A review: Tiger, Phil, and the hype machine for their Match come to HBO

Tiger and Phil want your money to watch them play each other Thanksgiving weekend. So they put on an HBO show to help convince you it’s worth it. Here’s a review on how that went.

Thanksgiving weekend is for football and fattening up. It’s not for golf. But “The Match” between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson is asking for your attention. The $9 million winner-take-all event tees off in Las Vegas next Friday afternoon and could provide a model for more professional golf just like it.

As part of this endeavor, the two were the subject of HBO’s acclaimed 24/7 series this week. It was a mix of promotion and candid moments from two players who are rarely accessible beyond visits with the press during tournament weeks. Here are some notes on the show and what it had me feeling about “The Match” next week.

It’s pretty.

• The 24/7 series is typically well-done and so was this. It was a fine production and looked pretty. The cameras made Shadow Creek look pristine and beautiful, the kind of setting and backdrop you want for a made-for-TV game like this. It did not go real deep on Tiger, Phil, their past, and any sort of rivalry, but it was more candor (not a lot!) than we usually get and it looked nice.
• I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes camera of them filming the segments that would eventually go into all the promotion for this match. There’s a camera on the cameras and you can see Tiger pull on a new face as the production crew says their rolling and throws him a question to answer. It was a peek into how they make so many of these fluffy segments we see in broadcasts every week on Tour. It’s not much, but it’s more than we’re used to seeing behind the scenes.
• “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” was a predictable music choice but it made for a fun montage that I’m sure had dads smiling on their couches all across America.
• If you want slow motion scenes of various modes of transportation, this is the show for you. There are scenes of private jets, slow-rolling SUVs, golf carts, high-end car services — all we were missing was Tiger on his Monster-branded WaveRunner and his Hero motorbike.
• The one thing I wanted more of was Phil plotting his way around Shadow Creek. I understand the limitations of this. Broadcasting Phil’s plan before The Match would be like Bill Belichick disclosing how he planned to defend a certain opponent that coming Sunday. But I was most fascinated when Phil started dissecting in detail why a certain par-3 would be a great option for a closest-to-the-pin bet and play into his strengths to put Tiger at a disadvantage. You have a brilliant, sometimes too-brilliant for his own good, golf mind scouting the course for a very specific purpose against a specific opponent. I would have watched 30 to 45 minutes of nothing but Phil going through the course and explaining where and why he would be at an advantage or disadvantage. The audience for this is probably not large! But there’s value and entertainment in it and I loved watching Phil go through just that one hole.

Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images

It’s promo.

• This is an entertaining 45 minutes with a different look at two inaccessible players that also serves the very distinct purpose of promoting an event that will cost you $20 with HBO’s content sister B/R Live, which lives in the same new WarnerMedia McMansion. This is fine. It doesn’t make the show a useless document. But there’s always an angle and you should understand that, too.
• Tiger hypes the match in extremely Tiger-fashion, calling it a “one-day boat race.” Phil hypes all that cash on the table, saying when “the stakes are four or five times higher financially than any event on tour, you feel it.” We know that money doesn’t necessarily impose pressure on a player or an event. Every Ryder Cup participant will tell you the most pressure they have ever felt in their career has been at that event, which is played for no money. No matter how much cash The Players Championship dumps into its purse, it’s not going to be more prestigious or pressurized than The Masters. The money is a nice thing to promote in flashing lights, but it’s not going to create pressure. Certainly some motivation, but the primary motivation with these two is “not losing.”
• Whereas Phil is ostensibly scouting the actual course they will play for The Match, the Tiger scenes feel quite manufactured. A camera crew showed up, he had to do something, and it’s basically: let’s hop in a golf cart, go out to a hole or two on my home course in South Florida and play some hypothetical betting games against a ghost opponent. He’s talking to himself about how he might bet this and that and it just feels inauthentic and extra promo-y.

But it’s promo with lapses of candor.

• In May at The Players, I wrote that the most significant benefit of this late-career Tiger-Phil romance may be the revelatory moments it yields about what was going the past 20 years during two of the game’s historically important careers. It yielded details at The Players we’d not heard publicly and came in the context of the two becoming more comfortable with each other in the sunset of their careers. The Match should provide more. So the promo is also dressed up with some useful quotes and insights that we may not have heard before or at least not directly from the source
• Here was Phil in 24/7 coming right out and saying just how jealous they all were of Tiger’s off-course earnings. “When Tiger first went pro, there was a lot of jealously, myself included,” Mickelson says. “We were all jealous of these enormous contracts he was signing off the course and we didn’t that it was worth it. And then he won the ‘97 Masters.”
• The two also admit to often trying to play one another instead of the course or the field in their past days on Tour. That’s something they would never admit in the moment. “Any time there was a board, I’d always look to see where Phil was,” Tiger said. Phil admits to it always feeling good beating Tiger, even if it means he came in 50th place.
• In the show, Phil says point blank “Tiger is the greatest player of all time.” That’s usually prefaced with a polite “arguably” in deference to a Golden Bear.
• Phil repeats with added detail that no one has benefitted more from all the money that Tiger brought to the game than him. That’s not something he’d admit in the past.
• Tiger says there’s verrrry little overlap between the two’s fanbases, which is a rare public acknowledgment from the subject of a lot of love and hatred the last two decades. “You’re not both a Phil or Tiger fan, you’re one or the other.” That’s the case with most fans and he’s been paying attention.
• We hear never-before-told stories that might seem like the most impotent form of trash talking in other sports but is entertaining gamesmanship in golf and a perfectly Phil story.

