Tiger has never have been universally popular among African Americans but his match-up with Phil Mickelson offers relief from the burdens of age
On Friday Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson will play for a winner-takes-all purse of $9m in Las Vegas. The biggest question isn’t which of these multimillionaires will triumph, but why anyone would care. The match-up has nothing to do with golf any more than Muhammad Ali’s 1976 fight with Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki had anything to do with boxing. Or, for that matter, my 1992 one-on-one matchup with Julius Irving had anything to do with basketball. Since these showbiz events don’t enhance or redefine sport in any way, there must be some kind of metaphoric value that justifies the millions of dollars they generate – a glitzy-yet-heartfelt theme we can all get behind.
My own match against Dr J 26 years ago – billed as the “Clash of the Legends” – wasn’t great basketball, but it wasn’t meant to be. Julius was 41 and I was 44, roughly the same ages as Woods and Mickelson are now. It was showbiz, giving fans what they wanted. We huffed and puffed and did our best, but we were clearly not the players we were in our prime. But so what? The fans wanted to see two middle-aged men work their asses off to prove that we still had the spark of greatness, if not the full-blown flames. We did just that. The score didn’t matter, nor who won. What mattered was that we showed we still had a few moves, a few flashes of glory.
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