Ratings gold: Woods vs. Mickelson for $10M

Longtime rivals during their prime years, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson have become the PGA Tour’s unlikeliest buddies upon Woods’ return to competitive play this year. There was the practice round ahead of the Masters in April, when Woods and Mickelson teamed up to beat Fred Couples and Thomas Pieters over nine holes that Couples described as “very loud, very fun.” Then they got paired together for the first two rounds of the Players Championship a month later, their first such grouping since the 2014 PGA Championship.

At a Players news conference, Mickelson proposed the two simply play each other without anyone else on the course.

“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-tohead and just have kind of a high-stakes, winner-takeall 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.”

Woods seemed amenable: “I’m definitely not against that. We’ll play for whatever makes him uncomfortable.”

It turns out negotiations for such a match already were underway during the Players and Mickelson and Woods merely were priming the pump. According to Golf.com’s Alan Shipnuck, the two were in discussions with television networks and corporate sponsors about a winner-take-all, $10 million, prime-time head-tohead match, with an original target date of July 3 in Las Vegas.

That didn’t get off the ground, obviously, but Mickelson said this week they’re still working on it.

“We’re working on a different date,” Mickelson said last week, again via Shipnuck, at the PGA Tour’s stop at the Greenbrier in West Virginia. “I thought it was done for the 3rd but obviously it wasn’t.”

According to Shipnuck, the chilly relationship between the two legends began to defrost after Team USA’s loss at the Ryder Cup in 2014, when Mickelson blasted U.S. captain Tom Watson and the PGA of America. Woods didn’t play in that Ryder Cup but joined a task force that was created in the wake of Mickelson’s criticisms and was aimed at fixing the American team’s problems. Since then they’ve been closer than ever, with Mickelson helping Woods through problems with his game and his various back ailments, and Woods helping lead the easily victorious 2016 Ryder Cup team as vice captain.

The two now seemingly want to take their nowfriendly rivalry — Shipnuck reports the trash-talking between the two still is nonstop — to a new level, with perhaps more such matches to come if this one works out, possibly with them playing as a pair against top players from Europe, such as Rory McIlroy and Ian Poulter.

Such head-to-head matches were more of a thing around the turn of the century, when Woods was in his prime and cord-cutting had yet to kneecap television viewership, and they garnered ratings that today’s TV sports executives would covet.