World No. 1,266 Tiger Woods is certainly not used to that prefix ahead of his name.
However, what comes with sitting at the lowest ranking in his 30 years of playing Official World Golf Ranking-eligible events is the chance to make the largest single jump of his career next week at the Hero World Challenge.
While not an official PGA Tour event, Woods’ Hero features a star-studded field of 15 of the top 20 golfers in the world and has offered world ranking points since 2009. Woods has often played the event as a sort of test run, especially when coming off injuries, and even made the single biggest ranking jump of his career at the 2017 edition. That week he flew 531 spots from his previous low of No. 1,199 to No. 668 with a T9 finish.
With a win next week, he could dwarf that jump.
Twitter’s OWGR whisperer Nosferatu projects Woods would move inside the top 250 in the world with a win in the Bahamas. That’s a jump of more than 1000 spots.
While the OWGR fomula has been tweaked this year to discount limited fields like the 20-man Hero, the field strength and Woods’ extremely low ranking allow the possibility for the mammoth jump.
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Woods made only three starts this past year and finished just one, with a 47th place showing at the Masters, his first event back after a February 2021 car crash that left him with severe injuries to his right leg. Most are rooting for Woods to simply make it through the 72 holes relatively pain-free, but hey, this man won the U.S. Open on one leg and then won another major 11 years later.
Woods is a five-time winner of the Hero, which he started to benefit his foundation in 2000. However, he hasn’t come away with the trophy since 2011.
The tournament has been a bit of a sign of things to come for Woods as after his win in 2011, he broke a more than two-year winless drought on the PGA Tour in 2012, and after his solid performance in 2017, he broke a five-year winless drought in 2018.
Woods announced two other events for next month: The Match VI with Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, and the PNC Father/Son Challenge with his son Charlie, but neither of those events will earn him any more ranking points.
