Journalist Alan Shipnuck explained how big changes on the homefront led to Phil Mickelson’s allegedly detestable behavior within the golf world.
Phil, 56, started acting out of character around 2015, according to Shipnuck, who wrote a shocking story about the celebrated golfer for Skratch Golf, published on Friday, June 26.
The allegations against Phil came after his wife, Amy, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009.
“Amy is recovering from her breast cancer treatment, she’s not traveling much anymore,” Shipnuck, 53, said Tuesday, June 30, on the “Dan on Golf” podcast. “The kids are getting to be teenagers. They have busy lives. Phil is just kind of out on the road alone in his mid-40s. Someone used the word ‘restless’ to describe him.”
Phil and Amy got married in 1996 and share three children: daughters Amanda, born in 1999, and Sophia, born in 2001, and son Evan, born in 2003.
“Multiple people told me that’s when he started drinking a lot more on the road,” Shipnuck said. “That’s when a lot of these other behaviors cropped up.”
Shipnuck said Phil’s about-face was a surprising development for the man who many viewed as the “paragon of family values.”
“He dined out on that for a long time,” Shipnuck added. “I think it was sincere. I think he was invested in the lives of his family. I think he did love Amy, and vice versa. They had a real bond. But it just feels like something changed as he got into his mid-to-late 40s.”
Shipnuck also defended writing his reporting from critics who disagreed with airing Phil’s dirty laundry.
“At least a half dozen people whom I interviewed for this said something to the effect of, ‘Someone’s gotta stop this guy. He’s just going to keep harming people,’” he said. “That resonated with me.”
Shipnuck added, “We’re in the age of Jeffrey Epstein where you see there was so many times that he could have been stopped if people had spoken out. That just didn’t happen and more and more people were harmed. I felt there was an obligation to tell this story as almost a bit of public service, really.”
In a statement to Us Weekly on Thursday, July 2, a spokesperson for Phil called Shipnuck’s story an “anonymously-sourced drive-by shooting, heavy on implication but unsupported by any on-the-record sources.”
“Shipnuck has spent years attempting to position himself as the definitive authority on Phil Mickelson,” the statement said. “This story demonstrates precisely why he is not.”
Addressing Amy specifically, the statement continued, “She did not choose this spotlight, and there was no legitimate journalistic reason to drag her into it. Shipnuck nevertheless gave anonymous sources a platform to speculate about her marriage, her motives and decisions they had no firsthand knowledge of.”
In response, Skratch Golf editor-in-chief Ben Boskovich called the pushback “bizarre,” noting his outlet gave Phil’s team an opportunity to comment on the claims three days before the article was published.
“Skratch Golf stands by its reporting,” Boskovich said in a statement to the New York Post.
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