Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are preparing to give golf fans the head-to-head duel they have always wanted.
It’s not the final round of a Major Championship, but Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are preparing to give golf fans the head-to-head battle they have long craved.
Woods and Mickelson are making the final preparations for a winner-take-all, televised duel for $10 million, according to Golf.com’s Alan Shipnuck.
The match will be played at Shadow Creek in Las Vegas, but no date is set. The round was originally supposed to happen on July 3 but never took place. Mickelson, however, says negotiations are still ongoing.
“We’re working on a different date. I thought it was done for the 3rd but obviously it wasn’t,” he said Thursday while playing at A Military Tribute at The Greenbrier.
Mickelson first hinted at the idea during the Players Championship in May.
“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,” he said at TPC Sawgrass. “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.”
“I’m definitely not against that,” Woods replied. “We’ll play for whatever makes him uncomfortable.”
For more than 20 years Woods and Mickelson have been rivals on the PGA Tour. The excitement their rivalry still generates, despite each being in their 40s and nearing the end of their career, was evident at The Masters, when they played a practice round together.
But a matchup between the two of them, long anticipated, has never really occurred. They have been in the final pairing on Sunday in a Major just once, at the 2001 Masters. Woods shot 68 that day to complete the Tiger Slam, while Mickelson shot 70 to drop to third. The only Major they have finished first and second was the 2002 U.S. Open, but Mickelson still finished three shots back.
During the years they have competed against each other their relationship has changed. Once bitter rivals, they have developed a friendship during the past few years as Woods struggled to recover from injuries.
“Phil was great. He tried to help me out when I was trying to make a comeback,” Woods said at Augusta National earlier this year. “Our friendship has gotten stronger over the years. We’ve competed a lot of times coming down the stretch in events. We’ve gone through it a long time, better part of 20 years. Our friendship has certainly gotten a lot better.”
Mickelson revealed at Augusta the respect he has for Woods and his appreciation for what Woods has meant.
“Nobody respects and appreciates what he’s done for the game more, because no one has benefitted from what he’s done for the game of golf more than I have,” Mickelson said. “To see him back out playing is incredible.”
The match will allow golf fans to witness two legends compete against each other, possibly for the last time.
“We are at the tail end of our careers,” Woods said in April. “We’ve had a great 20 year battle. Hopefully we’ll have a few more.”
They will have one more, at least. That is all golf fans can hope for.