Tiger-Phil tilt cash grab for the ages
Staged event will be anything but ‘uncomfortable’
The new US$10-million friendship between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson is so adorable. It just bathes you in warmth that after all these years of frostiness they’ve had a rapprochement and decided to help each other with the upkeep on their Gulfstream G550s. It’s so endearing, the idea of those two bro-buds playing a winner-take-all match in Las Vegas on mustsee TV. What a romp this will be.
There’s nothing more bonding than a mechanically engineered, shrewdly calculated “challenge” event for a quick eight figures. Next, why don’t Woods and Mickelson stage a fight with axes and long swords, full Viking style, wearing animal pelts? It wouldn’t be any less contrived.
They are on the back end of their careers and maybe the millions don’t pour in like they used to. Things aren’t set in stone yet, but Mickelson confirmed to Golf Channel last weekend they’ve been in negotiations for this joint venture for some time.
Which sends you spinning back to the cute meetups that Mickelson and Woods have been having or staging over the last few months. First there was that practice round together at the Masters. Then that joint news conference with all the sweet back-and-forth teasing after they were paired together at The Players Championship.
“The excitement that’s been going on around here, it gets me thinking: Why don’t we just bypass all the ancillary stuff of a tournament and just go head to head and just have kind of a high-stakes, winner-takeall match?” Mickelson said, as if the idea had just come to him. “Now, I don’t know if he wants a piece of me, but I just think it would be something that would be really fun for us to do and I think there would be a lot of interest in it if we just went straight to the final round.”
And, gee, didn’t Woods swallow the bait, as if it was the first he’d heard of it.
“I’m definitely not against that,” he said. “We’ll play for whatever makes him uncomfortable.”
Then we come to find out they’re not talking about just one match, but maybe a whole series of them around the world. The idea is they essentially will own the events, so they cut out most of the middlemen when it comes to TV revenue, merchandising and sponsorship.
“As we’ve developed a good relationship, we’ve started to collaborate on some other things that have allowed us to achieve things that we couldn’t do on our own,” Mickelson told Golf. com. “Like this match. I couldn’t do it on my own. He couldn’t do it on his own. But together we’re trying to create something pretty special.”
Don’t you wish you could be in the room for the negotiations?
Woods: I’m not doing this unless I get the emperor suite at the Mandarin.
Mickelson: I get the emperor suite. You haven’t won a major since 2008. You can have the chairman suite at the Venetian. It’s got a massage room.
Woods: Hey, Cheesesteak, let’s count the number of your majors. It’ll only take a second.
Mickelson: Yeah, OK, and after that we can go to the museum to count yours.
Woods: If I don’t get the emperor suite, then give me the Marcus Aurelius villa at Caesars. The one with the exotic fish tank and the Garden of the Gods swimming pool.
Mickelson: The Rolex people already have that booked. What about the presidential suite at the Bellagio with the solarium? Or the sky villa at the Palms with the infinity pool and the butler?
This is the sort of charming repartee Woods and Mickelson are promising the audience. Mickelson said both players will be mic’d up, so: “You will hear a lot of the comments that you don’t hear on regular TV. We both like to talk smack and we both have fun with what we’re doing. And the fact that this isn’t an official tournament, that it’s just a headto-head match, you’ll hear some of the little nuances, some of the little things that you don’t normally pick up.”
As Woods says: “Phil and I have great banter. We give each other the needle. We always have.”
Neither one of these guys is ever going to be wearing a sandwich board for extra money, but you wonder if this whole thing isn’t about keeping themselves in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. Woods hasn’t won a tournament since 2013 and is still trying to get the Tag Heuers and Gillettes of the world back after his infidelity scandal. Mickelson has won just once in the last 4½ years. They both enjoy expensive vehicles and pastimes and carry sizable overhead.
It will always be a visceral pleasure to see either of these men hit a golf ball and genuinely compete. Just as it never got old watching Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer tee it up. But the idea that either of them will feel any “discomfort” or tension standing over a putt on a casino golf course is nonsense.
Uncomfortable would be a contest to see which one could dig a 100-yard trench with a hand trowel. If they were playing for $10 million of each other’s money, maybe it’d be interesting, but to act like this is anything other than a money grab in the dying days of their earning power is nonsense.
I might watch it, while I finish knitting a sweater for my niece. It should be fun — if you don’t mind being taken for an imbecile.
WE GIVE EACH OTHER THE NEEDLE. WE ALWAYS HAVE.