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 ankle surgery Woods had in April — a subtalar fusion on his right foot — was apparently performed to alleviate some of the pain Tiger was experiencing as a result of his car crash at the beginning of 2021.
Nobody knows when he will play again, but it seems increasingly unlikely that it will happen in 2023. Woods is set to launch a co-owned virtual golf league alongside Rory McIlroy called TGL, which debuts in January 2024. The league will take place indoors with players hitting into screens and cleaning up around an artificial green. Though you do have to be able to swing to hit a ball into a screen, you don’t have to be able to walk, which has been the part that has plagued Woods for the last few years.
Tiger, who was instrumental in reshaping the business aspect of the PGA Tour last year, has not spoken since the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s PIF struck a deal last week.