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Tiger Breaks His Silence Regarding his Return to Golf

Published

4 years ago

November 30, 2021

In his first in-depth interview since his February car accident, an upbeat Tiger Woods shed light on his traumatic injuries, recovery and what the future might hold.

“I think something that is realistic is playing the tour one day—never full time, ever again—but pick and choose, just like Mr. [Ben] Hogan did. Pick and choose a few events a year and you play around that,” Woods said during a Zoom interview with Golf Digest’s Henni Koyack from his South Florida home. “You practice around that, and you gear yourself up for that. I think that’s how I’m going to have to play it from now on. It’s an unfortunate reality, but it’s my reality. And I understand it, and I accept it.”

Watch the complete video interview below:

“I don’t have to compete and play against the best players in the world to have a great life. After my back fusion, I had to climb Mt. Everest one more time. I had to do it, and I did. This time around, I don’t think I’ll have the body to climb Mt. Everest, and that’s OK. I can still participate in the game of golf. I can still, if my leg gets OK, I can still click off a tournament here or there. But as far as climbing the mountain again and getting all the way to the top, I don’t think that’s a realistic expectation of me.”

Woods suffered comminuted open fractures to both the tibia and the fibula in his right leg after losing control of his vehicle outside of Los Angeles on Feb. 23. He was rushed to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and subsequently transferred to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he spent three weeks and faced the possibility of amputation.

“There was a point in time when, I wouldn’t say it was 50/50, but it was damn near there if I was going to walk out of that hospital with one leg. Once I [kept it], I wanted to test and see if I still had my hands. So even in the hospital, I would have [girlfriend] Erica [Herman] and [friend] Rob [McNamara] throw me something. Throw me anything.”

One of the first memories Woods has after the accident is asking for a golf club to toy around with while in his hospital bed. Such began a rehabilitation process that included three months in a hospital-type bed in his home. Next, a wheelchair. He then progressed to crutches, which allowed him to regain independence and move around at his own will.

“Adding that part into my day-to-day life was so rewarding because I’d been stuck in a house. Granted, it’s a pretty nice house I’ve built for myself, but I hadn’t been able to do the one thing I love to do: I love to go outside and just be outside. Sometimes I just crutch and lay on the grass for an hour because I want to be outside. Missing the contact of a golf ball hit properly is one of the better feelings.”

Woods’ rehabilitation has been a frustrating up-and-down ride—he says he actually expected to progress faster than he did—and, in the dark days shortly after the accident, he says he reverted to a mentality he learned from his father.

“This is where dad’s teaching came into play being in the military and being SF [special forces]. Any SF operator can attest to this—you don’t know how long a firefight is gonna take. It could last five seconds or five hours and some could go on for days at a time. With that in mind, you don’t know when the end is so that’s the hard part. How do you get through that? One of my dad’s ways of getting through that was live meal-to-meal. … I just shortened up the windows of, Oh, this is gonna be nine months of hell, to It’s just two or three hours. If I can repeat these two to three hours at a time. Next thing you know it adds up, it accumulates into weeks months and to a point where here I am talking to you and walking into a room.”

Once he was cleared to practice putting, Woods lengthened the famous Scotty Cameron Newport 2 putter that he used to win 14 of his 15 majors, for he couldn’t bend over the same way he used to. Next came chipping competitions with his son, Charlie, and eventually clearance to begin very limited full-swing practice. Woods posted a video of him flushing a short iron to social media last week, which fueled significant hype and speculation on a return. But Woods suggested he is nowhere near ready to compete on the PGA Tour.

“I have so far to go … I’m not even at the halfway point,” he said. “I have so much more muscle development and nerve development that I have to do in my leg. At the same time, as you know, I’ve had five back operations. So I’m having to deal with that. So as the leg gets stronger, sometimes the back may act up. … It’s a tough road. But I’m just happy to be able to go out there and watch Charlie play, or go in the backyard and have an hour or two by myself with no one talking, no music, no nothing. I just hear the birds chirping. That part I’ve sorely missed.”

Woods said the prospect of playing with his 12-year-old son has motivated him greatly throughout the process. Some of the first post-accident images that surfaced were of Woods watching Charlie at tournaments around Florida.

