Tiger Woods Is Back—and Teeing Off on the PGA Tour’s Secretive Saudi Deal

When Tiger Woods addressed his long-anticipated comeback from ankle surgery that has sidelined him since April, he delivered something even juicier than updates about his own future: his insight into the uncertain future of professional golf. 

Woods, who’s set to tee off Thursday at the Hero World Challenge that he hosts in the Bahamas, said his ankle is now pain free and that he hopes to play as much as once a month next year. But from his powerful perch inside the negotiations, the 1,328th ranked golfer in the world also provided some of the most revelatory remarks about the status of the stunning pact between the PGA Tour and its Saudi-backed rival.

When the Tour in June agreed to join forces with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which had upended the golf world by recruiting stars such as Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka to its new LIV Golf league, Woods was just as taken aback as everyone else. Which is something he wasn’t exactly thrilled about. 

“I was frustrated with the fact that the players were never involved,” Woods said. “No one knew. That can’t happen again.” 

But the framework deal, which calls for the PGA Tour, Europe’s DP World Tour and PIF to combine their commercial golf assets in a new for-profit entity, was merely an agreement to try to strike an actual agreement. Little was set in stone except for the two sides dropping their costly, high-stakes litigation against one another. 

And Woods’s biggest disclosure was that even with a tentative year-end deadline for a final agreement rapidly approaching, everything is still up in the air: the format of a joint venture between the Tour and the Saudis, the involvement of other investors, the return of the LIV players—and even the deadline itself. 

“The answer is murky,” said Woods when asked what golf would look like in a year or two. “There’s a lot of moving parts on how we’re going to play. Whether it’s here on the PGA Tour or it’s merging, or team golf.”
 

PGA Tour players described being blindsided by the framework agreement, which was negotiated in secrecy by a pair of Tour board members and commissioner Jay Monahan and came after the Tour had battled LIV for a year by attempting to take a moral high ground. Since its inception in 2022, LIV has been accused by politicians and activists of attempting to use golf’s popularity to whitewash the country’s record on human rights.

In a bid to temper the players’ distrust after the deal, the Tour agreed to add an additional player to its board: Tiger. That made the world’s most famous golfer a power player in the ongoing negotiations, which have evolved beyond just the PGA Tour and PIF at the bargaining table. 

A number of other investors, such as Fenway Sports Group—which owns the Boston Red Sox and the English Premier League team Liverpool—have expressed interest in acquiring a stake. People familiar with the matter said that a likely scenario involves backing from both PIF and additional outside investment. 

Woods was non-committal about whether the Saudis come out of the final deal as partners at all. “We’re looking at all options and trying to figure out what is the best deal for the players,” he said, though he added that the Tour and its former bitter rivals were “working right now with no animosity.”

Woods also indicated that any Dec. 31 deadline could easily get pushed back. He added that he believes there are benefits to team golf, which is integral to LIV’s format, but the question is: “How do we do it?” One of the issues, he continued, is figuring out how any future team events may mesh with the PGA Tour’s schedule. 

Deciding on the future of LIV’s roster of talent has also been a tension point since the deal was announced. LIV boasts a number of the world’s highest-profile players, who were suspended by the PGA Tour for violating their contracts once they defected. Some of them resigned their memberships. 

But now that the former foes are now attempting to do business together, there has been a delicate balance of seeing if there’s a way back to the PGA Tour for those who left—while also not upsetting members of the Tour who remained loyal and may have turned down enormous sums of money offered by the Saudis. 

“Part of the deal we’re working through is trying to find a path, whatever that looks like,” Woods said. “There’s so many different scenarios.”

The most consequential scenario may be out of the Tour’s hands entirely: The Justice Department, which was already investigating the Tour and other golf bodies over anticompetitive behavior, has already indicated that it will review the new pact over antitrust concerns, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
 

While professional golf’s future has been up in the air in recent months, so has Woods’s career. And these are familiar confines for him: he has made his return at the Hero World Challenge in 2016 after more than a year off because of back surgeries. When he suffered major injuries in a car crash that required emergency surgery in 2021, he used this event to hit some balls and make extensive comments about his future. 

The 47-year-old’s current layoff still traces back to that wreck, which he has said could have led to the amputation of one of his legs. He last competed at the Masters in April, where he made the cut for the 23rd consecutive time but withdrew after rain-soaked conditions caused a postponement in the action on Saturday. Shortly afterward, he had the surgery, which stemmed back to the career-threatening crash. 

Woods, over the last two years, has vacillated about his own professional prospects. While he has conceded that his physical limitations will prevent him from playing anything close to a full schedule again, he has also said he still believes he can reach the highest levels of the sport. “I don’t show up to an event unless I think I can win it,” he said at the 2022 Masters, where he shockingly participated at his first major following the wreck. 

The wavering continued this week. He gave a glimmer of hope when he said all of the pain he had at Augusta National is now gone after the surgery, and that he hoped to increase his tournament schedule to playing once a month. He also admitted he was rusty and wasn’t sure how he would play this week. 

“I’m just as curious as you are to see what happens,” he said. 

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com