Are you excited yet? No? Well, don’t worry because you’ll soon be left reeling from the giddy turbulence generated by PR-powered, industrial-sized excitement blowers as the build up to the winner-takes-all, $9 million shoot-out between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in shimmering Las Vegas intensifies. Or perhaps not.

In terms of an extravagant exercise in needless ostentation, The Match, as November’s showdown will be known, is broadly equivalent to Evel Knievel jumping the fountains of Caesars Palace on a gold-encrusted motorbike and landing in Liberace’s wardrobe.

Two very rich men going head-to-head amid a sanitised environment in a bid to become a little bit richer? Those aforementioned PR folk won’t bill it quite like that, of course.

The fact Mickelson, a hitherto hermit when it came to social media, cheerily unveiled his own Twitter feed for the first time ever just hours before the official unveiling of said match was all slightly tawdry. You could almost hear the marketing goons saying, “right Phil, you just stick your name to this and we’ll do the rest. They’ll love it.”

Earlier in the year, Mickelson expressed his enthusiasm for an orchestrated tussle with Tiger after Woods and himself had been paired together at the Players Championship.

“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.

Rather like being told to play musical chairs on a boat that is sinking, this already feel likes one of those stage-managed affairs where enjoyment is demanded and fun is forced; a point-and-gawp festival of mutual back-slapping, thumbs-ups, and smile-for-the-cameras camaraderie involving two 40-somethings with one win between them since 2013.

Another major victory for either of them, but particularly Woods, would serve a greater benefit to the global game than some contrived clash of the ageing titans.

And it wasn’t as if they were going toe-to-toe in their pomp anyway. “Fifteen years ago my record against him (Woods) sucked, and now it’s ok, I’m doing better as time has gone on,” Mickelson said of a rivalry that was decidedly lop-sided.

In those days, however, there was a frostiness between the two which added an extra layer of intrigue and needle to the jousting. As the years have passed, though, that relationship has warmed to mutual admiration. Come The Match, they’ll probably walk to the first tee hand-in-hand.

Of course, golfing exhibitions are hardly a new phenomenon. In the days of Allan Robertson, the Parks and Old and Young Tom Morris, challenge matches were par for the course in the game’s formative years while Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen played out The Match of the Century in the 1920s.

In the swinging 60s, Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf series took the great and the good on a televised jaunt which was part golf match, part travelogue.

If it wasn’t Gene Sarazen versus Henry Cotton at the Old Course, then it was Ken Venturi going up against Ugo Grappasonni in Rome.

It wasn’t that long ago, meanwhile, that Woods and Rory McIlroy were being forced together in a competitive circus that was diluted to chummy, corporate compliance.

During the World Golf Final, Woods ambled to a six-shot win in a match that had all the fire of a crochet evening class. Asked if he was disappointed by the trouncing, McIlroy shrugged his shoulders and said: “Not really, I’ve got an afternoon by the pool.” The heart wasn’t in it and who could blame him?

Whether it was Sarazen and Hagen, Hogan and Snead or Nicklaus, Palmer, Player and Watson, the great rivalries of the game have enthralled and excited through a natural evolution.

November’s match, meanwhile, will be far from that. Millions of dollars on offer for a care-free occasion that will be on pay-per-view television?

Such is Woods and Mickelson’s star power, plenty will be tuning in to the bonanza.

If it’s context you’re looking for in your golfing rivalries, then you’ll possibly be switching off.