“I went to golf tournaments to watch him play, and I’m looking at some of these scores he’s shooting and I said, How the hell are you shooting such high scores? I gotta go check this out,” he told Koyack. “So I’d watch him play and he’s going along great, he has one bad hole, he loses his temper, his temper carries him over to another shot and another shot and it compounds itself. I said, ‘Son, I don’t care how mad you get. Your head could blow off for all I care just as long as you’re 100 percent committed to the next shot. That’s all that matters. That next shot should be the most important shot in your life. It should be more important than breathing. Once you understand that concept, then I think you’ll get better.’ And as the rounds went on throughout the summer, he’s gotten so much better.”

Messages of support and encouragement have poured into Woods’ phone and inbox since the accident—including a call from the president, which Woods cannot recall without laughing about hearing “the White House on line 1.” He also expressed deep gratitude for the way the golf community has embraced him. A number of PGA Tour players have visited Woods at different stages of his recovery, perhaps no one more frequently than Justin Thomas.

“The Thomases and the Woodses are like family,” he said. “JT is like the brother I never had, and Charlie is like the little brother that JT never had.”

Woods will make his first public appearance since the accident at this week’s Hero World Challenge, a 20-man tournament in the Bahamas that benefits his foundation. That he is upright and present this week is hugely encouraging, but Woods knows there is still a long road ahead.

“There’s a lot to look forward to, a lot of hard work to be done—being patient and progressing at a pace that is aggressive but not over the top. Obviously, when I get in the gym and I get flowing and the endorphins get going, I want to go, go, go,” he said. “That’s how I’ve been able to win so many tournaments. But then again, everyone reminds me at what cost? Look at you now. Pre-accident I was what? Ten surgeries. That’s just the wear and tear of doing my sport, of just trying to push it to win everything I possibly can. To win every single tournament I played in, I would do everything I possibly could. Like any sport, there’s a cost to it. There’s a cost of doing business and unfortunately, for sportsmen and sportswomen, injuries are a part of it.”

This article originally appeared on Golf Digest.

Related Topics:news PGA Tour Tiger Woods

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The BLOG MAN

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The Bogey Man’s Guide to Accidental Course Exploration: Or, How I Found My Ball (Eventually) in the Rough of Life

Published

6 days ago

May 27, 2025

The Bogeyman "Boo"

Ah, golf. The gentle game of precision, patience, and occasionally, profound personal humiliation. You know, the kind that makes you question all your life choices, particularly the one where you decided to spend your Saturday morning chasing a tiny white ball around 18 acres of manicured torture.

Boo here, reporting live from the depths of a particularly thorny patch of “rough” that I’m fairly certain wasn’t on the course map. My mission? To recount a tale of a golf shot so spectacularly off-target, it became less about breaking par and more about breaking new ground. Literally.

It was a glorious Tuesday. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and my swing felt… well, it felt like something. I was on the par-4 7th, a hole notorious for its deceptive dogleg and a bunker that swallows balls faster than a hungry teenager devours pizza. My plan was simple: a nice, controlled fade, landing gently just short of the green. A textbook approach, really.

What actually happened was less “textbook” and more “abstract expressionism.” My driver, bless its misguided heart, decided that “fade” was merely a suggestion, and “controlled” was a concept best left to professional pilots. The ball, a brand-new, gleaming Titleist Pro V1 (because, you know, optimism), launched with the trajectory of a startled pheasant and veered sharply right. So sharply, in fact, it cleared the cart path, hopped over the maintenance shed, and disappeared into what I can only describe as a dense, untamed jungle previously known as “the woods bordering the 7th fairway.”

Now, a lesser golfer, a more sensible golfer, might have declared it lost, taken a drop, and moved on with their dignity mostly intact. But I, dear readers, am Mr. Bogey Man. And the Bogey Man doesn’t abandon his children, especially when they cost $5 a pop.

So, armed with a 7-iron (optimism again, clearly), a profound sense of misplaced determination, and a faint hope that perhaps a deer had picked it up and was using it as a chew toy, I plunged into the abyss.

