Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, the two richest and most decorated golfers of their generation, are negotiating a high-stakes exhibition match between the two, according to a Golf.com report published on Friday.

Mickelson told the website on Thursday that they were close to working out a deal to play in Las Vegas on 3 July, but it fell through. He suggested the sides are still committed to making it happen.

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“We’re working on a different date. I thought it was done for the third but obviously it wasn’t,” he said.

The winner-take-all match is said to be for $10m and involve a television network and other corporate interests. Even for Woods and Mickelson, who rank first and second on the career money leaderboard (with $111.9m and $87.6m respectively), it’s a prize that moves the needle.

“It’s a ridiculous amount of money,” Mickelson said. “No matter how much money you have, this amount will take both of us out of our comfort zone.”

Woods and Mickelson drew lots of attention when they played a practice round together at Augusta National before the Masters. When they were paired at the Players Championship a month later – the first time they’d played in the same group at any PGA Tour event in nearly four years, – Mickelson floated the idea.

“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 then. “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.”

Woods sounded like he was up for it.

“I’m definitely not against that. We’ll play for whatever makes him uncomfortable,” he said.

In their highly anticipated round on 10 May, Woods shot an even-par 72 while Mickelson melted down in a round of seven-over 79.