Phil Mickelson once asked to bet on his own Ryder Cup team as part of one of his £1billion worth of gambling over 30 years.
That’s according to Billy Walters, one of the the most successful sport bettors of all time that once had a winning streak of 30 years.
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On the golf course, Mickelson – or otherwise known as ‘Lefty’ – is known for winning 45 events on the PGA Tour, including six major championships: three Masters, two PGA Championships and one Open Championship.
But behind the scenes, it’s now been claimed the LIV Golf star has been spending a crazy amount of his money on gambling, and even tried to wager on a game he was competing in.
Writing in his book ‘Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk’ which comes out later this month, Walters details Mickelson’s staggering sports betting losses.
In an extract revealed by The Fire Pit Collective before the book’s release, Walters wrote: “As I said, Phil liked to gamble as much as anyone I’ve ever met. Frankly, given Phil’s annual income and net worth at the time, I had no problems with his betting. And still don’t.
“He’s a big-time gambler, and big-time gamblers make big bets. It’s his money to spend how he wants.”
Walters, who met Mickelson at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in Northern California in 2006, says he and the golfer formed a betting partnership in 2008, and agreed to split everything 50-50.
“Phil said he had two offshore accounts that would take big action from him. In all the decades I’ve worked with partners and beards, Phil had accounts as large as anyone I’d seen. You don’t get those types of accounts without betting millions of dollars,” Walters wrote.
He later added: “Based on our relationship and what I’ve since learned from others, Phil’s gambling losses approached not $40 million as has been previously reported, but much closer to $100 million. In all, he wagered a total of more than $1 billion during the past three decades.”
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During their partnership, Walters details how Mickelson phoned him from the 39th Ryder Cup to ask to bet $400,000 on himself, Tiger Woods, Bubba Watson, to reclaim the cup for Team USA over Europe.
“‘Have you lost your fucking mind?’ I told him. ‘Don’t you remember what happened to Pete Rose?‘ The former Cincinnati Reds manager was banned from baseball for betting on his own team.”
According to Walters, in 2011 alone, Mickelson made 3,154 bets—an average of nearly nine per day.
The partnership came to an end in 2014, and Walters was later sent to prison for insider trading in 2017, with his sentence commuted by former President of the United States, Donald Trump, in 2021.
Walters claims Mickelson ‘refused to tell a simple truth that he shared with the FBI and could have kept me out of prison’.
The extract ends by saying: “While this excerpt focuses solely on our betting relationship, my book explores how Phil finagled his way out of not one, but two cases that ended in criminal convictions.
“As my book makes clear, Phil is not always the person he seems to be.”