The first five minutes were a blur of tangled vines, unseen roots, and the distinct feeling that I was being watched by small, judgmental woodland creatures. My pristine golf shoes quickly became mud-caked relics. My carefully tucked-in shirt became a casualty of low-hanging branches. I swear, I heard a squirrel snicker.

Then, a glimmer! A flash of white amidst the green. “Aha!” I cried, startling a family of robins. I pushed through a particularly stubborn bush, only to find… a discarded plastic water bottle. My heart sank faster than my last putt from 3 feet.

I pressed on, muttering to myself about the unfairness of golf, the existential dread of lost balls, and whether it was too late to take up competitive napping. Just as I was about to give up and declare the ball a permanent resident of the arboreal underworld, I saw it. Nestled perfectly at the base of an ancient oak, gleaming defiantly, was my Pro V1.

The triumph! The sheer, unadulterated joy! It was like finding the Holy Grail, if the Holy Grail was spherical and prone to slicing. I carefully extracted it, brushed off a few leaves, and held it aloft.

Then I looked around. I had no idea where I was. The fairway was a distant, hazy memory. The cart path? A myth. I was utterly, gloriously lost.

It took another fifteen minutes of bushwhacking, a brief but intense wrestling match with a particularly aggressive thistle, and the accidental discovery of what I’m pretty sure was a very old, very moldy sandwich, but I eventually stumbled back onto the course. My playing partners, who had long since finished the hole and were contemplating sending out a search party (or at least ordering another round of drinks), looked at me with a mixture of pity and amusement.

My score on the 7th? Let’s just say it involved a number that would make a mathematician weep. But the story? The adventure? The sheer ridiculousness of it all? Priceless.

So, the next time your ball decides to take an unscheduled tour of the local flora and fauna, don’t despair. Embrace it. See it as an opportunity for accidental exploration. You might not break 80, but you’ll definitely have a story. And isn’t that what golf is really about? (Besides the frustration, the lost balls, and the occasional snickering squirrel, of course.)

Until next time, keep those swings (mostly) in bounds, and remember: even a bogey can be an adventure.

Boo

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Make watching golf more interesting.

Does the idea of sports betting intimidate you? Stick with me and learn how to make watching sports with your partner more engaging and fun.

Published

1 week ago

May 23, 2025

Sports Betting Babe

Hey there, ClickItGolf fam!

I’m the Sports Betting Babe, and I’m here to shake up your Sundays and sprinkle a little extra thrill on your tee times. I know most of the guys on here already love golf, but this one’s for the ladies, especially those of you who’ve been watching golf with your boyfriend or hubby and secretly thinking, “Wait, can I actually bet on this stuff?”

The answer is yes, you absolutely can and you should.

I’m going to make golf betting super easy to understand, a little sexy, and a whole lot of fun. You don’t need to be a pro or know who won the Ryder Cup in 1999. You just need to know how to make smart, simple bets and enjoy the ride.

Let’s Start with the Basics: How to Bet on Golf

Betting on golf is like picking your favorite brunch spot. You check the vibe, pick someone reliable, and hope it all works out. Here are the easiest ways to get started:

1. Pick the Winner (Outright)

This one’s like calling your shot. You’re betting on who will win the whole tournament. Odds are listed next to each golfer. For example, +1200 means a $10 bet would win you $120. Favorites are usually listed around +800 to +1400 and less favorites, or long shots, are usually +5000 and up. Big swings, big rewards.

2. Top 5 / Top 10 Finish

If you’re not ready to go all-in, no worries. These bets are like hedging your weekend plans – low commitment, still fun. Bet on a golfer to finish strong (in the top 5 or 10) instead of winning outright. It’s a safer bet, but still gives you a reason to cheer all weekend long.

3. Matchups

This one’s juicy. Sportsbooks will pit two golfers against each other, and you just pick which one finishes higher.

For example, if you see a matchup like Viktor Hovland vs. Tony Finau, and you think Viktor is trending hotter, bet on him to beat Tony. Even if neither of them wins, if Viktor finishes 8th and Tony finishes 9th, you win. It’s a simpler way to stay engaged without needing to track the entire tournament field because even if they’re not winning the tournament, you’re winning your bet. It’s low drama, high payoff.

Bonus? It’s a perfect way to gain low-key bragging rights during Sunday brunch.

