Despite being the target of smear campaign by the PGA Tour, and more specifically three of the four participants in The Match, LIV Golf’s Phil Mickelson took to Twitter on Saturday evening to promote the tour-affiliated exhibition while wishing the foursome of Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth “all the best.”
“I’m proud to have been a part of the creation of The Match. Today will be a fun, funny and insightful version and I’m wishing Tiger, Rory, JT and Jordan all the best,” wrote Mickelson.
“I’ll be watching it on TNT and I hope you will too.”
I’m proud to have been a part of the creation of The Match. Today will be a fun,funny and insightful version and I’m wishing Tiger,Rory,JT,and Jordan all the best. I’ll be watching it on TNT and I hope you will too.
— Phil Mickelson (@PhilMickelson) December 10, 2022
Mickelson was most responsible for getting The Match franchise off the ground when he proposed a “high-stakes, winner-take-all match” after being paired with Woods at the 2018 Players Championship in the opening two rounds.
“Why don’t we just bypass all the ancillary stuff of a tournament and just go head-to-head and have kind of a high-stakes, winner-take-all match,” joked Mickelson.
“Now I don’t know if he wants a piece of me, but I think it would be something that would be really fun for us to do.”
Woods retorted: “I’m definitely not against that. We’ll play for whatever makes him uncomfortable.”
The six-time major champion played in the first five editions of The Match: first against Tiger in the original event at the Wynn in Vegas, where he claimed a late victory. He was then paired with Tom Brady in The Match II but lost to Woods and Peyton Manning. He then teamed with Charles Barkley in the fourth edition, edging Steph Curry and Manning. Finally, in Match IV, he and Brady lost to Aaron Rodgers and Bryson DeChambeau.
Of the four who teed it up in the most recent iteration of The Match, only Spieth stayed above the fray, refusing to criticize Mickelson for joining LIV Golf. Woods (here) and Thomas (here), however, both dinged Mickelson at various times during the season. It was McIlroy, though, who threw the most verbal sucker punches, most memorably calling the iconic lefthander “naïve, selfish, egotistical and ignorant.”
