV Golf.

Woods also apparently contacted him and congratulated him on his recent US Open victory.

“It’s the first communication,” DeChambeau said Thursday, “but I will say he’s a competitor and I have a lot of respect for him. I’m sure winning two U.S. Opens certainly helped, I think, for him to come out and congratulate him. I don’t know what his position is, but it was very thoughtful and I appreciated it.”

Woods may be trying to patch up some differences over the upcoming merger of the two tours, and it appears he may be succeeding.

Tiger also tried to contact friend and business partner Rory McIlroy. Woods said this week that he tried to reach out to McIlroy to console him over his U.S. Open loss, but McIlroy had changed his number and was unaware that Woods was trying to contact him.

Once he discovered that, he was grateful that Woods tried to reach him.

“Tiger has been nothing but incredible to me over the course of my career, through the good and the bad. He sent me an incredible message after St Andrews in 2022,” McIlroy said.

“It means a lot. It means a lot that he reached out. Actually, it means a lot that he waited a few days to reach out, which I probably would have gotten if he hadn’t waited so long. But I spoke to him earlier. It’s always nice when your hero and the man who was on your bedroom wall reaches out and offers you words of encouragement.”

Perhaps as Woods gets older, he’ll become wiser and kinder because he no longer has the “me against the world” mentality he had when he was younger.

It is clear that many younger golfers still look up to him and ask him for advice and guidance.

{Yahoo Sport, SB Nation}