Tiger Woods’s 2019 season will begin at Torrey Pines next week.
Woods has officially committed to the Farmers Insurance Open, which begins on Jan. 24 at Torrey Pines in San Diego, Calif., for his first start of the new year. He also committed to the Genesis Open on Feb. 14, which is run by his foundation.
It will be Woods’s first official start since he won the Tour Championship in September for his 80th career PGA Tour victory. Since then Woods has played in the Ryder Cup, faced off against Phil Mickelson in The Match and hosted his own unofficial event, the Hero World Challenge.
Woods has won eight times at Torrey Pines. He’s won the Farmers seven times and won the U.S. Open there in 2008.
Woods joins what is already a stacked field that includes Rory McIlroy, Jason Day, Justin Rose, Jon Rahm, Rickie Fowler, Jordan Spieth, Patrick Reed and others.
The 14-time major champion made his 2018 debut at the Farmers last year and finished T23. It was a promising 72 holes, as it was only his second start (following the Hero) after his fusion back surgery. Woods missed the cut in his next event but found his form after, finishing 12th, T2 and T5 in his next three starts.
His season eventually built up to a runner-up finish at the PGA Championship and a victory at the Tour Championship, which ended his winless drought dating back to 2013.
Woods, who turned 43 on Dec. 30, had seven top 10s in 18 starts in 2018.
During a Presidents Cup media event in December, Woods discussed a toned-down schedule for 2019.
“I certainly won’t play as many times as I did last year, or last season,” he said. “I played a lot of events. I qualified for a couple events. I missed the cut in LA, I added Tampa, I qualified for the Akron event. And so it kind of just played out. At the beginning of the year if [you] would have asked me would I have gotten through all the playoff events, well, I didn’t know I was going to qualify for the playoff events, so that was something that I hadn’t really trained for and planned for, and you saw at the end of the year, I was pretty worn out. So trying to pace myself next year and do a better job of that with the entire 12 months. Hopefully I’ve learned my lessons this year.”
Tickets for the Farmers Insurance Open are available on their website.
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