EPILOGUE

100 Rounds

The Benjamin School

Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

March 26, 2024

Golf awards ceremonies are nothing new for Tiger Woods. He’s been smashing records and making history in the sport for almost half a century.

But he could not be more delighted to attend tonight’s ceremony honoring the Florida High School Athletic Association’s 2023 state champions. Tiger beams from the audience alongside Elin in celebration of the Benjamin School Buccaneers’ win—and their fifteen-year-old son, Charlie, and his high school golf team’s impressive accomplishment.

Tiger’s logged many hours as a proud spectator at Florida golf courses where the team plays its matches.

“Tiger’s been here a lot—it’s great to have him watching,” coach Toby Harbeck says. “We were playing a match at home, 18 holes, and we finished shooting a course-record 15-under. Tiger’s sitting next to me and he goes, ‘What did we shoot, coach?’”

Tiger’s impressed with the team’s score. “Are you kidding me?” he says before congratulating every player on the team, including Charlie, with a handshake.

While Tiger famously intimidates Tour players with 4 a.m. texts highlighting his incomparable training regimen—I’m in the gym. What are you doing to get better?—Harbeck admires the champion’s humble approach to being a golf dad.

“We don’t call him Tiger. We call him dad because he’s dad,” Harbeck says. “And Charlie’s not Tiger Woods’s son, but he’s Charlie, and that’s the way they want it to be.”

The team receives its championship rings at a ceremony held on Benjamin’s upper-school campus. The awestruck players open the jewelry boxes holding the rings marked with a B and encrusted with diamonds to catch the light reflected in the brilliant stones.

Harbeck, who’s coached the team for four decades, makes an emotional speech. “When you win a state championship, no one can ever take that away from you,” he says. “You can be 75 years old sitting in a chair with your grandkids on you and you can tell them, ‘I was a state champion.’”

Cameras flash as Charlie puts on his ring and shows it to his dad, who can’t make the same statement—for all his honors, Tiger never won a high school state championship.

He’s been more spectator than player so far this year. After he withdrew from the Genesis Invitational in February, Tiger’s name was also absent from the commitment list for the PGA Tour’s flagship event, the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass, which he’s won twice, in 2001 and 2013. But while his aspiration to play one tournament per month in 2024 may have faded, Tiger’s diplomatic star has been rising.

On March 6, CBS Sports announced: TIGER WOODS NAMED VICE CHAIRMAN OF PGA TOUR ENTERPRISES.

PGA Tour Enterprises is a new for-profit entity with the stated objective to “continue to build the PGA Tour as the highest level of competition in professional golf.”

Tiger is leading the visionary team that’s transforming the PGA—and working to bring the best players to the best courses worldwide. The task of his team will be to forge “pathways back” to return the LIV roster to the PGA fold. “Trust me,” Tiger says. “There’s daily, weekly emails and talks about this and what this looks like for our tour going forward.”

Though Tiger’s played just twenty-four holes of competitive golf this year, his name is on the player list for the 2024 Masters in April.

As a Masters champion, Tiger’s earned a lifetime invitation to the tournament, and the eighty-eighth Masters would mark both his twenty-sixth appearance and the fifth anniversary of winning his fifth Green Jacket and fifteenth major title. “To me,” Michael Jordan said after that astonishing 2019 victory, “it was the greatest comeback I’ve ever seen.”

Skeptics question whether Tiger will truly be able to make it to Augusta, but excitement grows when his Gulfstream G550 is tracked to Augusta Regional Airport. On March 30, ESPN’s Scott Harig reports that Tiger played a round with Justin Thomas and club chairman Fred Ridley.

The question remains, Can he withstand the physical challenge of walking the several elevation changes on the 6.5-mile course, then repeat the feat each of the next three days? “We’re playing on a hillside,” Tiger says, “and we’re just meandering back and forth across that hillside. So, yeah, it’s a long walk.”

