NAPLES, Fla. — Minjee Lee, the No. 2 money winner in the LPGA this season, follows men’s golf pretty closely because her younger brother, Min Woo, is a top amateur making his way into the pros. So, of course, Lee said recently, she would be interested in watching Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in their $9 million, winner-take-all exhibition on Friday.

“I think it’s going to be a great match,” she said.

Then someone mentioned $19.99, the cost for golf’s first foray into pay-per-view.

“I didn’t know that,” Lee said with a thin laugh. “Maybe I’ll just follow it on Twitter or something.”

In an HBO special last week that played like a 45-minute infomercial for the match, Woods said one of his objectives was “getting the next generation interested in the game.” He and Mickelson have hit that theme hard: Their showdown can expand the sport.

“This is a fantastic way to do it,” Woods said on HBO.

But by themselves, this pair of 40-somethings, who have a combined 19 major titles, can sell only nostalgia, if that. Their audience has already been hooked, riveted for years to the two biggest names in the game.

If Woods and Mickelson were serious about using Turner Sports’ multiple platforms to extend golf’s reach, they could have joined with LPGA players in a team event. The women’s and men’s tours have come together before in a prime-time exhibition. In 2001, under the lights outside Palm Springs, California, Woods and Annika Sorenstam defeated David Duval and Karrie Webb in 19 holes in an alternate-shot match.

The players wore microphones, but the exchanges were drier than the desert air.

That would not be the case today. The LPGA’s current players possess both the game and the gregariousness to sell themselves to a wider audience. All they are missing is a stage big enough to accommodate their personalities.

Take Shanshan Feng, a former world No. 1 and the first player from China to join the LPGA Tour. You never know what she will say next. Her stories are almost as colorful as her outfits. She might talk about the popularity of her cow-pattern pants or about making an indelible first impression on China’s president, Xi Jinping, during a formal meet-and-greet for Olympians by telling him that he was handsome.

It conjures a smile just imagining Feng, 29, known to her friends as Jenny Money, and her cow pants teaming with Mickelson and his green alligator shoes. Whatever the outcome of the match, high-definition TV would be the winner. Feng, a 2016 Olympic bronze medalist, also has the potential to make a vast Chinese audience care about the outcome.

Unlike in tour events, Mickelson and Woods will wear microphones during the exhibition so viewers can hear them talking smack. If the HBO special was any indication, viewers should not expect Woods, whose resting state is guarded, to play Mickelson’s straight man in an on-course comedy routine. If it is spirited banter the viewers want, there is always Ernie Johnson and Charles Barkley in the broadcast booth.

The $9 million pot for Woods and Mickelson, who both ranked in the top 25 on the 2018 Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest athletes, is hard to fathom for players on the LPGA Tour, where the largest purse for a tournament this season was $5 million for the U.S. Women’s Open. (The men’s tour topped out at $12 million for its U.S. Open.)

From a strictly financial perspective, Woods and Mickelson could reject the idea of sharing a huge check with partners whose skills have less market value. But remember, they are the ones talking about building the sport. And the women’s game is the next frontier. A report commissioned this year by the R&A, one of golf’s two governing bodies, found there was ample opportunity to increase participation in the game — by luring more women and families.

LPGA commissioner Michael Whan has said he is thrilled to see that 14 women topped $1 million in earnings this season. In 2010, his first year on the job, the number was eight. And then, he said, he looked up the PGA Tour money list and saw that 114 players had made at least $1 million in 2017-18. “I thought, OK, we’ve got a little bit of room to go,” Whan said.

They are making slow but steady progress. Ahead of last week’s season finale at Tiburon Golf Club, Terry Duffy, the chairman and chief executive of the CME Group, the tournament’s title sponsor, announced that next year the purse would double, to $5 million, with a record $1.5 million for the winner (about $600,000 higher than at this year’s U.S. Women’s Open).

Though Duffy, an avid golfer with a single-digit handicap, is willing to raise the ante for the women’s game, he professed little interest in the high-stakes match between Mickelson and Woods.

“I would not pay to watch that,” Duffy said. “That kind of money should have a lot of beneficiaries.”