The Hot New Advantage in Sports: Being Old – The Wall Street Journal

Then, last weekend, a fit, 50-year-old Phil Mickelson went out and pocketed the PGA Championship, outdueling golf’s thick-shouldered rocket-hitters to become the sport’s oldest major tournament winner. 

Finally, on Sunday, Helio Castroneves cannily passed 24-year-old Alex Palou with two laps to go to win the Indianapolis 500—at age 46. 

In victory, Castroneves cited Brady and Mickelson as inspirations. 

“The old guys still got it, still kicking the young guys’ butts,” Castroneves said after the win, which tied him with three others (Rick Mears, A.J. Foyt and Al Unser) with four Indy 500 titles. 

Castroneves’s sentiment may be brusque, but it’s hard to argue—today’s sports geezer revolution feels far and wide. At the moment, there’s a plucky battle of the elders happening in the NBA playoffs—36-year-old LeBron James and 36-year-old Chris Paul squaring off in a fierce battle between the Los Angeles Lakers and Phoenix Suns. In the WNBA, the legendary 40-year-old Sue Bird is back for her 18th season, a title defense with the Seattle Storm.

Across the pond at the French Open, you’ve got 40-year-old Venus Williams, her 39-year-old sister, Serena, and, on the men’s side, another 39-year-old, some geezer from Switzerland named Roger Federer who’s got a handsome-looking one-handed backhand. 

In gymnastics, you’ve got former all-around champion Chellsie Memmel, returning to the sport at age 32—not exactly a sports geezer age, but old enough that some of Memmel’s current competition were rolling around in cribs when she won her world title in 2005. 

Meanwhile, Chicago’s Arthur Muir—grandfather of six—just became the oldest American to summit Mount Everest, at age 75. (He started climbing at 68!) 

I’m not sure where to put this last one, but there’s also next weekend’s pay-per-view exhibition boxing match between 44-year-old Floyd Mayweather and 26-year-old YouTube star Logan Paul. The Miami fight is being billed as an intriguing curiosity, a generational battle between an all-time boxing great and a raffish social media phenom…but I have a slight feeling this event might just be trying to take people’s money. 

This much is true: in sports, age feels increasingly less consequential. With improved training and travel regimens, smarter diets and broader overall knowledge about bodies, athletic lives are extending—and winning.  

Brady is the most frequently cited example of this, as he appears to be aging in reverse, adhering to a famously strict diet that has him steering clear of nightshades and turning into the Orville Redenbacher of avocado ice cream. 

It’s flipping the traditional script. Nature conditions us to expect that, in sports, youth will prevail, that experience will eventually be no match for sprightly strength and power. 

How many of us sat around last weekend dreading a potential Mickelson crumble, waiting for one of golf’s younger stars to rise? 

It didn’t happen. And while it’s pretty hard to compare the physical task of winning a golf major to winning a Super Bowl—to say nothing of crossing the finish line first at the Brickyard—you can detect common threads in these victories, from their tenacity to their self-discipline to their unshakable positivity. Brady remains absurdly focused for a seven-time champion. Castrovenes talked Sunday of summoning the energy of racing fans. When Mickelson won in Kiawah, his signature tactic wasn’t his ball striking, or craftiness in the short game, but how he regularly stepped away from a shot to refocus and visualize an outcome. 

That’s wisdom, perhaps the ultimate edge in sports.  

Here’s the other thing: these victories aren’t simply late career validations, exclamation points on the way out the door to retirement. Today’s sports geezers appear to be in no rush to step away. 

Brady’s practicing with his Tampa Bay teammates, eager for a repeat and an eighth ring. There’s now speculation about whether Mickelson could turn back the clock again in June at the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. (Oddsmakers are skeptical, penciling in Mickelson at 50-1, which is, to be fair, an improvement upon the 300-1 odds set before the PGA Championship.) On July 6, Mickelson and Brady, like Matthau and Lemmon, will pair up for a golf exhibition against younger guns Bryson DeChambeau and Aaron Rodgers. 

As for Castroneves, the pressure will now be on to chase Indianapolis 500 title No. 5, which nobody’s ever done. He’ll very likely get a few more chances to do it. At 46 years, 20 days, Castroneves didn’t even make the podium for oldest Indy 500 champions—he’s fourth behind Al and Bobby Unser, who both did it at 47, as well as fellow Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi, who did it at 46 years, 169 days. 

He’s really just a kid, when you think about it.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com