Tiger Woods has informed the R&A that he will not play the 2023 Open Championship at Royal Liverpool. Woods withdrew from the Masters in April, and following an ankle procedure later that month, he has subsequently missed the PGA Championship and U.S. open as well.
“We have been advised that he won’t be playing at Hoylake,” Mike Woodcock of the R&A told Sports Illustrated.
Woods missing The Open is not a huge surprise given the state of his body. It means Woods will have played in just one of the last five Open Championships. He missed the cut last year at the Old Course at St. Andrews in what may have been his last appearance as a professional at that golf course.
By the end of The Open, Woods will have played in only four of the last 12 majors completing four rounds in only one of those tournaments, the 2022 Masters at Augusta National where he finished 47th.
Woods has been besieged by injuries over the latter part of his career. Since 2014, he has played in just 21 of a possible 35 majors and has just three top 10s in that span. Incredibly, one of those was a victory at the 2019 Masters.
The 15-time major champion, who won at Royal Liverpool in 2006, has recently foreshadowed the end of his playing career.
“I don’t know how many more I have in me,” said Woods at the Masters in April. “So just to be able to appreciate the time that I have here and cherish the memories. But still, to just look at the golf course, it looks like it’s been here for over a hundred years and hasn’t changed, and each and every year we come here, everything has changed since I first played here.”
“I don’t know, if it is [six or seven years until The Open returns to St. Andrews], whether I will be able to physically compete at this level by then,” Woods said last summer. “It’s also one of the reasons why I wanted to play in this championship. I don’t know what my career is going to be like.”
The…
Source : cbssports