As Notah Begay III explains during a pre-tournament conference call on April 3, “He’s got some constraints… He’s got zero mobility in that left ankle and really has low-back challenges now.”

“I hurt every day,” Tiger admits. But he’s determined, banking on his familiarity with the course. “I think it’s consistency, it’s longevity, it’s an understanding of how to play this golf course,” he says of Augusta National. “There’s a lot of knowledge that goes into understanding how to play it.”

There’s also a record on the line. Though he’s more than a dozen Masters cuts away from Jack Nicklaus’s record of thirty-seven total nonconsecutive cuts, Tiger has made the cut a further twenty-two times since winning his first Green Jacket, in 1997—in all, twenty-three times consecutively, a record he shares with Gary Player and Fred Couples. The only time he’s missed a Masters cut was in 1996, the year after making his first cut in 1995, at age nineteen, and winning Low Amateur. He’s yet to miss a Masters cut since turning pro.

If he makes it this year, Tiger will take sole possession of the record.

Fred Couples is optimistic about Tiger’s chances after they play a nine-hole practice round on April 9. “I don’t stare at his gait much,” says Couples, the 1992 Masters winner. “But he just hits it so good.”

“There he is, there he is,” fans murmur when they spot Tiger.

“Boy is he in shape,” a spectator from Iowa tells Fox News. “He’s buff. He still looks like a defensive back [in the NFL], no doubt about it.”

At his press conference, forty-eight-year-old Tiger is filled with nostalgia for Augusta National. “This tournament has meant so much to me and my family,” the five-time Masters winner says. “Hugging my dad [after the 1997 win], then a full circle in 2019 [after his fifth Green Jacket] to hug my son [Charlie].”

No matter the outcome this Masters week, he says, “the fact that I’m able to put on a Green Jacket for the rest of my life is just absolutely amazing.”

Then comes a prediction only Tiger could make: “If everything comes together, I think I can get one more [Green Jacket].”

“An ideal way to strike your first shot in a major” comes the call from the ESPN broadcast booth.

Tiger tees off at 3:54 p.m. For the first time since 1999, he birdies his first hole.

Heavy rain and forty-five-mile-per-hour wind had delayed the round by several hours, but Tiger is comfortably in the top twenty, tied for seventeenth place with a score of 1 under when darkness falls as he finishes on 13. Tomorrow, he’ll need to play twenty-three holes—the five remaining in round 1 and a full eighteen in round 2.

“The body is OK,” Tiger tells reporters after Day 1.

On Friday, April 12, Tiger begins prep at 4:30 a.m. He tees off at 7:50 a.m. and plays the five holes held over from yesterday, then signs his round 1 scorecard (73, one over par) at 9:35 a.m., leaving a mere fifty-two minutes before round 2. Team Tiger 2024—agent Mark Steinberg, VP of TGR Ventures Rob McNamara, and new caddie Lance Bennett—are all on hand to support their player.

In a secluded spot on the practice range, Tiger loosens his clothing to reveal a pain patch on his lower back, then covers his trunk and spine with Icy Hot. Thirty minutes until round 2 tee time.

CBS Golf is working with innovative new camera equipment. THE BUNKER CAMERA AT AUGUSTA NATIONAL IS MY NEW FAVORITE CAMERA! posts Omar Villafranca of CBS News.

The lenses capture Tiger protecting himself from the wind that’s whipping sand up and out of the bunkers, some blasts lasting up to forty-five seconds.

Tiger makes four birdies—and four bogeys—and pars the other ten holes to shoot 72 and make the cut at one over, tied for twenty-eighth and seven back of the lead. Galleries are stacked deep with fans roaring for Tiger as if they’re witnessing a final. It’s an emotional moment.

At the post-round press conference, a reporter says to Tiger, “I know it’s tough to reflect right after your round, but 24 straight cuts made here at Augusta. What does that mean to you, especially after the quick turnaround between rounds?”

