Tiger Woods hates the Players Championship. He hates everything about it. The slow play. The course. The 17th hole. And the fact that it’s the purported Fifth Major — and the way Tim Finchem kept talking it up as if it were a real major.Â
I had waited for years for Tiger to finally skip this tournament. In the past, he just couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse. But this year, he struck gold. The knee scope conveniently lets him off the hook. He’ll be laid up for 4-6 weeks and voila! See ya later, Sawgrass gator!
Don’t think for a second that Finchem didn’t consider this a big-time dis. So much so that he even issued a statement expressing his thinly veiled annoyance. Let’s face it, while Tiger is out, the only tournament of consequence that he’ll miss is the Players Championship. He might makes it back just in time for Jack’s tournament, the Memorial.
But Finchem and TPC only have themselves to blame. By shifting the tournament from March to May, they practically invited the top players to skip the tournament. Before, it was an important tuneup for the Masters, and all of the world’s top players obliged by showing up. Now, it’s just another tournament between the Masters and U.S. Open, never mind it does boast the riches purse on tour.
After Tiger won TPC in 2001, it completed his checklist. By then, he’d already won every big tournament on tour in addition to the majors, and from that point and on you know it’s only a matter of time that he’d skip it. He’s done that to the Mercedes Championship pretty much annually now. He’d even passed on the Tour Championship, before it reincarnated as the final tournament of the FedEx Cup “Playoff.”Â
Skipping TPC this year was totally premeditated. He’d had the scope done no matter how he performed at the Masters. And by being out, he most definitely realized that he’d miss the Players. You can almost see the mischievous grin on his face when he cooked up this little scheme.
Because Tiger gets it. Nobody is ever going to remember how many Players he wins. The Fifth Major. Yeah. Do you remember who’s the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse?
Exactly.
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