Tiger Woods rockets up world ranking with near last-place finish

Eventually week’s Hero World Challenge within the Bahamas, Tiger Woods made his return to professional golf after lacking most of 2023 as a consequence of damage. And it solely took 4 rounds of golf for Tiger to make a large leap up the world rating.

However to rocket up the rating, a participant wants to start out from a low place, or in Tiger’s case, a particularly low place.

After lacking massive parts of the previous couple of seasons and taking part in poorly (or WDing) the few occasions he did tee it up, Woods had dropped all the best way all the way down to No. 1,328 within the Official World Golf Ranking, the bottom rating of his profession.

However that each one modified this week. Woods had an up-and-down efficiency on the Hero, making a lot of birdies together with loads of bogeys. A very powerful improvement, at the very least in his eyes, is that his body held up for 72 holes.

In the long run, Woods’ scorecard confirmed a complete rating of even par, which put him in 18th place. At a standard occasion, that will be a stable end, however the Hero World Problem solely had 20 rivals, which meant Tiger was two spots from final place.

In idea, the Hero has so much working in opposition to it: its subject dimension is small, it options no lower and it’s an unofficial PGA Tour occasion. However the high quality of competitors is robust, provided that lots of the high gamers on the planet tee it up, together with this 12 months’s winner, World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. Due to that, the event awards OWGR rating factors.

Because of this, even along with his poor exhibiting, Woods moved up 430 spots within the rankings, all the best way as much as No. 898.

This isn’t the primary time Woods made a world-rankings leap when getting back from damage on the Hero World Problem, neither is it probably the most dramatic soar.

Again in 2017, Woods performed the Hero after lacking a lot of the season, ending a decent T9. With that outcome, he moved from No. 1199 to No. 668. Following his 2019 Masters win, Woods made all of it the best way again to No. 5 on the planet earlier than extra accidents and surgical procedures stalled his progress.

Kevin Cunningham

Golf.com Editor

As managing producer for GOLF.com, Cunningham edits, writes and publishes tales on GOLF.com, and manages the model’s e-newsletters, which attain greater than 1.4 million subscribers every month. A former two-time intern, he additionally helps preserve GOLF.com buzzing exterior the news-breaking tales and repair content material offered by our reporters and writers, and works with the tech crew within the improvement of recent merchandise and modern methods to ship an attractive web site to our viewers.