Phil Mickelson: Remarkable streak comes to an end

Shugo Imahira’s runner-up finish in the Mynavi ABC Championship on the Japan Golf Tour marked the end of an era.

The Japanese star leap-frogged Phil Mickelson on the world rankings, causing the five-time major winner to fall outside the top-50 for the first time in almost 26 years.

Mickelson, 49, had been a constant in the upper echelons of the standings since he jumped from 51st to 47th on December 5, 1993.

Since then, he has spent an incredible 1,354 consecutive weeks inside the world’s top 50. A remarkable 271 of those were spent at No.2 on the rankings – more than five years! Perhaps surprisingly, he never got to the top spot.

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He spent 787 weeks inside the top-10 –over 15 years – and 1,111 weeks (in excess of 21 years) inside the top-20.

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Since Mickelson climbed into the world’s top-50, a remarkable 348 different players have won on the PGA Tour.

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The last time he was ranked outside the world’s top-50, he was an unmarried 23-year-old, with three PGA Tour wins and seven major starts to his name, who had career earnings of $800,449.

Now, he’s a 49-year-old married father of three, who has won 44 times on the PGA Tour and made 108 starts in the majors, winning five of them. His career earnings now? A colossal $90,613,345 – the second biggest haul in the history of the circuit.

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Here are some other things facts from the last time Phil Mickelson wasn’t in the world’s top-50…

• Three of the world’s current top-50 weren’t even born: Matt Fitzpatrick, Jon Rahm and Sung-jae Im.  

• Tiger Woods was 17-years-old and had never played in a major.

• Rory McIlroy was four.

• Brooks Koepka was three.

• Nick Faldo was world No.1.

• Jim Gallagher Jnr was the most recent winner on the PGA Tour.

• Colin Montgomerie had just won the fourth of his 31 European Tour titles.

• Bill Clinton was less than a year into his first term as US president.

• John Major was the British Prime Minister.

• Meat Loaf was at No.1 in the UK singles chart with I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).

• Addams Family Values was the No.1 film at the cinema.

• Gianluigi Lentini was the most expensive footballer in the world, having been transferred from Torino to AC Milan for £13million the previous year.

• Friends was still just under a year away from airing on television for the first time.

Incidentally, Rory McIlroy now holds the record for most consecutive weeks inside the world’s top-50. For him to match Mickelson’s streak, he would need to stay there every week from now until the middle of October 2034.