Tiger Woods will not win the 2024 Open Championship. Tiger Woods is unlikely to win another major. Tiger Woods will most likely never win another PGA Tour event.
And Tiger Woods should continue playing all these tournaments as long as he pleases.
Thursday at Troon at The Open Championship featured the latest example of Tiger Woods of the 2020s, a legend well past his prime, slipping far down the leaderboard and struggling to make his way into the weekend.
At this point, it’s almost a fill-in-the-blank story: “After a promising start at the (insert name of a major here), Tiger Woods stumbled with a (final number over par) round that left him (a disturbingly high number) strokes off the lead. Woods will now fight to make the cut…” Change the numbers, rinse them, reuse them as needed.
This week, the details are as follows: Woods carded six bogeys and two double bogeys against two birdies to finish at +8, with a total of 79 and 11 shots off the lead. Without a strong comeback on Friday (with a very brief recovery overnight), Woods will miss the cut again this week and once again struggle through a tournament where he didn’t have to bother packing for the weekend.
The numbers, once so astonishing in Woods’ favor, are no longer so good. This year, he placed 60th at the Masters and missed the cut twice at the PGA Championship and the U.S. Open. He hasn’t finished the weekend in a major tournament held outside of Augusta since the 2020 PGA Championship.
Let’s face it: watching Woods in 2024 is very uncomfortable. Today, it’s an exercise in finding solutions, in convincing oneself of increasingly ridiculous and desperate scenarios. I wish I could shoot a 65… I wish I could birdie five of the last six… I wish I could make par… I wish I could sink a four-foot putt… I wish I could finish the damn round. …
We’re like blackjack players on a losing streak, doubling and re-doubling our bets, hoping the cards will come out right, knowing all the while that we’re only digging ourselves into a deeper hole. We keep covering ourselves, as I did in those opening sentences, because if anyone can pull a miracle win out of nowhere, as he did in 2019, it’s Tiger Woods.
Still, all the gloomy signs piling up around Woods are increasing the volume of calls for him to stop playing. The latest: Colin Montgomerie, who suggested last week that it was time for Woods to call it a day.
“All athletes have to say goodbye at some point, but it’s very difficult to tell Tiger that it’s time to go.”
Counterpoint: Why do we have to tell Tiger it’s time to go? As long as Woods wants to play, why shouldn’t he? No athlete has revolutionized his sport the way Woods revolutionized golf; he took the sport out of its country club origins and made it popular for the masses in a way that no one, not even Arnie and Jack, had ever done.
Another, more relevant counterpoint was made by Woods himself on Tuesday: “As a former champion, I am exempt until I am 60. Colin is not. He is not a former champion, so he is not exempt. So he does not have the opportunity to make that decision. I do.”
That’s the key: This is Woods’ decision, and Woods’ alone. This is not a matter of Woods’ “legacy,” which was firmly established 20 years ago, and as long as Woods doesn’t try to blow up the entire sport by helping to found a rival golf league, his good name will remain intact. Woods should play as long as he wants to, and whenever he does play, he will draw spectators to rival any player, now and ever.
Watch the galleries surrounding Woods wherever he goes. Watch the cellphones held aloft to record his every shot, thousands of tiny clips that will never be seen again. Listen to the sound the gallery makes as he approaches each tee shot and, more rarely, when he sinks a birdie. They will shout his name — “TOY-GAH,” they say it at Royal Troon — and cheer him on, no matter how much he trashes a hole, a round or a course.
On Thursday afternoon, as Woods walked down the 18th hole toward the clubhouse, the galleries lining the fairway rose to their feet to celebrate Woods once again. Yes, everyone is applauding Woods. wasinstead of who he is isBut so what? Love is love, and for every devoted fan who abandoned Woods for his on-court insults or off-court behavior, a dozen still want to see him one more time, to catch a glimpse of one of the most famous American athletes of all time.
So if you’re thinking of seeing Woods in person (perhaps next year at the PGA Championship in Charlotte or the U.S. Open in Pittsburgh), don’t hesitate. He’s not hard to find when he’s on the course; you just have to follow his roar.
But just in case, it might not be better to wait until the weekend.
