After nearly an 18-month layoff from big time golf, Tiger Woods makes his return to PGA Tour events that count for something Thursday at the Farmers Insurance Open. He’ll take center stage at a course he’s dominated on over the course of his career -- Torrey Pines — where he’s won this event seven times & captured his last major title on one healthy leg at the 2008 US Open.
Of course, Big Cat made his return to competitive golf back in early December at his own Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas. But that’s not considered a full-status PGA Tour event with only 18 spots delegated to top players & pals of Woods throughout the world. It feels more like your local Sunday Skins game than a big time tournament.
That, um, won’t be the case this week at Torrey Pines. Woods will be paired alongside the No. 1 and 3 players in the world & new TaylorMade comrades Jason Day and Dustin Johnson. It’ll be the group that dominates the week’s TV coverage and a fairly comfortable one for Woods to return to big time action — Day is among his closest friends on Tour, if not the world.
Expectations for the Big Cat this week vary from “disaster” to “another Torrey title.” We took our best shot at predicting all the different ways this could go, but no one knows after a 521-day layoff from the PGA Tour. We’ll update the week’s developments and results here all week long.
But that’s the range, where Tiger always seems to look like he’s going to conquer the world. His first drive immediately sailed way right, rattled around in a tree, and led to an opening bogey. It didn’t get much better after that, either, as Tiger scuffled to an opening round 76. It came undone mostly on the back nine, where Woods posted a 39 despite carding all three of his birdies on that side.
Three red numbers and still a 39 on the inward 9? That’s how ugly it was on the rest of the holes, which featured a 5-over stretch from Nos. 12 to 15. The biggest damage came at the 15th, where Tiger completely smother-hooked a drive off the entire course and made a double bogey. The 4-over 76 came on the tougher South Course, but this wasn’t an overall pretty day for the Big Cat. Read a full recap here. After 18 holes, your leader is Justin Rose, who is in the house at 7-under. Full leaderboard here.
Tiger’s start on Thursday will not be on TV. Yes, you read that correctly. Unfortunately, Tiger tees off at 1:40 p.m. ET and Golf Channel will not be live until 3 p.m. ET. Their pregame show starts at 2:30 so they should show coverage and highlights during that stretch. PGA TOUR Live announced Thursday morning that they would stream the start of Tiger’s round on their service. You just need to buy a subscription. So that’s one way to watch the start.
