What Phil Mickelson did Sunday in winning the PGA Championship three weeks shy of his 51st birthday is one of the great sports achievements of our lifetimes. It also puts him squarely among the dozen greatest golfers of all time.

Mickelson’s win makes him the oldest major champion of all time — by an almost unimaginable two and a half years and another two years over the third oldest. The feat is all the more impressive when considering how golf has evolved in the past 20 years into a contest among weightlifting, highly toned younger athletes who bomb the ball more than 300 yards. This is not the cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking golf tour of the 1960s when Julius Boros won a PGA at age 48. The torque and pressure on the bodies of today’s top players is far greater than it was in the 20th century. And Mickelson did it after a full decade of fighting major psoriatic arthritis.