The newly crowned king of the Player Impact Program already has a good start on the 2022 race. Tiger Woods took to Twitter to troll Phil Mickelson, whom Woods beat to win the PGA Tour’s lucrative year-long bonus.
Back in December, Mickelson claimed he won the PIP, although the PGA Tour said results weren’t finalized yet. But after they were officially announced on Wednesday, with Woods on top, Woods didn’t miss his chance to dunk on Mickelson. The 15-time major champ tweeted a screenshot of Mickelson erroneously claiming he won and added text that said simply: “whoops.”
🤷♂️ whoops 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/SkMTGerVOB
— Tiger Woods (@TigerWoods) March 2, 2022
In about 20 minutes, the tweet was retweeted nearly 4,000 times and liked nearly 20,000 times.
The Tour created the PIP last year to incentivize players who helped bring the most eyeballs to the sport, while also doubling as a way to reward its top stars who might have been lured away by big-money rival golf leagues. The Tour — which uses several different digital metrics to track the ranking (more on that here) — had previously said it wouldn’t announce the winners, but on Wednesday it tweeted the final standings. (Golf Digest’s Dan Rapaport tweeted the results 25 minutes earlier.)
A total of $40 million was dished out, with Woods winning $8 million. Mickelson took home $6 million for second. Bubba Watson, who was 10th, earned $3 million. The complete results are here.
The results are in for the inaugural Player Impact Program.
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) March 2, 2022
1. Tiger Woods
2. Phil Mickelson
3. Rory McIlroy
4. Jordan Spieth
5. Bryson DeChambeau
6. Justin Thomas
7. Dustin Johnson
8. Brooks Koepka
9. Jon Rahm
10. Bubba Watson
Woods claiming the PIP’s top prize is yet another example of his influence in the sport. Due to his car accident in February, he didn’t make an official PGA Tour start in 2021; his only appearance on the course was a well-publicized team event with his son, Charlie, at the PNC Championship in December. The hype around that event and Woods’ return might also have been enough to push him ahead of Mickelson in the PIP.
Woods’ jab at Mickelson is also notable for a couple of reasons. For one, Mickelson has gone quiet on social media since his controversial comments two weeks ago; and Woods, despite a massive following on Twitter (6.5 million followers), isn’t known to get too playful in his tweets.
But this time he couldn’t hold back.
