Tiger Woods brings heat. He’s 48, decades past his playing prime, but he still packs heat.
He doesn’t do casual, and neither does the USGA, which picked up the tab for his dinner Tuesday night, for Tiger and his mother, for his two kids.
He got the Bob Jones Award and it comes with dinner.
Phil Knight got out his Nike checkbook because of those first six wins, plus Tiger’s life story.
His brilliant, profane, crazy-like-a-fox father, with his degrees from Kansas State (sociology) and Vietnam (Bronze Star).
His Thai mother, who wasn’t going to junior tournaments to sip tea with the other moms. Tiger’s two years at Stanford, his inherent shyness, his explosive fist pumps.
He was brown man in a white game with a body he stole from Gumby. Good lord it was exciting.
The ink was still wet on that Swooshed check when Tiger started winning PGA Tour events. His scoreboard totals are 82 PGA Tour wins, 15 of them majors. There’s not enough money in the world to make Woods go to LIV. That’s why not one of Mark Steinberg’s clients is a LIV golfer. Mark Steinberg owes his career to Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods owes his professional career to the PGA Tour, and his training for it came by way of a lot of things, including, at its core, the USGA.
Tiger could get to 10. He could still get to 10 USGA titles. He’s 48 and his body has been ravaged by extreme weightlifting, extreme practicing, extreme living and an inexplicable car crash three years ago that could have killed him. But his golf skill is still remarkable and so is his will. He could get to 10.
Tiger will be 50 when the U.S. Senior Open goes to the Scioto Country Club in Columbus in 2026. Scioto is where Jack Nicklaus learned the game. Big Jack won two U.S. Senior Opens. No sport does generation to generation like golf. Woods’s main competition has always been against Jack Nicklaus. Tiger will be tanned, rested and ready for that ’26 Senior Open. You can book that. Nicklaus will be 86, and he’ll still have that boyish Buckeye voice, and he’ll say some version of this and mean it: “I’ve said it a million times: Never bet against Tiger Woods.” Jack Nicklaus’s final U.S. Open was at Pebble Beach in 2000 when he was 60 but all these years later he remains the most important voice in golf. He’s still mad about the golf ball.
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Source: Tampa Bay Times