After playing just nine rounds over the first 10 months of 2022, Tiger Woods is prepared to nearly match that over the next month and a half. Woods announced Wednesday that he will play the self-hosted Hero World Challenge from Dec. 1-4 in the Bahamas.

Woods joins a field he recruited, which includes Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Viktor Hovland, Jordan Spieth, Hideki Matsuyama and Tom Kim. Most of the top 20 golfers in the world will be in attendance for this four-round event at Albany Golf Course, and while it is not considered an official PGA Tour event, the Hero World Challenge does receive Official World Golf Rankings points. (Tiger could use a few of those after missing so much time over the last two years.)

In addition to the Hero World Challenge, Tiger will tee it up on Dec. 10 at the seventh edition of The Match alongside Rory McIlroy. Those two will square off against Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas in a 12-hole exhibition at Pelican Golf Club in Belleair, Florida.

Additionally, Woods is expected to play alongside his son, Charlie, at the PNC Championship on Dec. 17-18. Though he has not officially committed to the PNC, this will likely be the third consecutive year he and Charlie would play in that event. If Woods commits to the PNC, we will see him play seven rounds over 18 days in December after he was on the course for just nine rounds over the first 334 days of 2022.

Woods finished 47th at the Masters then withdrew after the third round of the PGA Championship and missed the cut altogether at The Open in July.

Tiger has not played the Hero World Challenge since 2019 when he finished fourth, four back of winner Henrik Stenson. It is expected that he will ride in a cart for The Match and the PNC (if he plays), but it’s unknown whether he will walk or ride in a cart for the Hero World Challenge.

While the immediacy of Woods’ golf ambitions is encouraging for what his 2023 schedule will look like, don’t expect him to show up at many more events beyond the major championships, if he even plays all four of those. It was at the Hero World Challenge last year that Tiger advised everyone to be conservative about projecting his playing schedule going forward.

“I don’t foresee this leg ever being what it used to be, hence, I’ll never have the back what it used to be, and clock’s ticking,” said Woods. “I’m getting older. I’m not getting any younger. All that combined means that a full schedule and a full practice schedule and the recovery that it would take to do that — no, I don’t have any desire to do that. But to ramp up for a few events a year … as Mr. [Ben] Hogan did — he did a pretty good job of it, and there’s no reason that I can’t do that and feel ready.”

We’ll see how many events is “a few events a year,” but there’s certainly reason for optimism with Woods filling up his December with golf.

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A new era of the PGA Tour will begin in 2023. After announcing late this summer that nine of its 2023 tournaments would be elevated events with massive purses, the PGA Tour will reportedly increase that number of elevated tournaments to 13 per season with 12 of those 13 events paying out $20 million or more to golfers.

These big-time, big-money events will feature all the top players in the world, according to multiple reports, with the Phoenix Open, RBC Heritage, Travelers Championship and Wells Fargo Championship being the four newest additions, per Golfweek.

Those events will join the Tournament of Champions, Genesis Invitational, Arnold Palmer Invitational, Players Championship, WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play, the Memorial Tournament, St. Jude Championship, BMW Championship and Tour Championship in the elevated category. 

In total, 10 of the 13 elevated tournaments will feature purses of $20 million. The only events that have varying purses are the Tournament of Champions ($15 million), Players Championship ($25 million) and Tour Championship ($75 million toward the FedEx Cup overall).

These are the 13 PGA Tour events that all the top players in the world agreed to play together at the now-famous hotel meeting during the 2022 BMW Championship. Additionally, those players will ostensibly play the four major championships to bring the total of guaranteed appearances to 17 per season. It’s possible they may also be required to play three additional PGA Tour events on the calendar as a way to spread out star power across the non-elevated tournaments. That’s a likely total of 20 events during the 2022-23 PGA Tour season for the game’s top players.

Those golfers, defined annually as the 20 players who finished highest in the Player Impact Program, have agreed to play in these elevated events moving forward as a way to combat the newly-launched LIV Golf, which features limited events (14 in 2023) in which all the top players in that league play.

The only top-ranked players that have left the PGA Tour for LIV Golf have been Dustin Johnson and Cameron Smith. Though other big names have departed, none were in the top 20 in the Official World Golf Rankings.

“We need to get the top guys together more often than we do,” said Rory McIlroy earlier this year after the players-only meeting in Delaware ahead of the BMW. “I’m talking about all in the same tournaments, all in the same weeks.”

Functionally, this elevated event path creates two different leagues for the PGA Tour. There will be the 17 elevated tournaments (including the major championships, which are run by non-PGA Tour organizations but are considered PGA Tour events) and then the 30 non-elevated tournaments, most of which will not feature the PGA Tour’s top-drawing stars. However, this consolidates star power in a meaningful way and packs it into fewer events rather than spreading it thin throughout the season.

Also, it appears likely the PGA Tour will rotating some of these elevated event purses across different tournaments so that, for example, perhaps the AT&T Byron Nelson will be an elevated event in 2025 and give those in the Dallas/Fort Worth market an opportunity to see all the best golfers in the world. This is likely to provide a better overall fan experience than the status quo.

“Our top players are firmly behind the Tour, helping us deliver an unmatched product to our fans, who will be all but guaranteed to see the best players competing against each other in 20 events or more throughout the season,” said PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan at the Tour Championship earlier this year.

“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented commitment, a testament to who these guys are and what they believe in. To now have our top players rally around this organization and commit to a portfolio of tournaments like never before, I think our fans, our partners, our players are going to love it. I promise you, there’s more to come.”

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Fifty members of LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed tour which launched in June, have jointly issued a signed statement requesting that LIV Golf tournaments earn points towards the Official World Golf Ranking.

As things currently stand, LIV Golf tournaments do not qualify for ranking points, meaning that players who have only taken part in LIV Golf events since its launch are slipping down the world rankings, leaving some in danger of missing out on qualifying for the Majors and the Olympics.

The OWGR, which was first established in 1986, ranks players based on their position in individual tournaments over a rolling two-year period, taking into account the strength of the field. New rankings are calculated each week. In 2022, the results from 23 global tours factored into the world rankings, but have not included those from the LIV Golf Invitational Series, which has so far held five events – one in the UK and four in the USA, with three more due to take place this year, and 14 tournaments planned for next season.

The governing board of the OWGR is headed by chairman Peter Dawson, the former chief executive of the R&A, and has its headquarters at the European Tour Group’s offices at Wentworth Club in Surrey. There are seven other directors, including representatives from the PGA of America, the International Federation of PGA Tours, the USGA, the PGA Tour, Augusta National, the R&A and the DP World Tour.

In a letter addressed to Mr Dawson, the 50 signatories, including world no.2 Cameron Smith and two-time Major winner Dustin Johnson, who has slipped down from 13th to 22nd in the world ranking since moving to LIV Golf, have demanded that the results of LIV Golf events be included in OWGR’s ranking calculations on a retrospective basis.

The letter insists that to leave LIV Golf results out of the OWGR would be the equivalent to ‘leaving Belgium, Argentina and England out of the FIFA rankings’.

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