Chapter 86

Genesis Invitational

Riviera Country Club

Pacific Palisades, California

February 16–19, 2023

Forty-seven-year-old Tiger Woods, the player-host of the Genesis Invitational, walks alone on a course where, after thirteen tries, he’s never won a tournament. It takes intense concentration to move with the least amount of strain on his back and right leg, which he injured shortly after hosting this tournament two years ago.

Tiger made his PGA Tour debut here thirty-one years ago, playing on a sponsor’s exemption in the 1992 Nissan Open. When he looks up to check the current scores, he sees that the leaders, including Jon Rahm and Max Homa, are players who were children back then.

“Because I haven’t played a lot in the last few years, there’s a tremendous amount of turnover,” Tiger tells Golf magazine. “I look at the Champions Tour leaderboard”—the top pro golfers over age fifty—“those are all the guys I know. There’s a lot of new faces out here that are going to be the future of our tour that I got a chance to see and play with.”

Rahm wins, Homa finishes second, and Tiger ties for forty-fifth. Yet he still attracts adoring crowds who keep him hopeful. “Maybe next year,” he says.

Tonight, he faces the grueling recovery regimen he undertakes every time he plays a competitive round. “There’s a lot of ice going on here,” he tells the Los Angeles Times. “As soon as I get back to the hotel, it’s just icing and treatment and icing and treatment, just hit repeat throughout the whole night. Get ready, warmed up tomorrow, get this big sweat going on, big lift in the morning and stay warm and get off to a good start.”

In mid-March, a few weeks ahead of the 2023 Masters, Jack Nicklaus is strategizing about ways in which Tiger, despite his injuries, can prolong his playing career.

“Tiger, you’re eligible to take a cart,” Nicklaus says, referencing the PGA’s disability clause. It’s been available for the last twenty-plus years, ever since 2001, when Tiger’s Stanford teammate Casey Martin, who had a rare circulatory disorder that causes weakness in his right leg, won his case in the Supreme Court, allowing disabled players such as Martin and, more recently, John Daly to use a cart in competition.

Back then, Tiger had voted against the clause, saying “I think [walking] is an integral part of the game at our level, and I will never take a golf cart until it’s sanctioned.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Tiger says now, but he concedes to Nicklaus, “When I get to the senior tour, I will.”

In the Augusta National private dining room on April 4, things are a bit heated—at least on the Champions’ Dinner menu, which includes firecracker shrimp, tortilla soup, rib-eye steak, and blackened redfish with jalape?o creamed corn, served in honor of the twenty-six-year-old defending champion, Texan Scottie Scheffler.

The consensus is that the tortilla soup packs too much of a punch. “It had a little bit of kick in it, yeah,” says Spaniard José María Olazábal, the 1994 and 1999 winner. “I had to sort of swab the top of my head because it was perspiring,” says Sandy Lyle, though the Scotsman, who in 1988 became Great Britain’s first Masters champion, admits, “I suppose it’s a little bit like when I had haggis. A lot of people didn’t know what haggis was.” Less understanding is the 1979 winner, Fuzzy Zoeller, who declares, “I about gagged.” “Way too hot, too spicy,” three-time Masters champion Nick Faldo complains.

The atmosphere itself is rather chilly. Tonight is the first Champions’ Dinner since LIV Golf played its inaugural season, in 2022. Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia, Patrick Reed, Dustin Johnson, and Bubba Watson may now be ex-PGA, but their Green Jacket status lasts forever. At the Genesis Invitational, Tiger made it clear that the evening was about Scheffler. “Scottie’s the winner, it’s his dinner. So making sure that Scottie gets honored correctly but also realizing the nature of what has transpired and the people that have left, just where our situations are either legally, emotionally, there’s a lot there.”

Scheffler forewarns, “I’ll definitely get emotional. I wish I didn’t but I always do.” Dinner otherwise adheres to tradition. As Lyle notes, “Regardless of all the different things that have been said in the last week or so, it went off without a hitch. Nothing from Gary Player or Mickelson.”

Faldo observes that three-time Masters winner Mickelson (2004, 2006, 2010) “snuck around next to Gary”—who’s also won three Masters (1961, 1974, 1978)—after the group portrait and before dinner.

Player, the eighty-seven-year-old South African who, like many golfers, winters in Jupiter Island, Florida, competed in the Masters fifty-two times; he’s attending this year as an honorary starter. He’s publicly stated that LIV is “for guys that can’t win on the regular tour any more.”