• The relationship clearly improved as they got older and were less threatened by one another. They both say how much texting with each other has meant during bad times competitively and personally. Of course, many of Tiger’s “struggles,” which Phil gently calls them, have been self-inflicted. But Tiger’s back condition is a much more sympathetic struggle, and in the show he provides this anecdote of just how miserable it made his relationship with his kids. “I didn’t really care about golf. I just didn’t want to live in pain. I just wanted to be able to participate in my kids’ lives again. I wasn’t able to. I was just laying down. I remember if I dropped anything, they’d say ‘Dad I’ll get it.’ That sucked! Because at one point in time I thought, ‘This is the only dad that he knows.’ This form.” We knew it was this bad and had read reported details but hearing directly from Tiger how his kids rushed to pick things up when he dropped something was one of the show’s more impactful moments.

Phil morphs into a cartoon villain.

Tiger is the greatest draw in the game but Phil is the main character here. He’s a caricature. He’s a cartoon supervillain. He’s always in all black clothes. He’s rolling around an airplane hangar in a murdered-out SUV. His, hair, is, uh, doing something?

He’s sitting on this expensive-looking leather couch and shot from a low angle with this odd background that looks like the kind of lair where a villain would be headquartered.

He says he’s heading to Vegas to practice on the host course and “adjust to Vegas altitude” but really just becomes a “Find someone who looks at you the way Phil looks at the Vegas strip” meme.

He references an “app or like a site on Instagram” called “Overheard in LA” and re-tells the dad joke he found funny on it, laughing at himself. He calls one drive a “hellacious seed” and laughs at his own line and then he laughs more maniacally at the other people nearby either laughing at his line or him laughing at his own line.

I had to keep pressing pause. Every moment, every face, every hand gesture is amusing in one way or another. Basically, every single second Phil appears in this show could be paused, screenshotted, and made into a meme.

Tiger is not great at faking it!

Tiger struggles more to actually play a character and promote this thing. It’s sometimes hard to know if he just struggles to appear authentic in his promotion efforts or is just naturally awkward. Or both.

It’s enjoyable to watch him run through some of the side games and betting lingo they have out there, but they didn’t exactly put him in a position to succeed. The scenes of him talking to himself while playing against a ghost opponent don’t do him any favors in appearing natural. “$1000 KP. That’s closest to the pin. I know it’s a ‘C’ but we always call it KP. I don’t know why.” Okie doke.

And when he hits a handful of poor shots (“Shit. That sucked.”) during this little promo demonstration, he makes a joke that, “I forgot my range finder in my other bag because I just switched from the Ryder Cup.” He’s only half-joking, I think, and it’s also a lesson why he should never, ever take the Monster bag off the road.

Tiger is the draw, but Phil is probably the best salesman for this thing and certainly is throughout this show.

A declarative verdict: The Match should be fun.

Tiger thinks he will win and “envisions it being over by the time we’re on the 18th tee.” Phil thinks he will win 2&1 and could see himself doing the worm across the green when he does.

“Will there be swearing in The Match?” Phil asks. “Shit yeah. There’s always swearing with Tiger, whether it’s pay-per-view or not.”

But this is not going to get heated. It’s a mutually-beneficial enterprise with a nice paycheck for both. There’s no animosity there and they state during the show that the rivalry has always been overblown.

“It was never as bad as people perceived it to be,” Tiger says. “There was never any bad blood.”

Phil, more the salesman, said he willingly played into the portrayal. “The media categorized this as a heated rivalry. And it’s fine. It was actually a good thing for both of us and it wasn’t worth the effort to try and change the narrative.”

This will be a fun, entertaining diversion from the usual golf format we get every week on the PGA Tour and it will feature two of the biggest stars in the history of the game. As the show illustrated with ample b-roll and memory-jogs from the last 25 years, it will be a nostalgia trip with two players that have owned the stage. It will be a reason to avoid your relatives and shopping on Thanksgiving weekend.