Tiger Woods handed major new golf role amid doubts he'll ever play again
On Wednesday, the PGA Tour announced that Woods will chair a 'Future Competition Committee,' tasked with reimagining how the tour runs its tournaments.
The nine-member panel is being framed as a fresh start for a sport still fractured by the rise of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf League.
'This is about shaping the next era of the PGA Tour,' Woods said in a statement posted onto social media.
The move gives the 15-time major winner a leading voice at a pivotal moment, even as he remains sidelined from competition with a ruptured Achilles tendon.
Brian Rolapp, three weeks into his role as the tour's first CEO, said the committee would have a clean sheet to consider changes that uphold traditions without being tied to them.
Rolapp didn't have details on several issues he faces as he takes over for Jay Monahan, including the future of a sport that has been splintered by Saudi money that created the rival LIV Golf League and lured away a number of top players.
The PGA Tour's negotiations with the Public Investment Fund have stalled, and Rolapp did not make that sound as if it were a top priority when asked about the fans' desire to see all the best players together more often.
'I'm going to focus on what I can control,' Rolapp said. 'I would offer to you that the best collection of golfers in the world are on the PGA Tour. I think there´s a bunch of metrics that demonstrate that, from rankings to viewership to whatever you want to pick. I´m going to lean into that and strengthen that.
'I will also say that to the extent we can do anything that´s going to further strengthen the PGA Tour, we´ll do that,' he said. 'And I´m interested in exploring whatever strengthens the PGA Tour.'
Woods, who has played only 10 times on the PGA Tour since his February 2021 car crash and has been out all of this year with a ruptured Achilles tendon, already serves on the PGA Tour board without a term limit.
Now he will lead five players from the board - Patrick Cantlay, Adam Scott, Camilo Villegas, Maverick McNealy and Keith Mitchell - along with three from the business side. That includes baseball executive Theo Epstein.
The tour released a 2026 schedule on Tuesday that adds another $20 million signature event, this one to Trump National Doral, as part of a 35-event schedule from January through August. Rolapp said the simplicity was mostly about connecting the regular season to the postseason.
He referred to the committee's work as a 'holistic relook of how we compete on the tour' during the regular season, postseason and offseason.
'The goal is not incremental change,' he said. 'The goal is significant change.'
Meanwhile, back in June, news reports claimed that Woods and Vanessa Trump were getting so serious wedding bells were imminent.
Friends close to the couple said that the Woods, 49, and Vanessa, 47, were madly in love, spending all their free time together, and slowly integrating their families.
But a friend of Woods recently told the Daily Mail that any talk of an imminent wedding is absurd — and that both Woods and Vanessa have financial reasons for why marriage would not make sense.
'Cynically, why should she get married? There's no point of it, and it would just complicate her alimony from Donald [Trump Jr.],' the friend said.
'And Tiger of course paid out a lot in his divorce from Elin [Nordegren], and I don't think he's particularly excited to do that again.'
Vanessa has five children with ex-husband Don Jr., who she married in 2005. The couple divorced in 2018. The terms of their divorce settlement were not made public.
Woods shares two children with ex-wife Elin Nordegren. They split after six years of marriage in 2010 following one of the biggest sex scandals in sports history, in which dozens of women claimed to have had affairs with the golf star.
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