Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson playing on Pay-Per-View could bomb

The high-stakes match between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson was made official on Wednesday – but are they taking the wrong approach with some of the details?

Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson have announced the official details surrounding their high-stakes, one-on-one match this November. While the exact breakdown is pretty much what we already knew, some of the details they released leave me scratching my head.

First, the specifics. The match will take place on Friday, November 23rd at Shadow Creek in Las Vegas. While we already knew the general time frame that both players wanted, this is a solid call. The sports schedule the day after Thankgsiving is light; there are no NFL games, the NBA is airing just two games nationally (both on NBA TV), and the NHL’s featured game between the Rangers and Flyers airs at 1 PM Eastern. Fan focus is unlikely to be an issue, even though a time hasn’t been announced.

The format will, as expected, be match play, with a few new twists. The prize will be “just” $9 million, with the general understanding that the PGA TOUR likely didn’t want them to take the wind out of the FedEx Cup’s sails. However, there will be a “side bet” aspect to the match that we haven’t seen before.

Per the official press release from Turner Media, here is how that will look:

"As part of the live event, both Woods and Mickelson will selectively make side-challenges against one another during the match.  For instance, Woods or Mickelson could raise the stakes by challenging the other to a long-drive, closest-to-the-pin or similar competition during a hole as they play their match, with money being donated to the winning golfer’s charity of choice."

I’ll give them this much – knowing Phil’s penchant for wagering, this could be fun, especially if they have comically large wads of cash in their respective staff bags. Unfortunately, this is also where things start to go from “fun match between rivals turned buddies” into an over-produced event with a huge potential to bomb.

In 20-plus years of following golf, I never thought I’d say that about Tiger vs. Phil.

That’s a pretty small issue, I grant you, but unfortunately it’s not the biggest one. Back in the “Monday Night Golf” days, these big-name, prime-time matches were played in prime time on network TV.

This time around, it’s not even on premium cable; Woods and Mickelson are taking the match to Pay Per View. Turner media did state in their release that TNT would air “select content” in the “weeks following the live competition”. In other words, sponsor money isn’t gonna cut it, kids. Time to bust out the credit card.

I’m not about to suggest that we should somehow try to hold Woods and Mickelson to proving they’re playing for each other’s money. Quite the opposite, I would expect sponsor dollars to be through the roof for this, more than covering the prize, as well as a nice fee for the “loser”.

But as much as I love the idea of watching these guys play, pushing the content to a pay-per-view format could drive away at least as many fans as it will bring in.

Based on the content being produced for Bleacher Report’s B/R Live streaming platform, I don’t expect the price to be higher than, say, $19.99 for the event, but that’s still a four-hour commitment to a single golf match. I can’t imagine paying a premium to watch the same game I see every weekend – but this time we’ve got microphones!

Speaking of mics, HBO (also a TimeWarner product, of course) will have their “24/7” cameras following Tiger and Phil for some time before the match – days, if not weeks. That does add a nice little wrinkle, but this isn’t “Hard Knocks”. There’s no training montage, no rookies just trying to make a team. It’s just Tiger and Phil, and if this isn’t done in semi-real time (like Hard Knocks), then something will naturally be lost in the presentation.

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An audience that could easily be in the tens of millions on network might be shrunk significantly by putting up paywalls, while also promising “select content” weeks later on basic cable.

Of course, I’m do still have to be honest here in the end. I’ll be one of the first to pick up this match, at basically any reasonable price. But I would hate to see a long-awaited match between two of the modern game’s all-time greats treated like a failure because they couldn’t draw a big enough buy rate.

Obviously it’s too late to change the broadcast portion of the show, but so long as the remaining details – time, specifics on the ‘side action’, etc. – get hammered out, it still has potential.

It shouldn’t be that way for these two legends, especially this late in the game, but that’s how they’re protecting their pay day. As long as the product lives up to, or surpasses, the hype, it may be alright.

That’s the catch with The Match, though. At this advanced point in both Mickelson’s and Woods’s careers, there’s no middle ground. There probably won’t be a rematch. It will live or die on the quality of the presentation. Based on the decisions we’ve seen so far, I’m not sure it will get where it needs to be.