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Tiger Woods in February 2022
Photo: CAROLINE BREHMAN/EPA
Those looking for photos of Tiger Woods on golf courses won't find many for 2021.
In February last year, the superstar suffered serious leg injuries in a car accident.
His doctors are said to have even considered an amputation.
Since then, nobody has known whether the 46-year-old can really return to action as a professional.
Meanwhile, Woods has not participated in an official tournament for over a year.
However, Woods has not completely disappeared from the world of golf.
At the PNC Championship in December, he was seen watching the action from a cart, casually clad in a polo shirt, golf ball in hand.
He also played an unofficial 36-hole tournament in December with his 12-year-old son.
They finished second.
And now, on Wednesday, we were able to learn that Tiger Woods is still apparently the most important figure in his sport.
Despite his absence.
The PGA Tour announced to players that Woods is the winner of the new Player Impact Program (PIP).
This prize is endowed with 40 million US dollars.
It rewards players who generate a great deal of interest in the sport of golf, measured against five metrics that only have a subliminal relationship to athletic performance.
Woods remains taller than Mickelson
Woods has now collected eight million US dollars, simply because most people interested in golf look for his name on the Internet (more on this ranking later).
The PGA Tour not only announced that Woods won this ranking.
But also that Phil Mickelson is not number one in it.
Mickelson, 51, wrote on Twitter at the end of 2021 that he would like to thank all supporters for winning the "Player Impact Program".
That tweet hasn't aged well, and Woods is now delayed in replying to the post: "Whoops," he wrote to Mickelson.
Woods and Mickelson have had a rivalry for decades, although the sporting competition between them has recently played less of a role due to Wood's absence.
More important is Mickelson's relationship with the PGA Tour, which distributes prize money for the PIP.
And here Mickelson is not particularly popular.
Mickelson's public image has suffered in recent weeks, in fact he has even made himself impossible.
In an interview with author Alan Shipnuck, who is writing an unauthorized biography of Mickelson, the golf pro said he was willing to support a rival golf league funded by Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticized for human rights violations;
Mickelson himself commented on this in the interview and spoke of "Scary Motherfuckers".
Apparently, it was not an obstacle for Mickelson to consider a partnership with Saudi Arabia.
With these statements, however, he may have messed it up with Saudi Arabia.
And with his openly expressed interest in the new Superliga, he also opposed the PGA.
At PIF Saudi International a month ago, Mickelson accused the PGA Tour of "disgusting greed."
The leadership would mostly keep the players' hard-earned cash to themselves, Mickelson said.
Woods to Mickelson: "How can that be?"
The new PIP program was influenced, among other things, by the threat of a rival league that former world number one Greg Norman is trying to found with Saudi Arabian money - and which is backed by Mickelson.
There is a suspicion that Mickelson's commitment to the rival league has now cost him the top spot in the PGA's PIP ranking, at least his controversial statements and Woods' freestyle are close in time.
"How is that possible?" asked pro Kevin Na on Twitter with a smiley smile, although he was happy for Woods, he asked: "Has the past two weeks had an impact on this result?"
The PGA denies this, so only popularity values from January 1st to December 31st, 2021 were measured.
Still, Mickelson, who became a golf major again in May at the age of 50, finished second in the Player Impact Program and earned $6 million.
He was followed by Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Bryson DeChambeau and Justin Thomas, each receiving $3.5 million.
The PIP program and the "Play 15," which pays each player $50,000 to participate in at least 15 tournaments a year, are only partially based on sporting achievements.
The five metrics used for the PIP program are Internet searches (Google Search);
News articles containing the player's name (Meltwater Mentions);
TV sponsor presence (Nielsen ratings);
Awareness (Q-Score) and engagement in social media (MVP Index).
Woods ranked #1 on Google Search, Meltwater, and Q-Score.
He was ranked 8th in the MVP index and 43rd in the Nielsen rating.
Wood's merits for golf are undisputed, and the jubilation about his award was correspondingly great.
But the explanation for his high values in the popularity measurement in 2021 should also lie in his serious car accident: the pictures went around the world, fear for a superstar in sports was great.
Woods remained an issue, even without the golf course.
Woods drove across a median at high speed and fell down a hill on a suburban Los Angeles street in February 2021.
With the exception of an interview with Golf Digest (with whom he has an endorsement deal), he has largely stayed out of the public eye.
In any case, retreating into private life hasn't harmed Tiger Woods.
With material from Reuters and AP