Tiger Woods to play 2021 PNC Championship
- @TigerWoods
ORLANDO – Tiger Woods has confirmed he will return to competitive golf next week at the 2021 PNC Championship, taking place at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club Orlando, Grande Lakes, Dec. 16-19.
Woods will partner with his son Charlie as they return to the PNC Championship for a second time, having finished tied for seventh place in 2020.
Woods commented, “Although it’s been a long and challenging year, I am very excited to close it out by competing in the PNC Championship with my son Charlie. I’m playing as a Dad and couldn’t be more excited and proud.”
IMG’s Alastair Johnston, the executive chairman of the tournament added, “I am delighted to confirm that Tiger and Charlie Woods will be participating in the 2021 PNC Championship. We have been liaising with Tiger and his team for some time and are delighted that he has now decided to make his return to competitive golf at the PNC Championship.”
The 20-player final field for the 2021 PNC Championship is:
Pro Partner Bubba Watson Wayne Ball David Duval Brady Duval Gary Player Jordan Player Henrik Stenson Karl Stenson Jim Furyk Tanner Furyk John Daly Little John Daly Justin Thomas Mike Thomas Lee Trevino Daniel Trevino Mark O’Meara Shaun O’Meara Matt Kuchar Cameron Kuchar Nelly Korda Petr Korda Nick Faldo Matthew Faldo Nick Price Greg Price Padraig Harrington Paddy Harrington Rich Beem Michael Beem Stewart Cink Reagan Cink Tom Lehman Sean Lehman Tom Watson Michael Watson Tiger Woods Charlie Woods Vijay Singh Qass Singh The tournament, which will be broadcast live on NBC, attracts major champions whose victories this year span from 1959 to 2021, and last year, saw a field gather that had won a remarkable 67 Major titles. With only 20 teams in the field, players past and present have shown unprecedented interest in campaigning for a spot in the star-studded line-up.
Since the inaugural tournament in 1995, when 10 major winners gathered with their sons, the PNC Championship has continued to evolve and develop. It now features 20 major champions and their relatives competing for the total purse of $1,085,000 in a two-day, 36-hole scramble for the Willie Park Trophy. The 2020 edition was won by Justin Thomas and his father, Mike.
The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. has been the title sponsor of the tournament since 2012. The event formerly known as the PNC Father/Son Challenge, was renamed the PNC Championship in 2020 to reflect the high level of competition and field composition, while still celebrating an inclusive family event that showcases the special bonds that the love of golf creates.
To qualify for the PNC Championship, players must have won a major championship or The Players Championship. Their partner must not hold a PGA TOUR card.
The PNC Championship is operated in partnership by IMG and NBC Sports.
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Tiger Woods to play PNC Championship with son Charlie less than a year after accident
Less than a year after a single-car accident almost required his leg to be amputated, Tiger Woods will tee it up alongside his son, Charlie, next week in the 2021 PNC Championship.
The father-son event to be held at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club in Orlando, Dec. 16-19, has been holding a spot for Woods and his son, who stole the show at the 2020 event. The 15-time major champion has been teasing his return to the course for a few weeks now, most recently by rocking his Sunday red during a practice session during the final round of his Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas.
During Saturday’s third round coverage of the Hero World Challenge, Woods joined the broadcast to discuss his progress and Charlie’s performance at the 2020 PNC Championship.
“He carried me, no doubt,” Woods said.
“It’s short for Charlie, it’s not short from where I’m playing,” Woods added. “I’ve got to hit it from back there with Justin (Thomas). And I’m hitting it half as far as he does.”
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Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods 
Woods at the White House in May 2019Personal information Full name Eldrick Tont Woods Nickname Tiger Born December 30, 1975
Cypress, CaliforniaHeight 6 ft 1 in (185 cm)[1] Weight 185 lb (84 kg)[1] Sporting nationality United States
Residence Jupiter Island, Florida Spouse Children 2 Career College Stanford University
(two years)Turned professional 1996 Current tour(s) PGA Tour (joined 1996) Professional wins 109[2] Highest ranking 1 (June 15, 1997)[3]
(683 weeks)Number of wins by tour PGA Tour 82 (Tied 1st all time) European Tour 41 (3rd all time)[notes 1][4] Japan Golf Tour 3 Asian Tour 2 PGA Tour of Australasia 3 Other 16 Best results in major championships
(wins: 15)Masters Tournament Won: 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2019 PGA Championship Won: 1999, 2000, 2006, 2007 U.S. Open Won: 2000, 2002, 2008 The Open Championship Won: 2000, 2005, 2006 Achievements and awards World Golf Hall of Fame 2021 (member page) PGA Tour
Rookie of the Year1996 PGA Player of the Year 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2013 PGA Tour
Player of the Year1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2013 PGA Tour
leading money winner1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2013 Vardon Trophy 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2013 Byron Nelson Award 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009 FedEx Cup Champion 2007, 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom 2019 (For a full list of awards, see here) 
Eldrick Tont “Tiger” Woods (born December 30, 1975) is an American professional golfer. He is tied for first in PGA Tour wins, ranks second in men’s major championships, and holds numerous golf records. Woods is widely regarded as one of the greatest golfers of all time and one of the most famous athletes in history. He is an inductee of the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Following an outstanding junior, college, and amateur golf career, Woods turned professional in 1996 at the age of 20. By the end of April 1997, he won three PGA Tour events in addition to his first major, the 1997 Masters, which he won by 12 strokes in a record-breaking performance. He reached number one in the world rankings for the first time in June 1997, less than a year after turning pro. Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, Woods was the dominant force in golf. He was the top-ranked golfer in the world from August 1999 to September 2004 (264 consecutive weeks) and again from June 2005 to October 2010 (281 consecutive weeks). During this time, he won 13 of golf’s major championships.
