Fred Funk reveals Tiger Woods' Phil Mickelson RANT in front of Elin Nordegren
Fred Funk has revealed what Tiger Woods said about Phil Mickelson in front of Elin Nordegren as they drove back to the team hotel at the 2004 Ryder Cup.
The 2004 Ryder Cup was known as a bit of a debacle for the U.S. side that featured the likes of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.
The Europeans ran out 18.5 to 9.5 winners at Oakland Hills and to date it remains their largest margin of victory.
In case you forgot, both Woods and Mickelson were paired together on the first morning and it just didn't go well. In fact, it went terribly.
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Mickelson later complained he had issues with his equipment after big cat and Lefty were defeated 2&1 by Padraig Harrington and Colin Montgomerie in the morning four-ball session.
After that they were narrowly beaten by Lee Westwood and Darren Clarke in Michigan.
The U.S. captain was Hal Sutton and his decision to pair the two was criticised.
Mickelson, no stranger to a controversial remark, later went off on Sutton in an interview with Golf Digest in 2016.
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The six-time major champ revealed he only found out two days in advance that he was going to be paired with Woods.
Woods and Mickelson both played different golf balls. It was bound to cause problems in Mickelson's mind.
Mickelson said he tried to learn Woods' golf ball.
"It forced me to stop my preparation for the tournament, to stop chipping and stop putting and stop sharpening my game and stop learning the golf course in an effort to crash-course and learn a whole different golf ball that we were going to be playing," Mickelson told Golf Digest in 2016.
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"Had we known a month in advance, we might have been able to make it work. I think we probably would have made it work. But we didn't know until two days prior.
"That's an example of starting with the captain, that put us in a position to fail and we failed monumentally, absolutely."
One man who is familiar with the 2004 Ryder Cup is Fred Funk, who went 0-3-0 that week.
Funk recently hopped on GOLF'S Subpar podcast - which you can listen to here - where he revealed after the morning session on Thursday he grabbed a ride back to the team hotel with Woods and his then wife Elin Nordegren.
"I said, 'How was it?'" Funk told the podcast. "And he goes, 'How was what?' I go 'How was it?' And he doesn't reply. And I go, 'Tiger, how was it with Phil?'
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"And he's just shaking his head. I said, 'What's the deal?' He goes, 'He was useless! He didn't help me one shot.
"And that was the year [Mickelson] just switched over to Callaway with all new equipment. He was never with us all week, he was always somewhere else testing clubs, testing balls, trying to figure out.
"And [Tiger] just said, 'He doesn't know where the ball is going, he doesn't know how far to hit it, he can't keep it on the golf course, he didn't help me one hole!' … So we are just laughing."
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