Please Golf Gods, Give Us Tiger and Phil on Sunday at the PGA Championship

If you have ever picked up a club, spun a tee into the ground and stared down a tree-lined fairway on a crisp August morning, you know what it's like to put your faith in a higher power. Think of this, as Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson tee off at the 2013 PGA Championship as the two best players in the world. There is something bigger about this; a higher power at play.

The golf gods—be them Jones or Hagen or Kincaid or Mary, Queen of Scots—have an unexplainable control over the game, from tee to green, course to course, major championship to major championship. There is no proper way to explain the game of golf sometimes, why a tee shot can flutter through trees to only bounce back into the fairway for some, while burying deep in a forest of despair for others. 

Physics? Golf, at its foundation, is not about physics. Golf is about faith. 

Golf is about having the trust in your skills to envision the right shot and the belief you can produce what you've imagined. Golf is about hoping the wind will stay in the same direction from the time you address your approach shot until the ball lands, anxiously, on the putting surface or that a perfectly struck 15-footer doesn't stop one rotation short of the cup. 

Golf is about seeing the best players in the game battle for major championships on the greatest courses in the world. 

This week, as the last major championship of 2013 begins at Oak Hill Country Club in upstate New York, golf is about watching the two best golfers in the world over the last decade and a half battle for another slice of history.

At the PGA Championship, golf is about Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, yet again. Hopefully the golf gods agree. 

"It's just incredible what he's accomplished with the number of wins, the number of majors and the consistency that he's shown throughout his career," Mickelson said about Woods during his PGA Championship media availability, per Kyle Porter of CBS Sports. "But in the last five or six years, I've had some pretty good success head to head and I feel like he brings out the best golf in me."

"He's a great motivator for me," Mickelson continued. "He's helped me work hard. He's helped me put forth the effort to try to compete at the highest level year in and year out, and I've loved competing against him." 

Are you listening, Old Tom Morris?

Woods and Mickelson are not the only two players teeing it up at the PGA Championship at Oak Hill this week. There are, in fact, 157 other players vying for the Wanamaker Trophy, with as many as three dozen, give or take a few, possessing the necessary combination talent and poise to win a major championship. 

And yet, it just doesn't feel like a run-of-the-mill PGA Championship (if any major can feel run-of-the-mill) with the best field in golf trying to win the last major of the year—not with the season Woods and Mickelson have put together leading up to this event.

The 2013 season has been one of the best in golf's recent history, thanks in large part to the coincidental timing of Woods and Mickelson both putting together player-of-the-year-caliber performances. 

Woods has been the No. 1 ranked player in the world for much of the season, extending his dominance over the field after a resounding victory at the World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational. Woods has five victories in 11 events on the PGA Tour this season, placing in the top 10 seven times and collecting enough points to place atop the FedEx Cup standings as the Tour heads into the final major. 

Mickelson is 4th in the FedEx Cup standings after a to-date season that includes two PGA Tour victories and six top-three finishes in 16 starts, not including his Scottish Open victory the week before The Open Championship.

Riding a string of stellar performances since May—he has five top-three finishes in eight events around the world—Mickelson has climbed back to second in the world, ahead of Rory McIlroy and fellow 2013 major champions Justin Rose and Adam Scott. 

While the world has been waiting for Woods to be "back," Mickelson's resurgence has been a bit more surprising. Until his victory at the Scottish Open in July, Mickelson hadn't cracked the top five in the world golf rankings since June…2011. He has found the fountain of youth—the fountain of something—this season, leading to this incredible career revival in 2013.

Before this summer, the last time Mickelson was ranked in the top five in the world, Woods was ranked 15th, battling through a slew of injuries and off-the-course issues. The last time both Woods and Mickelson were in the top five in the world rankings was February 2011, and it has been nearly three years—September of 2010 to be exact—when Woods and Mickelson were the top two ranked players in the world. 

Thank the golf gods for giving us another chance at seeing Tiger and Phil at the top of their game at the same time.

Now, if we can be greedy, can we witness the two battling down the stretch on Sunday in a major? Please? 

