How will any of us know if Tiger Woods decides to even think about entering THE PLAYERS? All we have to go on is last year, when he decided to play a practice round at Augusta National to see if he could manage that course for the Masters. It was a Tuesday, the week before the 2022 event.
Augusta National is very beautiful, but it is also a very hilly walk, and if he couldn’t walk it, he couldn’t play it. That, of course, is why he went.
Well, Tiger’s arrival caused a social media blowout, a Golf Channel frenzy as well as many Tiger headlines, to say the least. The way we found out about his practice round was fairly comical, really, a combination of tweets from Tiger Followers, Eureka Earth and people who know how to follow airplanes when they take off from an airport. Plus, there was someone at the airport in Augusta, where his plane landed, who provided video. You can’t hide a plane, at least not easily.
Honestly, I don’t know how people track planes. I can hardly find my car on Google maps between my house and Publix. And when I need it most, my Android Auto fails. Always happens. It will fail to load. It won’t recognize my phone. It asks for stuff I don’t understand or can’t do while I’m driving. Sorry, Google, but it’s true. However, you have to trust me about people getting their planes tracked. There are specialists in this.
Now should I have an Apple phone? Well, I would have if there had been any available the last time I changed wireless companies. But there weren’t and my existing phone was damaged. Enter Android and now Android Auto. Enough of that. Back to tracking Tiger.
So, what happened first when Tiger went to Augusta was that Twitter nearly broke itself into a million pieces. Some enterprising person found that his plane had taken off from South Florida and landed in Augusta, Georgia, and tweeted it. People went berserk.
As a tweeter named Adam Stanley wrote in a tweet featuring a map of the plane’s route, “No other golfer is having their plane (or boat, if I recall correctly) tracked like this. Regardless of the outcome here, the fact that Tiger Woods is up, walking, playing golf, and this close to playing the Masters after what happened last year is amazing.”
Even Golf Digest got into the act with a tweet and a picture of Tiger’s plane.
Sir Nick Faldo tweeted: "See Tiger has arrived at Augusta. If he plays, it will be off the charts and another one of the greatest moments at The Masters."
One report said Woods’ name was listed among the participants, although who had that information is not known.
Todd Lewis of Golf Channel said Woods was going to “exhaust every effort” to play the Masters.
Eureka Earth, which provides occasional aerials of Augusta National’s renovations and modifications, as they did with the new 13th tee, also jumped on the bandwagon with a plane tweet. They also had video from someone at the airport. Sure enough, the three claw marks for Woods’ logo were on the tail. Growwl!
As it happens, Eureka Earth is located in Augusta.
Tweeters or twitterers, take your pick, were quick to find goat (G.O.A.T.) emojis. So, should the topic ever come up again, or if Woods does decide to play in THE PLAYERS, there’s a vast assortment of available goats for social media from Emojipedia. And who even knew there was one of those. I can’t decide which is best, although I’m partial to the Apple goat and the Facebook goat. The HTC goat looks a bit like it was found on the wall of a cave.
What all this means is if Tiger Woods were to decide to play a practice round at TPC Sawgrass, there’s no earthly way he would go unnoticed. Even if he shows up at 6 a.m., someone will spill the beans or tweet a G.O.A.T. sighting.
All our local radio and television stations will have it as breaking news. Count on it. ESPN and Golf Channel would be all over it. News people will be seen standing in front of the Marriott sign for TPC Sawgrass reporting on it. You’ll have to chase them away to get into or out of the Sawgrass Shopping Center, the Marriott or your house if you live on the PLAYERS side of Sawgrass.
The main question is does he really need to play a practice round here? I mean, he knows it’s a hard course. He knows it’s primarily flat. He knows where the bunkers and water hazards are, except for the new one dividing 6 and 7. Also, he hasn’t seen the new 12th hole and that hazard. He’s aware of the alligator, which is still in the lake at the 17th, and the herons, egrets, seagulls and cormorants that hang around the water.
If he wants to study at home, there are apps that do flyovers of golf courses, and they will surely have TPC Sawgrass. Golf Digest has one that is narrated by Ron Whitten, senior editor of Architecture. It’s about 12 minutes long and describes every hole. Whitten calls the course a “Southern version of Pine Valley,” which is a world famous, top 100 golf course in the pine barrens of New Jersey. It used to rotate with Cypress Point and Augusta National as the top course in the country.
The Golf Digest flyover starts with the drive up to the clubhouse, has just a smidgen of course history and then goes hole-by-hole complete with stunning photography.
If that’s not enough, Tiger could use Google Earth. It will even measure yardages. He could look at it while watching NCAA pre-tournament basketball and texting with Fred Couples and Woods’ caddie (who is also Couples former caddie), Joe LaCava.
If he wants expert eyes on the course, he could send LaCava on a mission to see where the back tee boxes really are located now and compare notes from the last time Woods won THE PLAYERS, which was 2013. So, he doesn’t really have to set foot on the property to know it. But will he?
The most important thing about this year is that, according to the PGA TOUR, from the looks of things, this is his last year of an exemption for winning the 2018 Masters. Here’s who will be invited to THE PLAYERS:
Unfortunately, despite winning 82 tournaments on the PGA TOUR, Woods doesn’t even have a World Golf Ranking any more. It’s just dashes. The tournaments he played in last year, the Masters, the PGA Championship and the British Open, allow past champions to play up to the age of 60 or 65, depending on the event. So right now, he plays in those because he can.
Now, as a quadruple lifetime member, meaning he has won four times the number of tournaments a PGA TOUR player needs for a lifetime exemption, he could play in any PGA TOUR event that would have him. Name one that wouldn’t send a limo to the airport to pick him up!
But that doesn’t get him into THE PLAYERS. What does get him into THE PLAYERS is his victory in the 2018 Masters. Woods’ last two victories after that were the 2019 TOUR Championship and the 2019 ZOZO, but neither of them count toward an invitation to THE PLAYERS. It’s his 2018 Masters victory that does the trick. And this is the last year of his exemption to THE PLAYERS with that Masters win as the golden ticket.
So, if there was ever a time when he might return to play in THE PLAYERS, this is it, unless he wins another tournament. Just when it looked like he wouldn’t play until April, Woods surprised everyone by announcing he intended to play in his tournament, the Genesis Invitational. So, who knows if he’ll come to Ponte Vedra? One thing is sure, it’s an easier walk everyplace here than it is to go up the hill to the clubhouse after the 9th or 18th holes at Riviera. He may need a sky hook for that.
