It’s hard to believe, but Tiger Woods is celebrating a milestone birthday on Dec. 30, as the all-time golf legend is now 50 years old.
For multiple generations of golf fans, it’s still easy to picture the 21-year-old kid picking apart Augusta National Golf Club in 1997 to win the Masters. That breakthrough championship marked the first of an eventual 15 major championships for one of the most transcendent athletes we’ve ever seen.
There’s been no shortage of ups, downs, drama and intrigue in the nearly 30 years since then. Few athletes in the history of professional sports have spent more time in the spotlight while experiencing the highest of highs and lowest of lows.
As such, it’s hard to encapsulate the first 50 years of Woods’ life in any succinct way. Perhaps the only thing more challenging is trying to picture what the next chapter of the 82-time winner’s life — and career — looks like.
Celebrating Tiger Woods at 50th Birthday
Of course, in this day and age of unending amounts of content, retrospectives for celebrities at milestone birthdays are the norm. Woods is no different. A quick Google search of “Tiger Woods 50” produces pre-planned and produced content from just about every golf outlet on the planet.
Like, for example, the PGA Tour putting together a montage of the 50 best shots of his career, a list that excludes the majors, presumably to highlight nothing but Tour play.
Some of the sport’s most respected scribes also spilled ink reminiscing about the player most responsible for their collective media success over the past three decades.
“Given all that he’s endured — and inflicted upon himself — it’s no small feat that he’s survived to 50 with both his dignity and his professional standing intact,” Jay Busbee wrote for Yahoo Sports. “He inspired every single one of today’s players, and he now stands as one of the key forces guiding golf forward into its coming decades.”
For fans of a certain age, it’s almost unfathomable to think there wasn’t a time where golf wasn’t part of the mainstream, and it’s Woods’ remarkable run that is solely responsible for that transformation.
“It has been fascinating to watch (that) he was bigger than the game,” longtime golf writer Rex Hoggard said on his podcast recently. ” … I went to the four corners of the planet just to cover every time he went somewhere. If he went to Abu Dhabi, we went to Abu Dhabi. If he went to China, we went to China. It was pretty amazing there for the better part of two decades where every week you showed up, it was either Tiger or the field. That’s a conversation you don’t have anymore. … To go through that brilliance … there was always a common theme; if you wanted Tiger to do something, just tell him he couldn’t.”
What’s Next for Tiger Woods?
In the golf world, turning 50 is more than a ceremonial milestone. With the birthday comes the opportunity to tee it up on PGA Tour Champions, formerly known as the senior tour.
“Yes, we’re ready. We’re well prepared,” PGA Tour Champions president Miller Brady told Golf Channel recently, per ESPN.com. “We’ve done some whiteboarding over the past year in preparation for Tiger turning 50. And if and when he plays, our tournaments are prepared.”
The big question, though, is whether Woods is willing — and more importantly, able. An unprecedented rash of injuries, especially over the last decade, has derailed what was left of his championship golf career. Just in the last year or so, Woods has torn his Achilles and underwent yet another back surgery.
“What an interesting exercise it would be to look forward instead of back,” veteran golf scribe Kevin Van Valkenburg wrote for Fried Egg Golf. “It does not matter if he plays golf at the highest level again. He’ll never be who he was in his 20s, so all we’re chasing is a memory that can’t be relived.
“How much more fun would it be to watch him and Ernie Els trading blows on the Champions Tour, even if a cart has to ferry Tiger between holes? Instead of holding on to what was, there is something freeing about letting go of dreams of miracle comebacks or Cinderella stories, and embracing Tiger the Elder, the golf dad, the grandfather, the ambassador.”
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