Tiger Woods played Augusta with club chairman Fred Ridley and Justin Thomas, according to a report by Bob Harig of Sports Illustrated on Saturday afternoon.
All of you have a happy plane-tracking season. It appears that in recent years, everyone has been speculating wildly about whether Tiger Woods will try his hand at the Masters in March. And that involves using a microscope to track both his and his plane’s movements.
The flight tracking account @radaratlas2 tweeted that Woods’ private aircraft, a 15-year-old Gulfstream G550 bearing the tailnumber N517TW, departed for Augusta, Georgia, early on Saturday morning.
Is it possible Woods’ plane flew to the site of the year’s first major, where its owner has won five times and can play pretty much whenever he wants?
As a past champion, Woods is in the field at Augusta National for the Masters until he tells the tournament he won’t play. Unlike the PGA Tour, he doesn’t have to “commit” the Friday before the tournament. Woods is currently listed on the Masters website as being in the field.
Woods has never missed the cut at the Masters as pro. Before withdrawing in 2023, he secured his 23rd consecutive made cut at Augusta, tying a tournament record.
He said in December at his charity event in the Bahamas that his goal for 2024 was to play “a tournament a month,” but he didn’t play on the PGA Tour in January and skipped the Arnold Palmer Invitational and Players Championship, the two events he was most likely to play in March.
Woods’ last start came at the Genesis Invitational in February, which benefits his foundation and where he serves as host. But he withdrew midway through his second round with what he later confirmed was the flu. He didn’t attend the trophy presentation ceremony in Los Angeles.
Woods did recover in time to make his first-ever appearance at the exclusive Seminole Pro-Member in Palm Beach, Fla., two weeks later in early March. He teamed with PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh to finish T33 in the net division and T44 in the gross flight. But that event was closed to the public.
This isn’t the first time Woods’ flight history has been tracked in anticipation of him returning to major championship golf.
A private jet flight from Woods to Augusta broke golf Twitter ahead of the 2022 Masters, when Woods had not yet made a start since his February 2021 car crash. Woods subsequently declared that the Masters would mark his comeback to competitive golf; he made the cut and placed 47th.
When Woods’ plane took off for Tulsa later that spring in advance of the PGA Championship at Southern Hills, where Woods made another start, the same fervor ensued. After the third round, Woods withdrew despite making the cut once more.
However, in 2015, while Woods was taking a break from competitive golf, his private jet was tracked to Augusta, even before he made his comeback in 2022. That week, Woods finished T17.
Six PGA Tour appearances following the
But even before his 2022 comeback, Woods’ private jet was tracked to Augusta in 2015 when Woods was in the middle of a break from competitive golf. Woods finished T17 that week.
In six PGA Tour starts since the accident, Woods has made the cut four times but has only completed 72 holes twice, the other coming when he finished T45 at the 2023 Genesis.
