Tiger Woods sees the bright side despite missing cut at British Open

TROON, Scotland – Near the end of his brief remarks Friday as he began to exit this 152nd British Open, Tiger Woods ran across a case of cross-accent confusion.

“Will we see you at Portrush?” went the question, referring to the Northern Ireland site of the 2025 British Open.

“What’s that?” Woods said.

“Will we see you at Portrush?”

“At, where?”

“Portrush, will we see you at Portrush next year?”

“Portrush. Is that the … next year’s Open? Oh, yeah. Definitely.”

He laughed then, and said, “Sorry. It’s a year away. No, I’m sorry.”

That burst of merriment helped conclude his major season at age 48 in this final major of 2024, his curtain dropping with a hopeless 77 on Friday in the brooding clouds and the winds off the Firth of Clyde. That, in turn, helped wreak a 14-over-par score that left him ahead of only four other nonwithdrawing golfers and nine shots off the projected cut. The four majors he entered, among his five tournament entries overall, saw him miss three cuts, a fate he avoided across all his first 37 majors as a pro, but has befallen him in half the 14 majors he has graced since winning the 2019 Masters.

On the upside, the side he always spots, the 15-time major winner, 82-time PGA Tour winner and crowd magnet did enter all the majors played for the first time since 2020. After his harrowing early-morning car crash in February 2021 and subsequent surgeries, he had traveled to zero majors in 2021, three in 2022 and one in 2023, withdrawing from the 2022 PGA Championship and 2023 Masters.

“I’d like to have played more,” he said, “but I just wanted to be sure that I was able to play the majors championships this year. I got a lot of time off to get better, which has been the case all year. I’ve gotten better even though my results really haven’t shown it. But physically I’ve gotten better, which is great, so, just need to keep progressing like that and then eventually start playing more competitively and start getting into the competitive flow again.”

He made off for the rest of the year, including the father-son event of December, which he winked over as “our fifth major.”

He had come here as Colin Montgomerie, the eight-time winner of the European Tour Order of Merit who never could quite claim a major, told the Times of London that he wished Woods would retire so that these noncompetitive years of Woods don’t blur all the bygone dominance. “Well,” Woods said Tuesday, “as a past champion, I’m exempt until I’m 60. Colin’s not. He’s not a past champion, so he’s not exempt. So he doesn’t get the opportunity to make that decision. I do.”

Once out on the Royal Troon course with its winds barreling in from surprising directions, Woods floundered worse than in the other majors this year. He had made the cut at the Masters with a good 72-73 opening but had gone to 82-77 to finish 60th, then had missed the cut by eight shots at the PGA Championship in Louisville (at 7 over par) and by two shots at the U.S. Open in North Carolina (at 5 over par). Here, he said, “Well, it wasn’t very good,” and he smiled there. “Made a double (bogey) there at 2 right off the hop when I needed it to go the other way, just was fighting it pretty much all day. Never really hit it close enough to make birdies and consequently I made a lot of bogeys.

He made five, plus that one double bogey when he spent No. 2 visiting a native area (way left off the tee), some rough and some fringe.

“I loved it,” he said yet. “I’ve always loved playing major championships. I just wish I was more physically” – and he very briefly searched for a word – “sharp coming into the majors. Obviously, it tests you mentally, physically and emotionally, and I just wasn’t as sharp as I needed to be and I was hoping that I would find it somehow, just never did.”

“I mean, he’s only playing major championships,” Xander Schauffele said on Thursday after playing alongside Woods as well as Patrick Cantlay. “He’s making it as hard on himself as possible, and I know he’s hard on himself, too. It’s just hard. I think he’s just learning. He’s got to learn a little bit more about his body, what he can and can’t do. I’m sure he’d like to prep more at home if it body would allow it.”

That’s where Woods will try to aim toward 2025, and then apparently all the way to Portrush.