As a kid, Tiger Woods and his father, Earl, used to go to a corner of the back nine of the Navy Golf Course in Cypress, California, and hit balls from their own shag bag.
“I got them mostly out of the ditch from other players hitting balls, and those were my shag balls,” Tiger recalled at the PNC Championship this week. “I’d pick the trees on the right to hit to, and he’d pick the trees on the left to hit to, and then we’d play in the last three holes kind of towards dark. And it was game on. And so it was, OK, you do your work, I do my work, and then let’s go head-to-head.”
Asked whether he did the same with his 13-year-old son Charlie, Tiger flashed his trademark wide smile and said, “All the time.”
Last week, rather than going head-to-head – Tiger said Charlie has outdriven him but yet to beat him – Tiger and Charlie teamed up for the third straight year in the PNC Championship in Orlando at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club. This anecdote may have summed up why Tiger was willing to limp around a golf course at a Silly Season event. Father and son, who limped along with him due to a bum ankle, finished T-8 after struggling a bit on Sunday and shooting 65 with two bogeys, but the score was immaterial. It’s a two-person scramble, a glorified exhibition, but it’s become the one event that Tiger won’t miss. He even said he’d risk a setback to play, something he wisely avoided at the Hero World Challenge by withdrawing with plantar fasciitis.
For a guy who managed to play just nine competitive rounds on the PGA Tour this year, Tiger kept busy in December between his hosting duties in the Bahamas, playing with Rory McIlroy in The Match and with Charlie in Orlando at the PNC. Tiger divulged in his Hero press conference that he’s undergone more surgeries this year, which was news to the world, but wouldn’t disclose anything about them. His plantar fasciitis prevented him from walking a golf course for five straight days in the Bahamas, but he can get around well enough with a cart. He showed at The Match that he still has enough speed and distance to compete on the PGA Tour, and outdrove Justin Thomas on multiple occasions on Saturday.
“I wasn’t joking yesterday when I said it,” Thomas said on Sunday. “When he’s feeling well, he’s longer than I am with a driver. I might be able to hit it further than him if I go after one but consistently, I mean, he’s hitting it farther than I am right now.”
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