It is less than two weeks until Tiger Woods makes just his third competitive appearance of the year at the PGA Championship.
Ahead of his next Major start at Valhalla, on Monday, Woods will reportedly embark on a scouting mission to the course.
According to X account TW Legion, Woods is set to visit the Kentucky course just 10 days before the second Major of the year gets underway.
The account wrote: “Tiger will scout Valhalla Golf Club tomorrow, site of the PGA Championship, according to a source familiar.”
🚨Tiger will scout Valhalla Golf Club tomorrow, site of the PGA Championship, according to a source familiar.May 5, 2024
One of Woods’ four PGA Championship wins came at Valhalla, when he lifted the Wanamaker Trophy in 2000 after winning a playoff against Bob May. That wasn’t the most recent time Woods played competitively at the course, though.
After missing out on the 2008 Ryder Cup at Valhalla as he was recovering from knee surgery, he returned for the 2014 PGA Championship. However, he couldn’t replicate his success of 14 years earlier, and missed the cut after two rounds of 74. The 48-year-old will be determined to ensure there is no repeat of that next week.
In 2024 so far, Woods has experienced mixed fortunes. At February’s Genesis Invitational, it was touch and go as to whether he would make the cut, but in the event, he withdrew during the second round because of illness.
Two months later, at The Masters, he set a new record for the number of consecutive cuts made at the Augusta National Major, but faded over the weekend before eventually finishing 60th.
There were still encouraging signs that he may have put his long-standing injury problems with his right ankle behind him, though, a year after he had undergone a subtalar fusion procedure on it.
Before the tournament Woods had expressed his desire to resume a plan originally outlined before last year’s Hero World Challenge to play a tournament a month. He said: "Well, I wasn't ready to play. My body wasn't ready. My game wasn't ready.
"And I thought that when I was at Hero, once a month would be a really nice rhythm. Hasn't worked out that way. But now we have major championships every month from here through July. So now the once a month hopefully kicks in."
Woods’ reported appearance at Valhalla this week is evidence that those plans remain firmly on track.
As for his hopes of winning a fifth PGA Championship title to add to his 15 Major victories, that’s something he refuses to write off too. Last week, he appeared on the Today Show with Carson Daly, where he expressed his desire to “ruin” his new Sun Day Red apparel brand’s logo.
He explained: “The logo is a tiger. It’s a simple thing - it’s nice and clean. There is some representation of what I have done in my career. If you look at the stripes, there’s 15 stripes, and as you alluded to earlier I’ve won 15 Major championships. My goal is to ruin this logo. I want to keep ruining the logo. If the trademark is this, my job is to ruin it.”
