Phil Mickelson’s greatest (latest) sin wasn’t gambling, book claims. It was silence.
A book by renowned gambler Billy Walters claims that the controversial golfer could have kept Walters out of prison and even further heartache.
Imagine if one of your best friends could have kept you out of jail but chose not to in order to protect his own image. Then imagine that your daughter committed suicide while you were in prison and you could do nothing to save her.
That’s what happened to Billy Walters, in the mind of Billy Walters, a world-famous bettor and Mickelson’s gambling-addiction enabler. Walters writes in his upcoming tell-all book, Gambler: Secrets From a Life at Risk, that he believes Mickelson could have kept him out of jail if Mickelson had been willing to refute insider-trading charges in 2017 that netted Walters five years in prison. And, if he’d been free, his daughter would be alive today.
“All Phil had to do was publicly say it. He refused,” Walters wrote. “The outcome cost me my freedom, tens of millions of dollars and a heartbreak I still struggle with daily. While I was in prison, my daughter committed suicide — I still believe I could have saved her if I’d been on the outside.”
Chilling, if true.
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Walters’ case is more complex than just his relationship with Mickelson, and Walters’ character is far from unimpeachable. But Mickelson does not deny almost all of Walters’ other revelations: that he has gambled at least $1 billion in his life and lost at least $100 million; that he made bets of more than $100,000 at least 1,115 times; that, on June 22, 2011, Mickelson placed 43 different bets on baseball.
The only refutation Mickelson issued about the book involved Walters’ claim that Mickelson tried to bet $400,000 on the 2012 Ryder Cup while Mickelson was playing in the event.
We’ve seen Mickelson act badly and distastefully. We’ve seen him cheat at the U.S. Open in 2018. We’ve seen him complain about paying his fair share of taxes in 2013. We’ve seen him brutalize Ryder Cup captains Hal Sutton and Tom Watson, who thought they doing the best for their Cup teams. We’ve seen him become the voice and face of LIV Golf, run by a murderous theocracy in Saudi Arabia whose evils he recognizes as repugnant at the cost of his PGA Tour membership.
We’ve even seen Mickelson insult the lovely lasses of Ireland.
And, of course, we’ve seen him profit off insider trading and get away scot-free, minus reparations; he was required to repay $1 million after profiting from Walters’ information but was never charged.
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Through it all, the golf establishment and his hard-core fans have ignored or dismissed these consistently reprehensible actions and this steady stream of immorality. They shrug and chuckle and chalk it up to a roguish nature. This tells you as much about the establishment and his fans as it does about Mickelson.
Betting, in general, is not the biggest issue here; it was legal, and it’s his problem, and he says he’s addressing it. Not even trying to bet on the Ryder Cup is as bad as what Walters claims Mickelson did:
Let a friend go to jail, where he watched his daughter die, all to save an image that he would, given his lack of character, inevitably tarnish anyway.