Tiger, Phil in Vegas showdown
Next Friday is D-Day for golf legends Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson when they square up in a one-on-one match over 18 holes at Shadow Creek in Las Vegas.
The winner of this blockbuster pairing, featuring these two legends of the game, will walk away with $9 million (R129 million). Not bad for two players who are on the wrong side of their prime.
Billed as “The Match,” it promises to be an historic duel between two golfers who have a combined 122 PGA TOUR wins and 19 majors.
The rivalry between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson has captivated golf fans for more than 20 years, but the once-intense on-course competition between them has taken a more cordial turn in recent memory, leading to a friendly post-Thanksgiving matchplay event that should still draw plenty of eyeballs.
Woods and Mickelson rank one-two for most major tournament wins among active golfers. Their pedigree speaks for itself, and both have achieved legendary status in the game.
Woods has been on the winning end of an astounding 80 PGA Tour events. The Arnold Palmer Invitational and Bridgestone Invitational have been especially kind to Woods. He has won each eight times.
The Tour Championship hosted Woods' triumphant return to PGA glory on 23 September this year, when he won by two strokes, his first victory since the Bridgestone in 2013.
Woods' most successful calendar year came in 2000, when he earned nine PGA Tour wins.
Although Mickelson’s PGA Tour wins (43) barely total half as many as Woods, he has had plenty of career success in his own right.
No event has treated him better than the AT&T Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, which he has won four times.
Similar to Woods, Mickelson endured a major gap in tournament wins before coming out on top at the WGC-Mexico Championship in March 2018, breaking a nearlyfive-year drought.
Woods owns the most major victories by any active golfer (14) and has the secondmost all time, behind just Jack Nicklaus.
Woods' first major win came in the 1997 Masters, when he became the youngest golfer to win the tournament at age 21. He has yet to win a major since 2008, when he defeated Rocco Mediate by one stroke in a playoff at the U.S. Open.
Woods also won four consecutive majors, spanning from the 2000 US Open to the 2001 Masters.
Mickelson has five major championships to his name, include three green jackets at The Masters.
The only major he has not won is the US Open, a famously elusive tournament for Mickelson, but he has finished as the runner-up in the event six times.
Woods and Mickelson have been grouped together on 37 separate occasions through their careers, most recently during the Players Championship in May 2018. Their first head-to-head meeting came at the 1997 NEC World Series of Golf, where they both shot a 72.
Woods have won 18 head-to-heads compared to Mickelson’s 15 with 4 ties. – sportingnews.com; pgatour.com; ESPN