Phil Mickelson has never won the Wells Fargo Championship. He has a chance to change that

Phil Mickelson has played the Wells Fargo Championship 17 times.

Winning the event, however, has never been in the cards for the 50-year-old golfer who owns five major championships.

He took a step in the right direction during the first round Thursday at Quail Hollow Club, finishing the day atop the leaderboard.

Mickelson shot a 7-under-par 64 and has a two-shot lead. It was his best opening round of the season (previously 69, Masters) and lowest score on the PGA Tour since a 63 in the second round of the 2020 Travelers Championship.

His opening-day performance was also his third career round of 64 or better at the Wells Fargo Championship.

“Just focus. I’m just present on each shot,” Mickelson said when asked what improved this week. “This course holds my attention. I’ve been doing some mental exercises and so forth just to try to get my focus to elongate over five hours and so forth. That’s been a real struggle for me the last few years because physically, there’s nothing physically holding me back from playing at a high level, but you cannot make mistakes at this level. The guys out here are just so good, and I’ve been making a lot of errors, just simply not being mentally sharp.”

He first caught attention Thursday when he played “The Green Mile,” holes 16-18 in 2-under. The performance tied his best on that stretch of holes since 2016. He made the turn at 4-under after starting the day on the 10th hole.

This is the first time he’s led on Day 1 of an event in 840 days, per the Golf Channel.

Prior to Thursday, Joel Dahmen, who was in a group with Mickelson for the first time, poked some fun at “Lefty,” joking that he was scared to play against Dahmen, which led to some back-and-forth Twitter bantering.

“We kind of ribbed each other down our first hole and then it was like, ‘All right, let’s play some golf now,’ ” said Dahmen, who finished with a 3-under 68. “It was kind of like one of those things of, ‘Hey, we’re both here to win a golf tournament.’ I think in our whatever future practice rounds there will be a lot more ribbing, I’m sure, but there was just a lot of good shots and storytelling.”

When asked if he single-handedly brought Lefty back, Dahmen said, “We were just walking to scoring and Ryan Armour said, “You don’t have to poke the bear.” So I poked him a little bit, and he played awesome today. It was incredible.”

Mickelson finished the day with eight birdies and one bogey.

He has finished in the top 10 at the Wells Fargo Championship 10 times, most by any golfer in the field by three finishes. Eight of those are top-five finishes. In 2010, he finished second to Rory McIlroy. He also owns the longest 36-hole cuts made streak with 15 in a row.

“I don’t want to jump ahead. I want to go play a good round tomorrow,” Mickelson said. “I have an opportunity to a play course I love with a great pairing. I’m playing well and I just want to kind of not get ahead of myself and go play another fun round.”