LOS ANGELES – The vantage point was as good as any on the Riviera for seeing Tiger Woods clearly and considering how little he plays tiger sightings are rare these days.
The man positioned himself behind a stationary TV camera in a tower behind the 12th green as Woods walked to the 13th tee. He has spoken. He was loud. He wouldn’t stop. Once Christiaan Bezuidenhout had to deflect his shot.
It turned out that this was not a cameraman. When asked to show his ID, the man leaned forward and slowly picked up a beer can. He came down from the tower, walked off the ropes again, and two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies escorted him off the court.
That probably—no, definitely—won’t happen at Augusta National, where golf can next see its biggest star. On the other hand, Woods could be heading to TPC Sawgrass in three weeks for The Players Championship.
Woods said he wants to play the four majors and a few other events. Nobody knows what these tournaments are. And when Woods does, he doesn’t say it.
“Here’s the deal,” Woods said Sunday afterward finished his first tournament since the Masters last year. “I’m not going to play more than probably the majors and maybe a few more. That’s all. That’s all my body allows me. My back as it is, all the surgeries I’ve had on my back, my leg as it is, I just can’t.
“This will just be my future.”
The schedule is not based on a score. It’s what happens after he signs his card and what he does before being announced in between, and what sounds like a lot of ice cream and other treatment.
As for his golf?
Some of it was great, some was pedestrianized, none of it was boring. That explains why Thousands waited for him on Thursday morning at the first tee for his first tournament in seven months and sang his name as he finished on Sunday.
“I’ve been in front of big crowds before, but not in front of 10,000 people cheering for one guy in the group,” Bezuidenhout said on Saturday after watching Woods posts a 67his lowest score on the PGA Tour since October 2020, which was just five tournaments ago.
Matthias Schwab from Austria was also in the group. He said he played with Rory McIlroy a few times on the European tour and saw big crowds.
“It was on another level,” Schwab said.
That’s to be expected no matter where he goes because Woods plays so rarely. Part of the chaos is that he’s playing at all.
It was two years ago when his SUV went off the road at nearly 87 miles per hour in suburban Los Angeles and crashed down a hill. He spent the summer in a makeshift hospital bed at his Florida home. He swung a racquet in November, played a 36-hole event with his son while karting in December, and played the Masters five months later.
Woods is an eight-time winner at Bay Hill, but the last of those was 10 years ago. It’s easy to lean on the past, except for Woods, which means surgeries on his back and right leg from 2014, left knee a decade earlier.
Riviera — which Woods has played the most (12 as a pro) without winning — made sense given that he’s the tournament’s host. The other tournament that benefits his foundation is the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas. He will probably play there.
Otherwise, the focus is on the majors and hoping he can recapture some magic and make lots of putts and at least go into the weekend with a fighting chance. He was five behind after the first round and the deficit grew to 11 shots and 12 shots until he finished 16 shots behind Jon Rahm.
It was his first competition in seven months. It could be seven weeks before he plays the Masters again and he’s hoping to make it to the other majors. Nothing is guaranteed. There is golf and there is tournament golf and they are not the same.
“I can go karting at home,” he said. “I can hit balls, chip and putt. But like I said, it’s time or attention and your eight to 10 mile walk and focus that it takes. yes it is hard I did it for a long time.
“The body is,” he continued, “sometimes it says no when the mind says yes.”
Catch him while you can.
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