For Phil Mickelson at the 87th Masters, it felt as if good golf brought a vague equivalence of forgiveness.

How can you be mean to an old champion playing beautifully? In any event, the galleries at Augusta National don’t generally resort to the moronic din so familiar from routine PGA Tour settings. For sure, Mickelson encountered the occasional “LIV will be looking for their money back,” sneer after an errant shot during Thursday’s opening round.

But the hotter his game is, the less all the dirty money seemed an issue.

He’d arrived with the reticence of the game’s richest loser, ranked number 372 in the world on Data Golf (which counts LIV), eight amateurs positioned higher. One of only eight players yet to score a single point on that Saudi breakaway confection this year, and someone with just a single worldwide non-senior tour top 10 finish to his name in the last 23 months.

His record in the Majors? One top 10 finish from his last 20. Then again, that was a win.

Interviewed on Tuesday, he bore the reluctance of someone who’d just signed some kind of official secrets act. Which is to say, he was very unlike the Phil Mickelson of old.

​Now it’s true, quite a lot has been happening in his life of late that would probably write hesitancy into the DNA of most people.

According to Fuzzy Zoeller and Tommy Aaron, he was a subdued murmur of a presence at Tuesday night’s Champions’ dinner, barely engaging with anybody around him in an environment where, previously, his instinct had always been to carry himself like the local magistrate.

His dramatic weight-loss had been the subject of conjecture too, Mickelson meeting one question on that issue with a sarcastic, “I stopped eating food, that was a big help”.

Much comment was passed here on the presence of his wife Amy at a tournament for the first time in at least two years. And he’s recently updated his Twitter profile to include ‘Husband’ before the words ‘Lefty’ and ‘LIV golfer’.

There is the sense of someone with a small multiple of bridges still to build.

Mickelson got a reputed $200 million for his move to LIV, but not everybody at Augusta was inclined to pre-judge.

On Friday, a writer for the No Laying Up website reported eavesdropping on a conversation between a married couple.

“Money motivates everybody,” announced the husband. “For $100 million, I’d do pretty much anything. Hell, I’d push you down the stairs for $100 million!

“You would, huh?” his wife replied, laughing.

“Yeah,” he said. “It ain’t like there is anybody out here recording me!”

On Saturday, Mickelson birdied two of his first six holes to go to six under and get a lot of people sentimental. Dressed all in black and wearing glasses with a heavy tint despite Augusta being darker than a crypt, he offered a gentle thumbs up and tips of his cap to any shouts of encouragement.

When he striped his drive down the fifth in strengthening rain, someone behind the tee roared; “It’s like it’s 2006 all over again”. But Mickelson just smiled the smile of a deferential priest.

Only his golf had swagger here.

After Friday’s 69, he pretty much said he’d seen it coming too. “I’m going to go on a tear pretty soon,” he said. “You wouldn’t think. You look at the scores. But I’ve been playing exactly how I’ve played here, hitting the ball great.

“I’m ready to go on a tear!”

On that same fifth hole, two men outside the ropes discussed Mickelson’s new circumstance. “After all he’s won, someone should have stepped in and told him ‘You’ll destroy yourself if you do this’,” he said.

The other man agreed. “His support system let him down!”

LIV infects everything to do with Mickelson now like a reputational virus. A charge of greed taints every conversation. It was only a matter of time before his gambling issues became an open sore, almost impossible to conceal.

In Alan Shipnuck’s unauthorised biography, Phil, Tom Lehman recalls being paired with Mickelson at the 2000 Presidents Cup in a match against Mike Weir and Steve Elkington. “Phil is hitting it everywhere,” Lehman remembers.

“He’s barely finished a hole through the first eight holes. He keeps saying ‘Don’t worry, I’ll show up eventually!’

“On the ninth hole, he buries it in the front bunker and is out of the hole again. He walks way back into the trees and is sitting on a stump with his back to everybody and his head down. I think he’s giving himself a pep talk, so I go over there to try and make him feel better and he’s got his phone out, he’s checking the football scores.”

The following February, it became public that Mickelson made $560,000 on a Super Bowl bet, having placed $20,000 on the Baltimore Ravens at 28/1.

Billy Walters, a famed gambler, operated essentially as his bookie. Walters subsequently served nearly four of a five-year prison sentence for insider trading, paying $44 million in fines for a case into which the golfer too found himself entangled.

Mickelson was never criminally charged but did settle civil charges, paying millions in fines and interest.

Over time, Mickelson’s heavy gambling brought him into increasing contact with dubious people, including – at one point – members of a Detroit mob. Some are said to have taken advantage, refusing to honour often substantial losses to Mickelson on the basis that he was clearly just a goldfish in with barracuda here.

His appetite for a deal, thus, always made him an obvious target for the Saudi money-men behind LIV Golf.

He had originally been down to play in last year’s Masters, but essentially went into hiding due to the fall-out overquotes in Shipnuck’s book – that Mickelson still insists were off-the-record – declaring LIV’s financiers money-men were “scary mother f******s”. Essentially, his comments suggested that, while cognisant of Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the brutality of their influence in Yemen, and an all-round rotten record in terms of human rights, he still considered LIV a legitimate tool of leverage in his negotiations to get more money from the PGA Tour.

This is from a man who had already earned an estimated $800 million in his career.

His unlikely Masters charge was interrupted as the rain came down in torrents on Saturday, Mickelson leaking a couple of bogeys before the weather hooter declared business over for the day. The idea that he might somehow win a fourth Masters never really flew here despite his final-day surge, but he’s still done something nobody really anticipated.

A pre-tournament poll conducted by Golf.com asking if Tiger Woods would win another Masters title drew a surprisingly high 18.5pc response in the affirmative.

The same question for Mickelson drew 2.8pc.

He’d come here as just a ghost in his clothes, but went home as flesh and bone.