Woods, Mickelson gearing up for $10 million prime-time showdown

After decades of battling for major championships, two of the greatest golfers of all time are gearing up to go head-to-head in a high-stakes showdown for the ages.

Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are negotiating a $10 million, winner-takeall, 18-hole one-on-one match that will air on prime-time TV, according to Golf.com. The website reports the match almost took place on July 3 in Las Vegas, with a major television network and several corporate sponsors all included in the logistical planning. But the group couldn’t come to terms quickly enough to make the epic matchup come to fruition that quickly.

Woods and Mickelson, however, remain committed to making this thing happen, Golf.com reports.

“We’re working on a different date,” Mickelson told the site Thursday. “I thought it was done for the 3rd but obviously it wasn’t.”

Woods’ reps, meanwhile, declined comment.

According to Golf.com, Woods and Mickelson started discussing this potential match in April when they were paired together for a practice round at the Masters.

Mickelson then publicly speculated about the possibility a month later at the Players’ Championship, when Mickelson and Woods were grouped together for their first two rounds, along with Rickie Fowler. At that point, according to Golf.com, negotiations were “well under way.”

“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 headto-head and just have kind of a highstakes, winner-take-all match?” Mickelson said then. “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.”