The comment is hardly polite dinner conversation. But in his pre-tournament press conference, Tiger reveals that he’s wrestling with a similar question. “I don’t know how many more I have in me,” he tells reporters of his fitness for the Masters.

At the Champions’ Dinner, Tiger and Jack Nicklaus take their traditional adjoining seats.

“I’m playing well,” Tiger tells his old friend. “I’m hitting the ball great. My short game’s great. My putting’s good. I just can’t walk.”

On April 7, the five-time Masters champion, playing his twenty-fifth Masters, ties a record belonging jointly to Player and the 1992 Masters champion, Fred Couples. All three players have made twenty-three consecutive cuts at Augusta National.

The next day, storm clouds burst and temperatures take a dive. Navigating the hills on the course proves a painful struggle. By the time play is suspended for weather, Tiger is at 9 over for an incomplete round—and in last place. A recurrence of plantar fasciitis and arthritis brought on by his foot surgeries forces him to withdraw.

Two weeks after the Masters and six years after back fusion surgery, Tiger undergoes ankle fusion surgery.

At the Folds of Honor Greats of Golf exhibition match on April 29, Nicklaus tells Golfweek, “He wouldn’t be having the operations if he wasn’t interested in wanting to continue to play. He’s a very motivated and dedicated young man.”

Seventy-two-time LPGA winner Annika S?renstam, whose own career ended because of injuries, takes “a fan’s standpoint” in considering Tiger’s ongoing medical struggles. “I think he’s in more pain than he lets everybody know. I think it’s a lot more serious. But he is so tough. And so courageous.”

On July 31, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan receives a forceful letter. It’s signed by forty-one PGA players. Two leading the charge are Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods.

“When Tiger speaks, his voice is very loud,” says the 2019 U.S. Open winner, Gary Woodland, one of Tiger’s captain’s picks in the 2019 Presidents Cup.

The players have serious objections to their lack of agency in shaping the future of their sport. They were blindsided at the surprise reveal on June 6 that the PGA was also in negotiation with the Saudi wealth fund that is backing LIV—the golf league now in its second season—to create an umbrella company that includes the two rival organizations.

The letter writers’ common goal is to increase player representation under Tiger’s leadership, and on August 1, he joins the PGA policy board as a player-director, altering the balance by a single vote—six to five—in favor of the players.

The shift is significant. “I know he doesn’t sleep a lot,” says Jordan Spieth, winner of the 2015 Masters, 2015 U.S. Open, and 2017 British Open, “but he’s spending most of his waking hours thinking about how to better the PGA Tour for the players. And he doesn’t have to do that. He could ride off into the sunset if he wants. We know that’s not his personality.”

When is Tiger going to play again? In a November 1 interview with Golf Channel’s George Savaricas, the 2009 British Open winner, Stewart Cink, drops some clues that the looming question might soon be answered. “He said that he’s started practicing, which I think is a great sign,” Cink says. “I don’t know what he’s practicing for, but he said he started practicing, so that means he’s in ‘go mode’ for something.”

Savaricas wagers a guess as to Tiger’s next competition. “Will he play in December at either Hero World Challenge or PNC Championship?” Savaricas posts after the interview. “My gut PNC Championship best bet.”

Golf fans in southwestern Louisiana are out in force the first weekend of November.

Fourteen-year-old Charlie Woods has moved into a more competitive age group in his second Notah Begay III Junior Golf National Championship. The adjustment has him shooting over par.

Like any smart golfer, Charlie knows that a caddie may advise, but it’s up to the golfer to execute the shots. “For Dad as a caddie, his reads are hook-bias,” Charlie says, “and I don’t hook as much as he does. So all of my putts, I miss right. So I have to account for that.” Still, the caddie wearing the WOODS bib is the most famous at Koasati Pines. Or any course.

“Tiger is walking like a champ,” one fan posts.

But in a post-tournament interview with the Associated Press, Tiger makes it clear that looks can be deceiving. “I’m pretty sore after caddying for four days,” he says. “It was a flat course, thank God.”

Just as the 2017 spinal fusion surgery repaired his L5 and S1 vertebrae, “where they fused my ankle,” Tiger says, “I have absolutely zero issue whatsoever.” But the stabilizing interventions have caused a chain reaction of sorts in the interconnected systems. “So you fix one, others have to become more hypermobile to get around it, and it can lead to some issues.”

