Though he has yet to commit to the season’s next two major championships, Tiger Woods will make at least one appearance before the Open Championship.
Woods will play in the J.P. McManus Pro-Am, tournament organizers announced, in the week preceding the 150th Open, which will be held at St. Andrews’ Old Course in Scotland. The pro-am will be played July 4-5 at Ireland’s Adare Manor, the site of the 2027 Ryder Cup.
Woods finished 47th in the recent Masters in his first official tournament since he sustained serious injuries to his right leg in a single-vehicle crash in February 2021 near Los Angeles. Afterward, he committed to play in July at St. Andrews, where he won the 2000 and 2005 Open titles, two of his 15 major championships. However, he has yet to commit to playing the next two major championships: the PGA Championship next month at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he won the 2007 PGA, or the U.S. Open in June at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts (READ MORE).
The final round of the recent Masters Tournament drew an average of 10.173 million viewers, CBS reported, a 7-percent increase from last year and the biggest audience on any network since the 2019 Masters, which Tiger Woods won.
Not coincidentally, Woods returned to competition earlier this month at Augusta National, 14 months after mangling his right leg in a single-car accident near Los Angeles. As he shot a first-round 71, Woods attracted 2.8 million viewers to ESPN, a 21-percent spike from the opening round last year. Though Woods would fade from contention, that mattered little to golf fans as he qualified for weekend play. For the second round, ESPN logged an average of 3.5 million viewers, a 31-percent jump from the second round in 2021. At the peak of CBS’ telecast on Sunday, 13.16 million viewers watched at 6:45 p.m.-7 p.m. as Scottie Scheffler slipped into his first green jacket.
CBS Sports and its streaming platform reported that Sunday’s final round was its largest streaming audience ever for golf (READ MORE).
Jack Newton, a former PGA Tour winner who lost his right arm and eye after walking into a plane’s spinning propeller four decades ago at the height of his golf career, died of undisclosed health complications in his native Australia. He was 72.
Though Newton won the 1978 Buick-Goodwrench Open for his lone title on the PGA Tour, he perhaps was best-known for having lost to Tom Watson by one stroke in an 18-hole playoff in the 1975 Open Championship at Carnoustie. He also finished T2 in the 1980 Masters.
In a statement, his family remembered Newton as “a fearless competitor and iconic Australian, blazing a formidable trail during his professional golfing career between 1971 and 1983. He fought back from tremendous adversity as only he could.” (READ MORE).
TAP-INS
The Presidents Cup will return to Melbourne, Australia, in 2028 and 2040, the PGA Tour announced, though the course was not disclosed. The Presidents Cup, a biennial series matching the top U.S. male professionals against an International (non-European) team, was played at Royal Melbourne in 1998, 2011 and 2019 (READ MORE). … Fred Couples and Zach Johnson will serve as assistant captains for the 2022 Presidents Cup, American captain Davis Love III announced. The U.S. will host the Internationals on Sept. 22-25 at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, North Carolina. Couples, 62, compiled a 3-0 record as captain in the Presidents Cup, and he owns a 9-5-2 record as a player in four editions of the biennial matches. Johnson, 46, the 2023 U.S. Ryder Cup captain, compiled a 10-6-1 record as a player in four Presidents Cups. The Americans have won the past eight Presidents Cups and lead the series, 11-1-1 (READ MORE). … The Australian PGA Championship will open the DP World Tour’s 2022-23 schedule and be played Nov. 24-27 at Royal Queensland Golf Club in Brisbane, officials announced. In January, Australia’s Jediah Morgan won the 85th Australian PGA after the event had been scrapped in the previous two seasons because of the COVID-19 pandemic (READ MORE). … American teen Alexa Pano announced that she will make her debut as a touring professional on the developmental Epson Tour at the Copper Rock Championship, to be played April 21-23 in Hurricane, Utah. Pano, 17, of Lake Worth, Florida, tied for 12th at the recent Augusta National Women’s Amateur and was No. 64 in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking. She is perhaps best known for her featured role as an 8-year-old in the 2013 Netflix documentary “The Short Game” (READ MORE). … The 2023 PGA Professional Championship will be played April 30-May 3 at Twin Warriors Golf Club at Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort & Spa and Santa Ana Golf Club in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, the PGA of America announced. The tournament will feature a 312-player field of club and teaching pros and award the top 20 scorers with spots at the PGA Championship, to be played May 18-21 at Oak Hill’s East Course in Rochester, New York (READ MORE). … The DP World Tour and the Emirates Golf Federation entered a deal through 2031 that will commit at least two Challenge Tour events per year to the United Arab Emirates and guarantee 30 spots per event to local players. The DP World Tour, which first visited the UAE in 1989 for the Dubai Desert Classic, also agreed to support the federation’s junior initiatives (READ MORE). … Four caddies at Montclair Golf Club in West Orange, New Jersey, have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that they have been forced to work an average of 10 hours per day for six to seven days per week during the peak season and rely on $60 bag fees and tips paid by golfers. The plaintiffs contend that they typically do not make the state’s minimum wage of $13 per hour, according to the complaint filed in Superior Court of Essex County (READ MORE). … Grace Crawford, originally from North Berwick, Scotland (where she was mentored by Catriona Matthew) and currently based at the Albany Golf Academy in the Bahamas, won the Helen Holm Scottish Women’s Open Amateur Championship by four strokes from England’s Thalia Kirby at Royal Troon (READ MORE) ... James Achenbach, an occasional contributor to Global Golf Post after his 2015 retirement from a 40-year career at Golfweek, died Friday. He was 78 (READ MORE).
Staff and Wire Reports