Tiger Woods And Phil Mickelson Are In Negotiations To Play A $10 Million Winner-Take-All Match

GOLF.com- The greatest match that never was almost took place on July 3 in Las Vegas, a prime-time TV special that was to have pitted Tiger Woods against Phil Mickelson in a $10 million winner-take-all, 18-hole death match. The negotiations, involving a major television network and various corporate entities, couldn’t quite be consummated in time but Woods and Mickelson and their people remain committed to making it happen as soon as it’s feasible. “We’re working on a different date,” Mickelson said on Thursday. “I thought it was done for the 3rd but obviously it wasn’t.” Woods’s representatives declined to comment. The seeds were planted back in April, at the Masters, when Tiger and Phil played a much-ballyhooed practice round together. 

At this year’s Players, a month after the Masters, Wood and Mickelson were paired together and Phil said, “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-take-all match. 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.”

Well well well. It looks like this might actually happen. It was first mentioned at The Players Championship and sounds like negotiations have been happening ever since. It sounds like it came suuuuuuuper close to happening. Like July 3rd close. This is an awesome idea obviously. So awesome that I’m pretty sure we talked about it on Fore Play before The Players Championship. We so rarely get to see the top golfers actually go head-to-head against each other. Yeah maybe they get paired up in the early rounds of a tournament but we almost never get the epic showdowns we want on Sunday. So how do you make that happen? You go head-to-head in a match for 10 million dollars. That’s gonna get EYEBALLS. I don’t care that Tiger and Phil are both in their 40s now. They’re both still playing at a high level. That’s gonna get EYEBALLS. It’d be the television event of the century.

I will say, I don’t love that Tiger and his people declined to comment. I mean of course they declined cause  that’s what they do but everything we’ve heard so far has come from Phil and his camp. He’s the one who mentioned it at The Players Championship. He’s the one who said, “I don’t know if he wants a piece of me.” He’s the one who’s talking about it now. It’s been all Phil. Phil is the one who really wants this. Which makes sense. I’m not saying it’s not gonna happen but Tiger has nothing to prove. Tiger has been better than Phil his entire career and has the majors and wins and iconic moments to prove it.

So why would Tiger do it? Maybe because he’s one of the most competitive people to ever walk the face of the earth. He’s not gonna let Phil say, “I don’t know if he wants a piece of me” in public and not force him to back it up. That’d be my guess. A match for 10 million bucks gets Tiger’s juices flowing and he wants to bury Phil once-and-for-all in front of everybody. One-on-one. Mano a mano. That’s why he would do it. We’ll see.