As Tiger Woods prepares to return to competition next week in the 150th Open Championship at St. Andrews, he planned for a little hit-and-giggle prelude to the season’s final major championship.
Woods, 46, will play in the J.P. McManus Pro-Am, a star-studded event July 4-5 at Adare Manor near Limerick in southwest Ireland that benefits numerous Irish charities. He has his eye on next week’s Open at the Old Course, where he won two of his three Claret Jugs, in 2000 and 2005.
Want to watch the McManus Pro-Am? It’s available live at 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. EDT for subscribers of NBC’s Peacock streaming service and at 7 p.m. EDT via tape delay on Golf Channel.
Woods, still recovering from injuries to his right leg sustained in a single-car crash in early February 2021, has not competed since May 21, when he withdrew from the PGA Championship after a third-round 79 at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One month earlier, he finished 47th at the Masters, his first official event since the crash and resulting surgeries. He remains tied with Sam Snead for the all-time lead in PGA Tour victories, with 82, and his 15 major championships rank second to Jack Nicklaus’ 18.
150th OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP FIELD TAKES SHAPE
Six more exemptions were granted to the 150th Open Championship by virtue of results Sunday on the PGA and DP World tours.
Winner J.T. Poston and co-runners-up Christiaan Bezuidenhout and Emiliano Grillo qualified out of the John Deere Classic, and David Law, John Catlin and Fabrizio Zanotti advanced from the Horizon Irish Open as part of the R&A’s Open Qualifying Series. They join 23 players who already have qualified via the OQS. Also, at least 16 exemptions were earned from Final Qualifying on June 28 at four sites in the U.K.
For the full list of exemptions into the Open on July 14-17 at St. Andrews’ Old Course in Scotland, click here.
Golf Sets Pace As Participatory Sport in U.S., NGF Finds
What’s the most popular participatory sport in the United States? Well, according to data from the National Golf Foundation and the Physical Activity Council, the answer is golf, and by a wide margin.
In 2021, 37.5 million respondents played on a golf course, practiced on a driving range or attended a golf venue such as Topgolf or Drive Shack. A distant second at 27.1 million was basketball, in the form of playing in a league, pickup games or shooting in the driveway. The rest of the top five: tennis (22.6 million), skiing (19.2 million) and soccer (17.9 million).
TAP-INS
The CJ Cup in South Carolina will be played Oct. 20-23 at Congaree Golf Club in Ridgeland, South Carolina, the PGA Tour announced. The CJ Cup had been played in 2017-19 in South Korea before it was moved to the U.S. for the next two years because of the pandemic. In June 2021, Congaree hosted the PGA Tour’s inaugural Palmetto Championship, which was won by South Africa’s Garrick Higgo (READ MORE).
Biltmore Forest Country Club in Asheville, North Carolina, will host the 2025 U.S. Senior Amateur, the USGA announced. The dates have not been set. Biltmore Forest, a 1922 Donald Ross design, has hosted two USGA events: the 2013 U.S. women’s Mid-Amateur and the 1999 U.S. Women’s Amateur. In 1939-42, the club hosted the PGA Tour’s Land of the Sky Open, which Ben Hogan won the last three years (READ MORE).
Angela Bonallack, one of the top female amateurs in the British Isles in the mid-20th century, died July 1, the R&A reported. Known as Lady Bonallack since her marriage to Sir Michael Bonallack, a past secretary and captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, she was 85 and had suffered from the effects of COVID (READ MORE).
Staff and Wire Reports