Jupiter, Fla. - Local news and radio shows were full of it. The Palm Beach Post today (Feb. 15th) is full of it. The posh Gardens Mall in North Palm Beach will surely be full of it, if it isn't already.
Full of what? The breaking news that Tiger Woods will play the Honda Classic, that's what.
The news broke late Tuesday morning during media day at the PGA National Resort and Spa in Palm Beach Gardens. It was Valentine's Day.
Woods was giving the tournament more than a little love. Ken Kennerly, the tournament's executive director, broke the news when he said that a fellow who first played the tournament in 1993, when he was 17, will play again. Woods was a teenaged amateur then, and the tournament was an hour to south at Weston Hills Golf Club. It's now at the resort's challenging Champions course. ( Watch as Kennerly breaks down in tears while making the announcement)
Now Woods is back. His photo was on the front page of Wednesday's Palm Beach Post. Another photo took up two-thirds of the front page of the sports section, where the headline in bold, big type was, "HE'S IN!."
An article on the front page of the business section pointed out that his appearance will mean an extra $800,000 in ticket sales and, Kennerly predicted, attendance could swell from 110,000 last year to 150,000 this year.
Kennerly was all over the place, doing interviews. Every tournament director on the PGA Tour wants Woods, never mind that he's been struggling in final rounds recently after putting himself in contention, or that he's ranked 18th in the world, having once held the top spot for 623 weeks in a row. He is still the main attraction by a long shot. The AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am's television viewership on Sunday, when Woods and eventual winner Phil Mickelson played together, was the biggest in the last 15 years.
This all means that the Honda Classic has won big. What would the RBC Canadian Open give to get Woods again? A lot. But forget it. Woods won't play the week after the British Open, the date the Canadian Open is saddled with. Spin it any way you want - the tournament is part of the FedEx Cup, it's in the summer, yada yada, yada - the fact is that the date is a clunker. But that's another story. Or maybe it's not, because we're talking Tiger Woods here.
It helps - does it ever - that Woods has settled into his new home on Jupiter Island, about 20 minutes north of the Champions course. He said that he hoped to support the Honda Classic when he moved into the area. He's made good on his promise.
The Honda was already a huge event in the area. Banners on PGA Blvd. showing former winners have been up for a week or two, and they're impossible to miss. An impressive Honda Classic display has taken centre stage at the Gardens Mall, and it too is impossible to miss. Woods wasn't featured when I visited the mall last weekend, because he hadn't announced he would play the tournament. I'd bet he'll now be front and centre in the display.
I happened to attend the 1993 Honda Classic, when Woods made his first and only appearance. The slim teenager had won the 1991 and 1992 U.S. Junior and would go on to win that summer's U.S. Junior, and the next three U.S. Amateurs.
Woods was behind a green, with a bunch of practice balls at his feet, all set down on a severe downhill slope. He was hitting flop shots to the green, which was about 15-feet away. The hole was cut close to the back of the green. He was working on a next to impossible shot as far as getting the ball close to the hole. His hands came down on the ball, well, in a floppy manner. Some touch.Tour players had gathered round to watch the youngster. More showed up by the minute.
That was 19 years ago. Woods became and remains a player with whom it is impossible not to be fascinated, and to observe. The Honda Classic bounced around four courses in south Florida from 1984 through 2006, before finally settling on the strong Champions course. Kennerly and his colleagues have worked hard to improve the tournament. This year's field includes 2011 U.S. Open Champion, 2011 Masters winner Charl Schwartzel, and 2011 Open champion Darren Clarke. Keegan Bradley, the 2011 PGA Championship winner, and a Jupiter resident, hasn't entered yet but it wouldn't be a surprise if he does.
So the Honda already had a top-drawer field before Kennerly made the big announcement Monday. ( For Canadian interest, by the way, and there's plenty of that in the area, Brantford, Ont.'s David Hearn, who has a home in nearby Delray Beach, will definitely play, as will Weyburn, Sask.'s Graham DeLaet). And now it has the golfer every tournament craves. People were asking my wife Nell in a Wednesday morning exercise class if her husband was all excited that Woods is playing.
"It's all anybody wants to talk about, so I told them you were all a-tingle," Nell said. Truth be told, she's a bit "meh" on the whole Tiger phenom at this point. But there is no denying the buzz that Kennerly's announcement has generated.
"You added a rocket booster to this event," Gary Williams, the co-host of Golf Channel's Morning Drive, told Kennerly on air Wednesday. The Honda Classic has done just that. Rocket booster Tiger Woods will play. That's news any tournament can use.
"Hello World," Woods said in a news conference in August 1996, announcing that he had turned pro. Now it's "Hello Honda." A rocket booster for sure. Planet Tiger, soon to play in Palm Beach Gardens.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf's Mysterious Genius (2012). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein