Bettin' his life

 The  big reveal is no reveal at all, so there's a chip professional gambler Billy Walters won't cash with his new book. What, you mean Phil Mickelson has a betting jones?

Might as well tell us the man breathes air.

We all knew he'd been wagering giant sums for the last 30 years, although we wouldn't have guessed those giant sums amounted to b-as-in-billion. And we knew Lefty was a gambling addict, because Lefty admitted it publicly.

But the b-with-a-billion part, and the 100 million Walters estimates he's lost in the last 30 years, at least exposes what a load of eyewash Mickelson sold us when he took Saudi blood money to jump to the LIV exhibition tour. Making the world better for golf had nothing to do with it; like any other junkie, Lefty just needed a fresh revenue stream to feed his habit.

So $200 mill from the same fund that bankrolled 9/11? Sounded okey-dokey to him.

Look. It's his money, as his defenders have been saying for the last few days. If he wants to whiz it away, he can do that; hell, if he wants to make paper airplanes out of it and sail them into the Grand Canyon, he can to do that, too.

But when you drop $400,000 on the Ryder Cup while you're playing in it, you're messing with your legacy. Walters claims Mickelson did that in 2012, and says he told Lefty at the time it was  Pete Rose shite and, by the way, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR BLEEPING MIND?

Pete could have told Lefty what sort of hellscape awaited him if he laid that bet, but when the action has its hooks into you as deep as it apparently did (does?) Mickelson, it likely would have just been words in the ether. Of course, Pete remains Pete, a sleaze still on the make after all these years. So maybe he doesn't say anything to Lefty except go with God, my son.

In any event, one of the most popular Tour golfers ever is now just Pete Revisited: A 50-something guy hustling for the next dollar without particularly caring whose dollar it is.  Anything to keep the ride going -- or maybe to keep from winding up in the trunk of a Lincoln Continental with two taps in the back of the head.

Sad, man. Really, really sad.