The next decade of Woods’ career was marked by comebacks from personal problems and injuries. He took a self-imposed hiatus from professional golf from December 2009 to early April 2010 in an attempt to resolve marital issues with his wife Elin at the time. Woods admitted to multiple infidelities, and the couple eventually divorced. He fell to number 58 in the world rankings in November 2011 before ascending again to the number-one ranking between March 2013 and May 2014. However, injuries led him to undergo four back surgeries between 2014 and 2017. Woods competed in only one tournament between August 2015 and January 2018, and he dropped off the list of the world’s top 1,000 golfers. On his return to regular competition, Woods made steady progress to the top of the game, winning his first tournament in five years at the Tour Championship in September 2018 and his first major in 11 years at the 2019 Masters.
Woods has held numerous golf records. He has been the number one player in the world for the most consecutive weeks and for the greatest total number of weeks of any golfer in history. He has been awarded PGA Player of the Year a record 11 times and has won the Byron Nelson Award for lowest adjusted scoring average a record eight times. Woods has the record of leading the money list in ten different seasons. He has won 15 professional major golf championships (trailing only Jack Nicklaus, who leads with 18) and 82 PGA Tour events (tied for first all time with Sam Snead). Woods leads all active golfers in career major wins and career PGA Tour wins. Woods is the fifth (after Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus) player to achieve the career Grand Slam, and the youngest to do so. He is also the second golfer (after Nicklaus) to achieve a career Grand Slam three times.
Woods has won 18 World Golf Championships. He was also part of the American winning team for the 1999 Ryder Cup. In May 2019, Woods was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump, the fourth golfer to receive the honor.
On February 23, 2021, Woods was hospitalized in serious but stable condition after a single-car collision and underwent emergency surgery to repair compound fractures sustained in each leg in addition to a shattered ankle. ““““““““““““““““““` In an interview with Golf Digest in November 2021, Woods indicated that his full-time career as a professional golfer was over, although he would continue to play “a few events per year”.
Tiger Woods to make return to golf alongside son Charlie at PNC Championship
Tiger Woods will make his return to competitive golf next week at the PNC Championship alongside his 12-year-old son, Charlie.
Last week the 15-time major champion acknowledged he is unlikely ever to make a full-time return to the professional game after a car crash in February this year left him with serious leg injuries. However, he said he would “pick and choose a few events a year and … play around that”.
Woods sustained open fractures to the tibia and fibula in his right leg in the crash and said amputation had been a very real possibility.
Tiger and Charlie Woods fist bump during last year’s PNC Championship.They will face competition from the defending champions, Justin Thomas and his father Mike, a former PGA professional. The world’s No 1 female golfer, Nelly Korda, will team up with her father Petr, who won tennis’s Australian Open in 1998.
Background and family
Eldrick Tont Woods was born on December 30, 1975 in Cypress, California to Earl and Kultida “Tida” Woods. He is their only child and has two half-brothers and a half-sister from his father’s first marriage. Earl was a retired U.S. Army officer and Vietnam War veteran; he was born to African American parents and was also said to have had European, Native American, and possibly Chinese ancestry. Kultida (née Punsawad) is originally from Thailand, where Earl met her when he was on a tour of duty there in 1968. She is of mixed Thai, Chinese, and Dutch ancestry. In 2002, ESPN claimed: “For the record, he is one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Caucasian, one-eighth African American and one-eighth Native American. Tiger has described his ethnic make-up as “Cablinasian” (a syllabic abbreviation he coined from Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian).
Woods’ first name, Eldrick, was chosen by his mother because it began with “E” (for Earl) and ended with “K” (for Kultida). His middle name Tont is a traditional Thai name. He was nicknamed Tiger in honor of his father’s friend, South Vietnamese Colonel Vuong Dang Phong, who had also been known as Tiger.
Woods has a niece, Cheyenne Woods, who played for the Wake Forest University golf team and turned professional in 2012 when she made her pro debut in the LPGA Championship.
