There’s no athlete more difficult for the American public to quit than Tiger Woods. It doesn’t need to. It doesn’t need to write him off. It doesn’t need to banish him. Two DUIs in a decade and another horrific single-car accident five years ago are not inherently signs of a bad person.
Yet, they are still mistakes. They are reckless. They are the choices of a person not thinking responsibly and definitely not thinking of others. And strangely, the errors of Woods’ near 50 years in the limelight are a sizable portion of his Shakespearian arc — the chosen one who can come back from anything, the injuries and the misdeeds. It’s why, up until Friday’s rollover crash in Florida and subsequent DUI charge, the golf world still waited with bated breath to know if he’d play the Masters in two weeks.
No, you don’t need to give up on Tiger Woods. However, he is a 50-year-old man who clearly continues to struggle. Each act of careless behavior no longer exists just as a poetic chapter in his hero’s arc. It’s reality. Which means it might be fair to ask if he remains the correct face for a new-look PGA Tour being built from the beginning.
Woods is no longer a golfer. He is, for all intents and purposes, a high-ranking executive. He’s vice chairman of PGA Tour Enterprises. It created an essentially permanent seat on the policy board just for Woods. And now he chairs the future competition committee, the group charged with building a new model for professional golf. PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp is the most powerful man in golf, but at least in terms of how he’s presented, Woods is No. 2.
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Oh, and if you think it’s just who leads the boardroom, the PGA of America keeps pushing Woods to captain the U.S. Ryder Cup team in 2027 in Ireland. His mere presence remains so valuable that TGL, the league he co-founded, made sure he was there for each of his team’s matches, even if he was not physically able to play. When he did finally swing a golf club into the simulator, it delivered nearly a million viewers, the highest ratings of the season.
Woods will remain the most beloved figure in golf, and I will not begrudge someone how they feel. He’s the biggest star the game has ever had, one who lifted an entire sport and seared more memories into brains than any athlete outside of Michael Jordan.
He’s proven to be the exception to just about every rule. He can come back from scandal and shame. He can win the U.S. Open with a broken leg. At 43, after countless surgeries and machinery in his body, he can win the Masters. Even after that horrific 2021 crash shattered his leg and ankle, he still somehow made three more Masters cuts.
Yet, maybe after chance three or four, the comebacks are less romantic. Because if any other high-ranking PGA Tour executive were charged with multiple DUIs, questions would be asked about whether they remained the right person to lead the project.
Right now, Rolapp needs everyone aligned. He took a bold risk this month by standing in front of a packed PGA Tour headquarters and setting his manifest destiny: A new PGA Tour schedule and model to be voted on by June.
Brian Rolapp has made Tiger Woods an important part of his PGA Tour leadership team. (Orlando Ramirez / Getty Images)
That risk ruffled feathers. While many powerful figures — including Woods — are in his corner and pushing it toward success, plenty of powerful stakeholders disagree. Rolapp is trying to uproot a multibillion-dollar corporation and move it toward a new future. That takes an undistracted direction from his inner circle.
And Woods appears to need help right now. His focus should be far from golf, and playing the least of his concerns. Whether he should be concerned about Zoom meetings and competitive models is another question.
There’s no need to cancel Woods. Not at all. If he shows up at a Champions Tour event, that’s great. If he appears at the Masters as a spectator or attends the Champions Dinner, all the power to him.
As a golfer, Woods never knew when to quit and was unafraid to push through the pain to achieve greatness. As a man, maybe this time he should know when it’s time to change.