“It’s better in the Bahamas” goes a 1992 ad slogan that’s remained popular in the Caribbean.

“Hey, guys,” Tiger says brightly on a late November day as he walks into the press tent at the Albany Bahamas resort, where he is an investor.

Shortly after Tiger turned pro in 1996 and founded Tiger Woods, Inc., he told Sports Illustrated that “I’ve gone from being a college sophomore to a mini-CEO.” Over decades, the empire has expanded, and the role of multihyphenate billionaire is wearing well. Player-host of the Hero World Challenge. Player-director on the PGA policy board. Golf course designer. Restaurateur. Real estate investor. Diplomat.

It “can’t happen again,” Tiger says of the PGA’s secretive negotiations with the Saudi financiers behind the PIF. He speaks with confident authority, though he’d recently weathered the surprise mid-November resignation of his friend and colleague Rory McIlroy, who had tired of the ongoing fluctuations in professional golf.

Stepping in to take his place and maintain the ratio of six player-directors on the PGA policy board is thirty-year-old Jordan Spieth, who praises Tiger’s leadership and perspective to the Athletic. “He’s not stepping in to throw influence anywhere,” Spieth says. “It just comes with him when he walks in the door. He’s a listener and he has a lot of experience. He’s seen the PGA Tour go through a lot of different changes over almost 30 years for him now.”

On December 3, 2023, Masters champion Scottie Scheffler wins the Hero World Challenge. Tiger is twenty strokes behind him, placing eighteenth in a limited field of twenty. But he walked all seventy-two holes, banishing the memory of his limping across Augusta National, wielding clubs as canes, before withdrawing from the 2023 Masters.

For 2024, Tiger’s set himself an inspiring goal: to play one tournament per month. “Once a month seems reasonable, and it gives me a couple of weeks to recover, a week to tune up,” he says. “Maybe I can get into the rhythm of something like that.”

The caddie wearing the WOODS bib hands Tiger a freshly cleaned club.

It’s not Rob McNamara. The VP of TGR Ventures caddied for Tiger at the Hero World Challenge now that Joe LaCava has teamed with Tiger’s fellow PGA policy board member Patrick Cantlay.

“New caddie today!” McNamara declares, joking with reporters who arrived early to cover Tiger’s warm-up that he’s already been fired.

This debut caddie recently finished fall semester exams for her junior year at the Benjamin School, in North Palm Beach, and wears her long dark hair parted in the center and pulled back in a ponytail. She’s sixteen-year-old Sam Woods. For the first time, Sam Woods is caddying for her father today reads a post on the official PGA Tour Instagram account.

Team Tiger 2023 has a third member: Charlie Woods. The fourteen-year-old high school freshman plays on Benjamin’s state championship golf team. The squad won—by a single shot—its fourth Florida High School Athletic Association class A title on November 15, with Charlie placing twenty-sixth individually.

The heavy downpour that coincides with the December 16 opening round of the PNC Championship at Orlando’s Ritz-Carlton Golf Club is no deterrent to the fans—or the press. “I’ve stood in the rain for four hours for two people in this world and their names are Taylor Swift and Tiger Woods,” a Golf magazine reporter posts alongside photos of a smiling, cheering, poncho-clad crowd.

Among them is eighty-four-year-old five-time major winner Lee Trevino, who has some advice for Charlie. For starters, “You got to leave the cell phone at home,” Trevino says. “Work on something.… You gotta hit a shot. It doesn’t have to be a good shot.”

“I drove the ball really good today,” Charlie says. “Didn’t miss a fairway, and still managed to shoot 8-under. We just suck at putting.”

His dad agrees. “That sums it up right there.”

As caddie, Sam has to be a good driver on a day when the entire field takes carts across the rain-drenched course. “We love you, Sam!” fans positioned next to a tee box shout. She looks down shyly, but Tiger lavishes even more praise on the first-time caddie, who steers Team Tiger to a five-way tie for fifth.

“Sam was fantastic,” the proud father says. “For me to have both my kids inside the ropes like this and participating and playing and being part of the game of golf like this, it couldn’t have been more special for me, and I know that we do this a lot at home, needle each other and have a great time. But it was more special to do it in a tournament like this.”