It's clear that Mickelson has used Woods as a measuring stick in his career, but it has always been more fascinating to hear how Woods views the rivalry with Mickelson from his perspective. 

While offering a rather boilerplate answer about his relationship (and rivalry) with Phil, Tiger realized they haven't actually faced each other that much head to head. Per PGA.com:

"We've battled. We've gone head to head quite a few times—not as much as people may think," Woods told reporters on Tuesday. "As I was saying last week, I've actually battled Vijay (Singh) and Ernie (Els) more times because we've played around the world.

"Phil and I have certainly battled in a few majors and few tournaments here and there."

For two of the greatest players in history, in the prime of their respective careers at the same time, Woods and Mickelson really haven't battled in majors as much as fans would have liked.

Blame the golf gods. (You owe us this one, Mary.)

Woods and Mickelson have combined to win 19 of the 67 major championships that have been held since 1997. In those 19 tournaments, the other player has finished in the top five just six times (three each).

The only time both players have ever gone 1-2 in a major championship was the 2002 U.S. Open, which saw Woods take a four-stroke lead into the final round, winning by three over Mickelson who was in the second-to-last pairing, not playing alongside Woods on Sunday.

Certainly, as Woods suggested in his comments, both players have battled in the same major championship, just not side-by-side in the end. (The two did recently play the first two rounds at the 2012 U.S. Open together and competed in the 2009 Masters final round in the same group, but they started Sunday tied for 10th, seven shots off the lead and hardly in serious contention.)

In the 2013 Open Championship last month, Mickelson came from five shots back, in a tie for ninth after three rounds, to win by three strokes, passing a star-studded pack of eight players that did include Woods. Still, the two never felt like they were competing against each other on Sunday. There haven't been too many times where it has ever felt like that in the tournaments that matter the most. 

Five years ago, it often felt like Woods and Mickelson were battling in the majors more often, but that was based on the tandem's cumulative success, not head-to-head results. 

From Mickelson's first Masters in 2004 through Woods' victory at the 2006 PGA Championship, Tiger and Lefty combined to win seven of those 12 majors.

In 2005 and 2006, Woods and Mickelson won six of the eight majors, each recording a second-place finish in one of the two they didn't combine to win.

It's fun to look back on that time in golf, and the combined success in 2013 by Woods and Mickelson leading into the PGA Championship affords us the opportunity to do it one more time.

While the fields now are filled with a greater depth of talent than ever before—even deeper than 2005 and 2006 with a hearty influx of young talent the last five years—it's not out of the realm of possibility that Woods and Mickelson are both playing their best golf* at the exact same time.

(*Note: No one in the history of golf has every played as well as Woods during the Tiger Slam of 2000-01, but his five victories this year proves he is certainly playing his best golf in more than half a decade.) 

Who knows how many chances we might get for Mickelson and Woods to be in this position again?

As good as Mickelson is playing right now, he is 43 years old, and only 12 players in history, including Phil at The Open, have won a major championship at 43 or older (Darren Clarke and Ernie Els were both 42 when they won the 2011 and 2012 Open Championships, respectively.) Only two men—Old Tom Morris and Julius Boros—have won multiple majors after turning 43. 

Phil certainly has years left to compete for majors—Tom Watson nearly won The Open in 2009 at the age of 59—but we all know the window is creaking closed as the years roll on. Phil only has so many years left to add more trophies to his major championship collection. 

If he can beat Woods.

Six years ago Woods was on pace to shatter Jack Nicklaus' major championship record, and while his drought is quite protracted for a player of his historical greatness, Woods seems to have his game in perfect shape to start collecting major championship hardware again. 

If he can beat Mickelson.

The golf gods have to be smiling at the notion of Woods and Mickelson heading into the PGA as the two hottest players in the world, each searching for another major victory to further validate his place in history. If they are at all fans of the game, the golf gods must be grinning from ear to ear. 

So please, if you're reading this, smile upon us all this Sunday. There is no telling when we might get a chance like this again.