It's been a long winter in these parts, and nothing says golf season is getting close like Tiger Woods making us guess whether he will or won't tee it up at the Masters.
After missing the entire 2025 season with yet another major back surgery, Woods joined the booth this weekend at the Genesis Invitational broadcast and surprised some when he didn't rule out competing in the season's first major.
With nothing to go on other than the amount of recovery time, and his history of pushing himself to the brink and beyond, I'd put the odds at slightly below 50/50 that the five-time green jacket winner shows up with his golf clubs at Augusta in April.
According to the Woods doctrine, the next step in any Masters mystery will be a five-second clip of him hitting iron shots in baggy shorts somewhere in Florida. We stand by for that development.
Another development is the now-50-year-old Woods is eligible for the Champions Tour. It will be interesting to see if teeing it up with his old pals interests him. All we can hope for is that Freddie Couples is in Woods' ear urging him to give it a shot, because that seems to be one guy he listens to.
Three round tournaments in a golf cart on the Champions Tour could be the ideal place for Woods to get competitive reps if he still holds out any hopes of catching lightning in a bottle and being part of the story at a major championship. You can bet the Champions Tour has already had meetings about the logistics of making sure they can handle what adding Tiger to a field would mean for that tour.
2) One thing that shows the strength of the game is that any new Woods injury drama is no longer the top storyline in the world of golf.
Time has done its thing and we now have new struggling veteran stars such as Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas, both firmly in their 30s, fighting injury comebacks of their own. We also have other 30-somethings like Xander Schauffele, Tommy Fleetwood, Patrick Cantlay, Hideki Matsuyama and Matt Fitzpatrick (didn't he just get his braces off?) trying to stay in Scottie Scheffler's vapor trail as an ever-expanding slew of young stars (Hello, Chris Gotterup) and young studs (Hello, Jacob Bridgeman) threaten to charge past them.
The PGA Tour is in a strong position even though it was just five years ago that LIV Golf disrupted the professional game and we all wondered whether the future of pro golf was doomed to fractured relevance. As impossible as it seemed during the Tiger era, the golf world has successfully moved past being a one-man show ... although Scheffler is trying his best to bring that back.
Speaking of Scheffler, his latest quest of seeing if he can punt the first round of tournaments and then chase down the leaders has been fun to watch. His opponents should be appreciative, but I don't expect it will be very long until he stops being so charitable.
Back in the day, Tiger seemed to have a knack for bogeying the first hole, but spotting the field 18 holes is a bit much. Even for Scottie.
3) A report just came out from Money in Sport that the Saudi Public Investment Fund has approved $267 million in new capital for LIV Golf.
That would put the total investment since 2021 at over $5 billion dollars. And that's with Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed bailing out and with the contracts of Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm set to expire at the end of this year and next.
It would be very interesting to know what PIF boss Yasir al-Rumayyan thinks of the return he is getting for this eye-watering sum. When looking at the other places PIF spends its sports money, such as the glitzy world of Formula One or the highest levels of soccer, it's easy to understand the benefits of having Saudi's Aramco branding at tunnels and bridges on track as Max Verstappen zooms by, or on the jerseys of star soccer players that kids wear to school.
One obvious difference is that LIV is his baby, but they aren't getting the eyeballs, they aren't getting the glitz, they aren't getting access to PGA Tour sponsors, or by proxy, NFL owners. So, at some point these questions will have to be asked. But apparently, not yet.
Chip shots
I came across a 10/10 X post from Golf.com's James Colgan on Sunday after the gut-punch Gold Medal hockey game between Canada and the U.S. that said "3 on 3 overtime to decide the olympic gold medal is like bringing in the TGL arena to decide the Masters" ... During this beast of a winter in the Toronto area, the PGA Tour early swings through Hawaii and California were absolute chicken soup for the soul. There's not much better than settling onto the couch and transporting yourself to Maui or Pebble Beach or Riviera after a morning of shovelling ... Canadian golf fans might want to tune into Korn Ferry events a little more this year as Adam Hadwin began his journey back to the PGA Tour with a runner-up finish in Panama and then a 41st in Bogota. It's an unfamiliar spot for the 38-year-old who was on tour for more than a decade before becoming a casualty of the PGA Tour's change from the top-125 players keeping their card to just the top-100. He picked a bad year for a bad year ... Thoughts are with six-time major winner Nick Faldo, 68, as he recovers from major heart surgery. His wife posted an update on his social media accounts and it sounds like he is recovering well from elective surgery to repair an aortic aneuryism.
