GREENSBORO, N.C. — Tiger Woods will play in the Wyndham Championship for the first time.
Agent Mark Steinberg confirmed in an email on Monday that Woods will play in the tournament, held at Sedgefield Country Club, this week.
That ends a few days of uncertainty around the site of the final tournament of golf’s regular season. Woods created a stir by entering the field just ahead of the deadline last Friday, but after closing out a 73 and missing the cut at the PGA Championship in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, he hedged a bit. He said he would “go through it with my team” to “see if that’s the right move or not.”
On Monday morning, Wyndham tournament director Mark Brazil wrote on Twitter, “Bam! Tiger is coming!”
The Wyndham Championship is the last chance for the PGA Tour’s bubble players to play their way into the FedEx Cup playoffs, which begin next week at The Barclays in New Jersey.
Woods — who’s at No. 187 on the points list — is rather far from the bubble. Only the top 125 players in the rankings qualify for the playoffs.
Mathematically, Woods will need to either win and earn 500 points or finish alone in second place for 300 points to crack the top 125.
Last year, only one player outside the top 125 — Sang-Moon Bae — earned enough points in the Wyndham Championship to move into the playoffs, jumping from No. 126 to No. 120 after he tied for 14th. Nobody did it in 2013.
Now the question is how long Woods will stick around at Sedgefield.
In 10 events this year, Woods missed the cut in four of them and withdrew from another. He missed the cut in the last three majors.
He had three rounds in the 80s. His best finish was a tie for 17th at the Masters, a remarkable effort coming off a two-month break to fix a short game that turned shockingly bad in Phoenix and San Diego. His best week was at The Greenbrier Classic. While he tied for 32nd, he finished six shots out of the lead. In the other four events where he made the cut, he was no closer than 10 shots.
At Whistling Straits last week, he said his game building, and that he found a key to his putting Saturday morning “but the damage had already been done.”
Now for the first time, he’ll test that putter on the Donald Ross-designed turtleback greens at Sedgefield.
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