4. Live Bets

Tournaments stretch over four days. That means the odds shift, players rise and fall, and you can jump in with bets mid-tourney. It’s like shopping sales in real time—see who’s hot in real time and grab the value before it’s gone.

Why Women Should Love Golf Betting

Golf is the perfect sport to ease into betting. It’s slow enough to follow, exciting enough to matter, and gives you tons of chances to win over the weekend. Plus, nothing gets a guy’s attention like a woman who casually drops, “I’ve got Rickie to finish top 10. Let’s go.”

You don’t need to know every stat or swing path. You just need to be curious, confident, and down to learn. The goal? Make betting approachable for women and show the guys we can hold our own.

Why I Love ClickItGolf

ClickItGolf is all about making golf more fun and accessible and I’m all about the same. Whether you’re here for gear deals, course perks, or just that perfect swing tip, this site is your clubhouse. Adding a little betting action into the mix? That’s just next-level fun.

So, ladies go grab your iced coffee, fire up the PGA app, and get ready to make golf weekends a lot more interesting.

Follow me here at ClickItGolf or on Instagram @sportsbettingbabe_official and let’s turn birdies into bankroll.

See you on the green (and in the winner’s circle).

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Meet the Sports Betting Babe: ClickitGolf’s Newest Voice Bringing Style, Smarts, and a Whole Lot of Fun to the Game

Published

2 weeks ago

May 22, 2025

Bobby Markowitz

Hey ClickitGolf family,

I’m thrilled to introduce someone who’s about to shake up your sports weekends in the best way possible.

She’s smart, stylish, funny, and knows her way around a betting slip—please welcome The Sports Betting Babe to the ClickitGolf crew.

Now before you assume this is just another picks column or dry rundown of odds, let me stop you right there. The Sports Betting Babe is anything but ordinary. She’s not here to act like a Vegas oddsmaker or overwhelm you with stats. She’s here to make sports betting fun, flirty, and totally approachable—especially for the ladies.

So who is she?

She’s the kind of woman who can turn heads at a cocktail party in heels one night, then toss on a tee and jeans the next morning to watch a game on the couch with wings and a cold beer. She’s sharp, relatable, and yes she actually loves sports. Not the fake kind of “I’m just here for the vibes” love, but the “I scream at the TV when my parlay falls apart in the 4th quarter” kind of love.

She lives for big Sunday slates, nail-biter golf finishes, buzzer-beaters, and 9th-inning home runs.

But here’s the best part, her mission is to bring more women into the sports conversation, and she’s doing it through betting.

Betting… but make it fun and responsible

The Sports Betting Babe isn’t trying to be your gambling guru. She’s not claiming to have inside info on who’s winning the Masters or who’s hitting a triple-double tonight. What she is doing is giving you the tools, confidence, and attitude to get in the game and have a damn good time doing it.

She believes sports betting can be empowering. It’s a way to connect, to learn, and yes, to make Sunday brunch with your partner a little more competitive. She’s all about responsible fun, setting limits, understanding your bets, and never taking it too seriously.

More Than Just Golf

Yes, she’ll be writing about golf betting often (because we are ClickitGolf after all), but don’t be surprised when she drops takes on NFL Sundays, March Madness upsets, NHL playoff runs, and MLB long shots. She’s a cornucopia of sports knowledge, and she’s bringing it all to the table served with a smile and a wink.

Her First Article Drops Tomorrow

Her debut piece hits the site tomorrow:
👉 “Ladies, Let’s Bet on Golf—Your Intro from the Sports Betting Babe”

It’s part pep talk, part how-to, and all personality. Whether you’ve never placed a bet in your life or you’ve been riding parlays for years, this one’s for you.

Follow Her Journey

Want more from The Sports Betting Babe?
You can follow her on Instagram at @sportsbettingbabe_official for daily takes, behind-the-scenes fun, and maybe the occasional outfit inspo for your next girls’ night and game day.

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome her to the team. Get ready for bold opinions, plenty of laughs, and a whole new way to fall in love with sports.

Stay tuned,
Bobby

#ClickItGolf #SportsBettingBabe #GolfBetting #SportsBettingForWomen #SmartIsSexy #GameDayFun #ResponsibleGaming