Phil Mickelson did more than just win a big trophy on Monday. AP
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It wasn't eloquent, but it came from the heart. Or maybe from the bottom of the belly, sport's true emotional core.

"Phil, you're one of us now," rang the voice from the grandstand as the winner of the 2005 PGA Championship, returning from the scorer's cottage, stepped back onto the 18th green at Baltusrol to collect the Wannamaker Trophy. "You gotta come down to the Shore for beers!"

Golf doesn't spend much time thinking about loudmouths like him. Why should it? He'll never sponsor a PGA Tour event, or rent a corporate tent at a major. He doesn't buy his kids $2,000 worth of golf equipment every year. Never mind the white-collar-or-blue-collar question -- his shirt doesn't even have a collar.

Yet, he was the most important guy at last week's PGA Championship. He lives for sports, and his interest level is what moves golf, on a week-to-week basis, from page C3 to C1. And it can make or break events like March's WGC Accenture Match Play or October's Chrysler Championship in Tampa, Fla., which is worth noting as the Tour readies itself to sit down to contract talks with the TV networks.

And this guy loves Phil Mickelson. Sure, it would have been OK with him if Tiger Woods won. He could have told that "I was there" story 'til kingdom come, endlessly repeating that Woods' triumph marked only the third time -- "Tiger in 2000, and Hogan back in '53," you can almost hear him say -- that a pro golfer had won three majors in a single season.

Yeah, that's history, alright. In the absolute worst sense of the word. Because that kind of story doesn't fuel daily interest. It doesn't send you to the agate pages on Friday morning to look at the first-round scores from Doral, or flip from football to golf on a September Saturday afternoon.

Funny thing is, golf stood on a precipice at last week's PGA Championship, and that guy didn't even know it. And he probably still doesn't realize that he watched Phil Mickelson single-handedly rescue the sport, simply by getting him, the day-to-day sports fanatic, all worked up about the outcome. Mickelson's victory did more for golf than he could ever imagine. Sure, that fan loves athletic excellence, and gets turned on by the prospect of watching, in person, Tiger ascend the mountain that he last climbed in 2001. But what he loves even more are hotly contested finishes, drama, arguing about whether Phil can knock Tiger down again.

While with The Golf Channel, Peter Kessler surmised that Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer once stood before God, who said to Nicklaus, "You will be the one they all admire," and then turned to Palmer and said, "But you will be the one they love."

It's kind of like that with Woods and Mickelson. Kind of. Woods and Mickelson are both loved, but by different constituencies, and in markedly different ways.