Tiger Woods return: 2022 golf tournaments that may be landing spots for 15-time major champion

Will Tiger play the Masters in April, or will his return be pushed into the summer?

Christmas has come and gone, which means the 2022 golf year is on deck. Though most of the attention is on the upcoming year, Tiger Woods' performance at the 2021 PNC Championship a few weeks ago still resonates. He looked so … shockingly (?) good that it became impossible not to try and project where he might tee it up first in 2022. There are some very specific and obvious landing spots for him in the new year, but one stands out above them all -- and it's probably not the one you would expect.

But before we get to that, we should talk about a broader timeline. Obviously what Woods says does not always match up with what he does (this is true of all pro athletes), but he did note two distinct realities when, in a year marked by injuries, he held his first press conference in the Bahamas at the Hero World Challenge at the beginning of December.

1. "I don't foresee this leg ever being what it used to be, hence I'll never have the back what it used to be, and clock's ticking. I'm getting older, I'm not getting any younger. All that combined means that a full schedule and a full practice schedule and the recovery that it would take to do that, no, I don't have any desire to do that. But to ramp up for a few events a year as I alluded to yesterday as Mr. Hogan did, he did a pretty good job of it, and there's no reason that I can't do that and feel ready."