“It means I have a chance going into the weekend,” Tiger says. “I’m here. I have a chance to win the golf tournament.” His competitive spirit as strong as ever, Tiger jokes with reporters that he plans to “text Freddy [Couples] and give him a little needle” about breaking the consecutive cut record.

“I’m tired,” he admits. “I’ve been out for a while, competing, grinding. It’s been a long 23 holes, a long day. But [caddie Lance Bennett] and I really did some good fighting today.”

Saturday’s round 3, however, brings pain and disappointment, though Tiger vows to play on Sunday, saying, “My team will get me ready. Kolb [physical therapist Kolby Tullier] has been awesome. It will be a long night and a long warmup session, but we’ll be ready.”

On the practice range Sunday morning, Tiger watchers are ecstatic to spot a familiar face. Charlie’s flown in from Florida—Sam’s stayed behind to compete in her high school track and field conference championship—to help his father work on lower-body mobility. The drills look familiar. Footage from 1993 shows Butch Harmon extending a club as Tiger swings, the obstacle forcing him to tighten his arms toward his trunk. Today, Charlie steps into the role of swing coach.

Seeing Charlie Woods on the range giving his old man a lesson… so cool! posts CBS Sports broadcaster Trevor Immelman.

It goes both ways. “I love watching [the younger players] succeed,” Tiger said during the pre-tournament press conference. “That’s part of the game. We pass on the knowledge. We don’t keep it. That’s what we do; we pass on the knowledge to the next generation.”

Tiger wears his traditional red shirt and black cap for the final round, now from his own Sun Day Red line. It’s a powerful image for golf fans.

Tiger Woods in Sunday red at Augusta National just feels right, tweets NBC Sports.

No matter what he shoots in the final round, Tiger is also hitting another notable milestone—today marks his one hundredth round at Augusta. On 16, where in 2005 he made the incredible chip shot that so impressed CBS Sports broadcaster Verne Lundquist, Tiger spots the eighty-three-year-old, who is retiring tomorrow.

“Tiger, thank you,” Lundquist says as Tiger shakes his hand.

“We’re gonna be tied at the hip forever,” Tiger tells him.

“Pure class,” says the Augusta Chronicle.

On the 18th, Tiger tips his cap to the admirers who’ve cheered him through his highs and lows. Though he scores better on his final round than on his third, it isn’t enough. “I hoped I was going to shoot something in the 60s. I thought I had that in my system but unfortunately it didn’t go that way,” he tells Sky TV. Yet completing all four rounds at the Masters opens the way for an even bigger goal. “I think the rest of the majors [this year] is definitely doable for me. Hopefully my body will cooperate.”

He’s got a plan. “I’m going to do my homework going forward at Pinehurst [U.S. Open], Valhalla [PGA Championship] and Troon [British Open],” he says.

“I’m just going to keep lifting, keep the motor going, keep the body moving, keep getting stronger.”

The USGA’s national championship, the 124th U.S. Open, is held at Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina in June of 2024. On June 12, Tiger is presented with the Bob Jones Award, the United States Golf Association’s highest honor, which “recognizes commitment to sportsmanship and respect for golf’s time-honored traditions.”

Tiger, a nine-time USGA champion—with six amateur and three professional victories—joins Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Ben Hogan in receiving the award. Tiger’s career has often paralleled that of Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones Jr., the greatest amateur to ever play the game. In 1930, Jones won the first—and only—calendar grand slam, which at that time meant the U.S. Amateur, the U.S. Open, the British Amateur, and the British Open. He also helped design Augusta National and cofounded the Masters.

The Bob Jones Award “goes beyond playing performance, recognizing the lasting impact of one person’s journey that has forever changed the image and growth of golf,” says the USGA CEO, Mike Whan, who foresees Tiger’s influence lasting generations.

“His impact on the game is incalculable,” adds the USGA president, Fred Perpall, “and there is no doubt that golf would not be the same without Tiger in it.”