Without Tiger Woods, the Players Championship misses an important part of its spectacle

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — The darn shame of it all is not seeing Tiger Woods on the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass has become par for the course.

When 144 golfers tee it up Thursday on the 50th anniversary of the Players Championship, it will mark a Woods no-show for the fifth consecutive year, the longest stretch of absences for any former No. 1-ranked golfer still eligible to play in the PGA Tour’s signature event.

Many Tour insiders thought the long-standing gold standard for golf excellence would make it for the Players’ golden anniversary. They felt the date was ideal for Tiger to use this week to tune up his game for the Masters, getting enough rest to be ready for the year’s first major.

But at 48, with so much scar tissue built up from two decades of body breakdowns, Woods seems less inclined to trust his body to hold up.

So the Players will go on again without him, leaving many to wonder if that closing 69 in 2019 and tie for 30th place will be his last competitive round on the Stadium Course.

“I do miss him,” said Billy Horschel, counted among Woods’ good friends on Tour. “It’s sort of fun to have a little jab at him, he throws some jabs at you, then you throw some jabs at him. It’s just fun. We all know when Tiger is playing, the atmosphere and energy that is felt throughout the grounds at a golf tournament. It’s unlike any other I’ve ever been a part of.

“We have a lot of great players in today’s game of golf, but Tiger’s the needle, he’s the dial, he’s everything that encompasses moving the needle.”

Sure, we’ve all known for a good while now that Tiger is approaching the end of one of the most stupendous careers in all of sports.

But the Tour would still love for Woods to receive a proper sendoff from the fans at its most prestigious event. Whether that happens remains a bigger mystery with each passing year.

As his body keeps betraying him and Woods’ priorities shift away from playing competitively, the more likely it seems that a fitting goodbye to the Players may not fit into his schedule.

Next year, maybe?

Horschel is holding out hope that circumstances can align for Tiger to tee it up one more time at the Players.

Normally, his eligibility for the tournament from his 2019 Masters victory would have expired this year, but Woods gets an extra year due to COVID-19. Thus, he’s eligible for the last time in 2025 without having to win a Tour event or finish in the top 125 in FedEx Cup points.

Otherwise, the only avenue of entry is either by winning the Senior Players Championship after turning 50, which seems unlikely, or the Tour creating an unprecedented special exemption category for Woods to get into the Players.

“If there was one guy in this world that should be able to play any event he wanted to play, it’s Tiger,” said Horschel. “Whenever Tiger wants to f—– play, he should play.

“To allow him to play whenever he wants and make a special category for that one week of the year, I have no problem with that. I don’t think any guy out here would have a problem with that.

“Without Tiger, we aren’t sitting here playing for what we play for now. Jack [Nicklaus] and Arnie [Palmer] did a whole bunch to get the PGA Tour to a certain spot. Tiger came in and has taken it to an infinite level that no one could have imagined 30 years ago. Whenever he wants to go play somewhere and he’s not in, you let the guy in.”

Sounds good in theory, and nobody questions that Woods deserves special consideration for all he’s done to advance the game, but there remains one holdup: Tiger.

Not just his body’s physical ability to do it, but will Woods even accept being given preferential treatment? Tour commissioner Jay Monahan is skeptical about that.

“I think you all know Tiger well enough to know that he wants to earn his way into all of, into every competition,” said Monahan. “That’s his makeup. But I think as you go forward and as you evolve as an organization and you think about how do you serve and satisfy a rabid fan base, those discussions more broadly would likely be held at the Policy Board meeting.

“And I’m sure we would have that discussion. But [Woods] would be the hardest one to convince.”

Good luck finding another Tiger

Scottie Scheffler, especially if this new TaylorMade Spider Tour X turns out to be a permanent solution for his putting woes, is the closest thing golf currently has to Tiger Lite.

The defending Players champion has held the world No. 1 ranking for 78 weeks over the past two years. Scheffler’s dominant five-shot victory last week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational extended his lead over Rory McIlroy to a sizable 2.617 ranking points, so he’s golf’s big cheese for now.

But a lot of players in the past decade — McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Jason Day, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm — have had periodic streaks of dominance, only to settle slightly below that top perch or drop way beneath it.

Tiger was No. 1 for 683 weeks, a record Scheffler concedes may never be broken. To illustrate, the previous mark was Greg Norman at 331 weeks.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever see anything like that again in the game of golf,” Scheffler said.

This is why the generation coming after Tiger pines for his return, however brief it may be. They would give anything to be paired up with him — be it at the Players or golf’s most hallowed ground, Augusta National — just once before Woods exits the game for good.

“I’d love that,” said 32-year-old Canadian golfer Corey Conners, who has never played competitively with Woods and finished 46th at the 2019 Masters when he won. “Time’s ticking. Having grown up idolizing him and watching Tiger beat everyone for years, it’d be special to be paired with him one day.”

Scheffler got a taste of that for his only time in the final round at the 2020 Masters. He watched in awe as Tiger, after making a professional-high score of 10 (putting three balls in the water) at the par-3 12th hole, rebounded by making five birdies in his last six holes.

Woods’ 76 impressed Scheffler for its sheer grit, making the effort to keep grinding away and climbing 20 spots up the leaderboard to finish tied for 38th.

“I mean, it’s completely meaningless to him, like at that stage in his career, what’s the point?” said Scheffler. “And for him just to step up there and completely turn it around. And I kid you not, he hit, still to this day, three of the best iron shots I’ve ever seen hit coming into those last few holes, and it was just unbelievable to watch.

“The way he competes in this game is different than a lot of players. He puts everything he has into every shot that he hits on the golf course, which I think is a really underrated skill out here.”

Right closure at the Players

Take Woods’ most famous stroke at the Players, the 50-foot, triple-breaker, “better-than-most” putt in the 2001 third round, as described by NBC analyst Gary Koch. What is often overlooked about that putt is how long Woods took to survey the green, trying to decipher the angles and how much the ball would break at certain points.

No one knew before Woods delivered that putt for the ages — when he was already three-quarters of the way to a Tiger Slam — that making it would end up being the difference in winning his first Players by one shot over Vijay Singh.

Woods gave fans at the Stadium Course and millions watching on television a display of golf that weekend – a 66-67 finish – forever etched in our memory.

It’s probably asking too much to expect a 48-year-old Tiger to ever again duplicate that feat, even at an idyllic venue like Augusta National.

Horschel believes Woods saying No Thanks to this year’s Players is a sign that the public should lower even its current modest expectations for his appearances.

“I know he was ambitious about playing once a month, that was his goal,” said Horschel. “Personally, what he told us is he said it may not be that much. He would try, but it just depends on what his body does and allows him to do.”

It’s safe to say there won’t be another Tiger Woods. Maybe some will have great career stretches, but nobody with so much advance hype that ends up far exceeding it.

Tiger Woods fan Cole Walker from Osteen, Florida, channels his hero at the 17th during final round the 2023 Players Championship in Ponte Vedra Beach. (Photo: Bob Self/Florida Times-Union)

Undoubtedly, golf will produce more stars that will go on to have fabulous careers. Scheffler, 27, has positioned himself to be special. It’s anybody’s guess what will become of 2024 first-time winners Jake Knapp, Nick Dunlap and Matthieu Pavon.

But to see Woods tee it up one more time at the Players Championship, where he has never missed a cut in 18 appearances? That’d be quite the spectacle.

For a two-time champion and still the game’s biggest star, it’d be a cool way to say goodbye to the Stadium Course.