Riviera Country Club is a special place for Tiger Woods.
Born and raised in Cypress, a suburb in Los Angeles, the LA Open at Riviera is his hometown event that he used to attend with his father, and the iconic California club is where he made his PGA Tour debut in 1992.
Yet over the course of his record-breaking career, some 30+ years later he is yet to taste victory at 'Riv' despite 82 PGA Tour victories and over 100 tournament wins around the world.
Woods' closest call at Riviera came back in 1999, when he recorded his best ever finish at the venue in his fourth start there.
Woods came into the week after winning the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines and ended at 12-under-par, two strokes back of Ernie Els for a runner-up alongside Davis Love III and Ted Tryba.
The American needed a birdie on the 72nd hole to force a playoff but dropped a shot on the closing par 4 to fall two shy of then-two-time US Open winner Els, who picked up his seventh PGA Tour title.
And that week 25 years ago, somehow, is the closest Woods has ever got to a win at Riviera.
He managed a fifth-place in 2003, again coming off of a win at Torrey Pines. He would go on to win the Match Play and Arnold Palmer Invitational in his next two starts yet that Riviera win remained elusive.
Woods would post a seventh-place at Riviera in 2004, and those three results are his only top-10 finishes in 14 starts. He finished 13th in 2005, withdrew in 2006 and then didn't return to the venue for another 12 years.
In that spell, between 2006 and 2018, he was creating history just south in San Diego winning four Farmers Insurance Open titles at Torrey Pines, taking his tally to seven wins in the event, and also capturing his 14th Major title there at the 2008 US Open.
By the time Woods returned to Riviera in 2018, he was hosting the event in support of the Tiger Woods Foundation. It's been bumped up to Invitational status, putting it alongside Jack Nicklaus' Memorial and Arnold Palmer's Bay Hill Invitational, meaning big purses and three-year exemptions to the winner vs just two for regular events.
The winner also gets handed the trophy by Woods on the 18th green on Sunday evening.
Will Woods be handing himself the trophy this year, next year or sometime in the future? He'll be hoping so. A win at Riviera would be an iconic triumph in the career of one of golf's greatest.
