One of golf’s biggest rivalries is about to once again take center stage for a whole bunch of money.
Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are planning to do battle in a one-on-one match play round with $10 million on the line, according to Golf.com’s Alan Shipnuck.
There’s still no date for the match play showdown, but Shipnuck wrote Friday the match almost took place July 3 in Las Vegas. According to Shipnuck, some of the plans were in place for the duel, but the particulars — TV, sponsorship, etc. — couldn’t be figured out in time.
“We’re working on a different date,” Mickelson told Shipnuck. “I thought it was done for the (July 3) but obviously it wasn’t.”
Mickelson actually hinted at the event back in May at the Players Championship when he and Woods were paired together for the opening rounds.
“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,” Mickelson said at the time, as pointed out by Shipnuck. “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.”
Quite frankly, this match would have been a much bigger draw and far more fascinating about 10 to 12 years ago when both players were at the top of their games and couldn’t stand each other. Regardless, both still have shown flashes of their old brilliance and this figures to be a fascinating matchup regardless … if and when it actually does happen.
