The field for the 2022 Tiger Woods-hosted Hero World Challenge has been released, and while it includes a lengthy list of PGA Tour stars, the biggest name of all is missing: Tiger Woods.
Woods announced the field for his annual exhibition event on his website Tuesday morning, and it includes a whopping 16 of the top-20 players in the Official World Golf Ranking. Among them are World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, PGA champion Justin Thomas, U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick, Jordan Spieth, Jon Rahm and Xander Schauffele, to name a few.
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Also joining the action for the first time is International team Presidents Cup star Tom Kim.
Unsurprisingly given Woods’ vocal support for the PGA Tour, no LIV Golf pros are featured in the field for the invitational event, which will be held at Albany in The Bahamas from December 1-4.
Suspiciously absent from the field list, though, is Woods himself. Typically a fixture of the event, Woods last appeared in the Hero back in 2019, when he finished 4th a few months after his Zozo Championship win. The 2020 event was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Tiger sat out last year’s tournament while recovering from his car accident.
These days, the question of whether or not Tiger is fit to compete is always up in the air. He played in just three events in 2022, finishing T47 at the Masters, withdrawing after three rounds at the PGA Championship and missing the cut at the Open Championship at St. Andrews in July.
We did see Tiger swing a club more recently at the Nexus Cup amateur event at Liberty National in September, which he hosts.
We also saw Tiger caddie for his son Charlie at a junior event last week, though he kept his clubs in the car.
In addition to the 17 players announced for the Hero field on Tuesday, three other spots remain to be filled. Woods could eventually take one of those spots and play, but we’ll have to wait and see. That is quite possibly Tiger’s plan, too: wait a little longer to see if the body is in good enough shape to participate.
You can check out the full announced field for the Hero World Challenge below.
2022 Hero World Challenge field (world ranking)
Scottie Scheffler (1)
Xander Schauffele (5)
Jon Rahm (6)
Will Zalatoris (7)
Justin Thomas (8)
Collin Morikawa (9)
Matt Fitzpatrick (10)
Viktor Hovland (11)
Sam Burns (12)
Jordan Spieth (13)
Tony Finau (14)
Cameron Young (15)
Billy Horschel (16)
Max Homa (17)
Hideki Matsuyama (18)
Sungjae Im (19)
Tom Kim (21)
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