Accumulated wealth
Woods has appeared on Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid athletes. According to Golf Digest, Woods made $769,440,709 from 1996 to 2007, and the magazine predicted that Woods would pass a billion dollars in earnings by 2010. In 2009, Forbes confirmed that Woods was indeed the world’s first professional athlete to earn over a billion dollars in his career, after accounting for the $10 million bonus Woods received for the FedEx Cup title. The same year, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $600 million, making him the second richest person of color in the United States, behind only Oprah Winfrey. In 2015, Woods ranked ninth in Forbes’ list of world’s highest-paid athletes, being the top among Asian Americans or the fourth among African Americans. As of 2017, Woods was considered to be the highest-paid golfer in the world.
Tiger-proofing
Early in Woods’ career, a small number of golf industry analysts expressed concern about his impact on the competitiveness of the game and the public appeal of professional golf. Sportswriter Bill Lyon of Knight Ridder asked in a column, “Isn’t Tiger Woods actually bad for golf?” (though Lyon ultimately concluded that he was not). At first, some pundits feared that Woods would drive the spirit of competition out of the game of golf by making existing courses obsolete and relegating opponents to simply competing for second place each week.
A related effect was measured by University of California economist Jennifer Brown, who found that other golfers scored worse when competing against Woods than when he was not in the tournament. The scores of highly skilled golfers are nearly one stroke higher when playing against Woods. This effect was larger when he was on winning streaks and disappeared during his well-publicized slump in 2003–04. Brown explains the results by noting that competitors of similar skill can hope to win by increasing their level of effort, but that, when facing a “superstar” competitor, extra exertion does not significantly raise one’s level of winning while increasing risk of injury or exhaustion, leading to reduced effort.
Many courses in the PGA Tour rotation (including major championship sites like Augusta National) have added yardage to their tees in an effort to reduce the advantage of long hitters like Woods, in a strategy that became known as “Tiger-proofing”. Woods said he welcomed the change, in that adding yardage to courses did not affect his ability to win.
Career achievements
Woods has won 82 official PGA Tour events, including 15 majors. He is 14–1 when going into the final round of a major with at least a share of the lead. Multiple golf experts have heralded Woods as “the greatest closer in history”.[169] He owns the lowest career scoring average and the most career earnings of any player in PGA Tour history.
Woods’s victory at the 2013 Players Championship also marked a win in his 300th PGA Tour start.[170] He also won golf tournaments in his 100th (in 2000) and 200th (in 2006) tour starts.[171]
Woods has spent the most consecutive and cumulative weeks atop the world rankings. He is one of five players (along with Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, and Jack Nicklaus) to have won all four major championships in his career, known as the Career Grand Slam, and was the youngest to do so.[172] Woods is the only player to have consecutively won all four major championships open to professionals, accomplishing the feat in the 2000–2001 seasons.
- PGA Tour wins (82)
- European Tour wins (41)
- Japan Golf Tour wins (3)
- Asian Tour wins (2)
- PGA Tour of Australasia wins (3)
- Other wins (16)
- Amateur wins (21)
Major championships
Wins (15)
Year Championship 54 holes Winning score Margin Runner(s)-up 1997 Masters Tournament 9 shot lead −18 (70-66-65-69=270) 12 strokes Tom Kite1999 PGA Championship Tied for lead −11 (70-67-68-72=277) 1 stroke Sergio García
2000 U.S. Open 10 shot lead −12 (65-69-71-67=272) 15 strokes Ernie Els,
Miguel Ángel Jiménez2000 The Open Championship 6 shot lead −19 (67-66-67-69=269) 8 strokes Thomas Bjørn,
Ernie Els2000 PGA Championship (2) 1 shot lead −18 (66-67-70-67=270) Playoff1 Bob May2001 Masters Tournament (2) 1 shot lead −16 (70-66-68-68=272) 2 strokes David Duval2002 Masters Tournament (3) Tied for lead −12 (70-69-66-71=276) 3 strokes Retief Goosen2002 U.S. Open (2) 4 shot lead −3 (67-68-70-72=277) 3 strokes Phil Mickelson2005 Masters Tournament (4) 3 shot lead −12 (74-66-65-71=276) Playoff2 Chris DiMarco2005 The Open Championship (2) 2 shot lead −14 (66-67-71-70=274) 5 strokes Colin Montgomerie
2006 The Open Championship (3) 1 shot lead −18 (67-65-71-67=270) 2 strokes Chris DiMarco2006 PGA Championship (3) Tied for lead −18 (69-68-65-68=270) 5 strokes Shaun Micheel2007 PGA Championship (4) 3 shot lead −8 (71-63-69-69=272) 2 strokes Woody Austin2008 U.S. Open (3) 1 shot lead −1 (72-68-70-73=283) Playoff3 Rocco Mediate2019 Masters Tournament (5) 2 shot deficit −13 (70-68-67-70=275) 1 stroke
