Even when the Tiger sleeps the world watches what he does, or doesn’t, do.
The 15-time Major champion last played a PGA Tour event in November 2020 and has slipped to 884th in the world. This comes after a car accident he had on 23 February last year, which has kept him out of competition golf, with the exception of partnering Charlie in the PNC Championship for fathers and sons last December.
Despite his inactivity, Tiger Woods still turned the needle enough to top the PGA Tour’s inaugural Player Impact Programme (PIP) for 2021 and bank another $8 million in the process.
Woods beat off Phil Mickelson (awarded $6m), Rory McIlroy, Jordan Speith, Bryson DeChambeau, Justin Thomas, Dustin Johnson (all $3.5m) and Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm and Bubba Watson (all $3m).
In determining the final positions, the PGA’s Tour PIP criteria is:
- Number of times a player is searched on the internet
- Number of unique articles that include a player’s name in the media
- A player’s social reach, conversation and engagement
- Duration that a sponsor receives coverage over the weekend at PGA Tour events and awareness
- A general ‘awareness’ score amongst the US population
The latter is particularly influential because someone like Masters champion Hideki Matsuyama must have broken the internet in Japan when winning last year’s Masters, but highlights that it’s in America where the big cheques are cashed.
Tiger’s social media platforms show that he has 6.6m followers on Twitter, but he is notoriously reluctant on that platform. In fact, he tweeted 64 times in 2021 – an average of five tweets a month – although you can be sure the majority of those came from his management company and not himself. He’s got 2.8m Instagram followers, although has only posted 349 times on his account in total, but it’s on TikTok where videos featuring #tigerwoods have racked up nearly 800 million views.
Tiger’s first tweet was in June 2009, where typically, it was sent by his management. The post read: ‘Welcome to my new Twitter page.’ It only received 123 retweets and 96 likes. By 2016 each tweet of his was valued at $34,000.
As an ‘incentive’ for PGA Tour golfers to ‘engage more’, the PIP programme fund will increase to $50m pot for this year. Few would bet against Tiger winning it again, even if he remains as unenthusiastic about revealing himself on social media as he has always been.
