There is Tiger Woods news at this Masters. But no Tiger Woods

AUGUSTA, Ga. — On Tuesday afternoon a dozen club employees were gathered in the second-floor dining room of the Augusta National clubhouse, getting ready for the Champions Dinner. A woman was ironing a white tablecloth as it sat on the long rectangular dinner table that filled the cozy rectangular room, portraits and books on its walls. Yellow floral arrangements were being teased and fluffed. Young men in clubhouse uniforms were moving heavy wood chairs. It was all vaguely solemn and decidedly orderly. Dinner would be for 33­ — or 34. At this hour, to the club’s on-the-ground employees, Tiger Woods was a maybe. He’s often a maybe.

For this son of an Army officer, that’s part of his SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). He keeps us guessing. He’s never been one to share much, about his play, his health, his business plans. In an us-against-the-world mentality, there’s nothing to be gained by sharing. Jack Nicklaus is, as Arnold Palmer was, disarmingly candid. It was their nature. Woods is the opposite.

On Monday afternoon, Fred Ridley, the club’s social-activist chairman, came to the Press Building and offered reporters, and by extension the world, details of a partnership between Augusta National and Woods, a five-time Masters winner. If these plans unfold as announced, young students in Augusta will have more and better opportunities to study science and math and the public-at-large will have new and improved playing conditions, and more playing opportunities, at The Patch, Augusta’s historic public golf course. Talk about a win-win. It’s exceedingly rare for an Augusta National chairman to have a Monday press conference, in addition to the chairman’s traditional Wednesday press conference. The club wanted this announcement to have its own spotlight for a day. 

In the days leading up the press conference, club officials wanted to know one thing: Would Woods be sitting beside Ridley for the announcement? Woods was a maybe, until he was a no.

It’s not easy being Tiger Woods, and it’s not easy working with Tiger Woods. Those statements are not meant to be blanket statements, but by all available evidence they are true ones. For most of Woods’ career, his custom was to wait until the last possible minute — Friday, 5 p.m. — to commit to playing in the following week’s PGA Tour event. He had his reasons, and tournament organizers and sponsors had no choice but to live by Tiger’s rules and Tiger’s ways. Woods would cling to maybe for as long as possible. Was he going to make a rehab start at Valspar? Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It created drama, attention and headaches.

Tiger does as he pleases. That has been part of his M.O. forever: Doing as you please — it’s an exercise in power, really. Because I can.

In a press release about the club’s partnership with Woods, nothing was said about Woods’s absence from the press conference. In recent weeks, Woods has used his X account, with its 6.4 million followers, to announce that he has a new girlfriend (“love is in the air”) and to share an April Fool’s Day joke that he would be playing in this year’s Masters, despite a recent injury. Five minutes later he added this: P.S. April Fools my Achilles is still a mess :).

(The addendum is the custom in these matters. After Sidd Finch, Mets’ righthanded pitching prospect with a fastball clocked at 168 miles an hour, appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated on April 1, 1985, there was a footnote in the magazine’s next issue, one week later: Sidd Finch had retired.)

On PGATour.com, there was a short news story about the Woods-Augusta National partnership with this sentence near its end: “Woods, a five-time Masters winner, was not in attendance for Monday’s press conference as he continues to recover from Achilles surgery.”

Other news outlets similarly implied that his recovery somehow prevented Woods from attending the Monday press conference. On March 11, Woods said, by statement, that he had had minimally invasive Achilles surgery for a ruptured tendon in his left heel. Per various medical websites, a month after such a procedure, recovering patients can typically walk but often wear a medical boot to immobilize the foot.

Woods has a complicated relationship with Augusta National. He doesn’t talk about the club and its course and its social history with hushed reverence, as so many others do. You don’t hear him use a phrase like “cathedral in the pines.” Arnold Palmer, who won the Masters four times, revered Augusta National and became the first pro to be a dues-paying member. Later, Jack Nicklaus, who has six titles, joined the club. There’s always a dance in these matters at elite clubs. The club has to want the candidate — and vice-versa. Woods almost never plays the role of supplicant. It is not often required of him. A privilege of success.

Woods has some relationships at the club and with club members. Ridley and Woods were playing golf together last year when Ridley first mentioned the renovation project at The Patch to him. That conversation was the spark that led to the Monday announcement and all that will come from it.

News

More tellingly, Woods has a warm playful rapport with more than a few club employees, who often are in the same place, doing the same thing, year after year. He has nicknames for some of them. Woods once saw a tournament employee, off-duty in this moment, walking the property with his young daughter. Woods later asked this visiting shift worker for his daughter’s name and the family’s home address. A few weeks later, a glossy photo of Woods, signed by Woods to the girl, arrived with no advance notice.

Stories like that one about Woods abound. He likes people who want nothing from him. He doesn’t encounter much of that. His fondness for Bernhard Langer, from all available evidence, is partly explained by Langer’s quiet, respectful demeanor, his work ethic which matches Woods’s, and the fact that he does not want anything from Woods.

The USGA would be thrilled to have Woods, a nine-time winner of USGA events, as an official and public pro-bono face of the organization, as Arnold Palmer was for decades. It could be good for the USGA, for Woods and for golf. But getting him to commit to a role has been an ongoing struggle.

Woods attended, and hosted, his first Champions Dinner in 1998, which was the final one Gene Sarazen ever attended. By many accounts, he thoroughly enjoys the dinner, with its storytelling, joke telling and club-within-the-club vibe. A hobbling Woods attended the dinner in 2017, when his back was so bad he told people privately that he did not know if would ever play competitive golf again. He struggled on the steps to get to the second-floor dining room that night. Later that Tuesday night, he flew to England to consult with a back specialist there.

In April 2021, as he was recuperating from surgeries after an inexplicable, near-fatal car crash, he missed the Champions Dinner for the first time. It was hosted that year by Dustin Johnson, the winner of the pandemic-delayed 2020 Masters. Woods posted this quip via Twitter: “I’ll miss running up @DJohnsonPGA’s bill at the Champions Dinner tonight. It’s still one of my favorite nights of the year.” Woods was at the dinner in 2021 (when he didn’t play), 2022 (40th place), 2023 (didn’t finish second round) and 2024 (60th place).

Early Tuesday night, you could see Fred Ridley here, driving a golf cart without accompaniment, going from the tournament office to the clubhouse. Suppertime! There was Jose Maria Olazabal, going to his car in a parking lot near the clubhouse, retrieving dress shoes. Before long, the parade of champions was underway, entering the clubhouse, going up the winding staircase to the second floor, for dinner courtesy of Scottie Scheffler. No Vijay Singh — he had told the club he was not attending this year’s Masters, owing to a recent injury. But everybody else. Almost.

Later on Tuesday night, the club released a dinner photo. The head count was 33 — Tiger Woods was not in attendance. Thirty-two former winners, plus, per custom, the club chairman. There was nothing on Woods’s X account, or elsewhere, about his absence.

Wednesday morning, by text, Mark Steinberg, Woods’s longtime manager, and Rob McNamara, an executive in Woods’s company, were asked why Woods did not attend the Monday press conference or the Champions Dinner. No response came and none is expected. That is SOP for such queries. When Tiger Woods wants to make a statement, he makes a statement. And when he doesn’t, he doesn’t. 

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com