As expected, Tiger Woods made an early trip to Kentucky to get a good look at Valhalla ahead of next week’s PGA Championship.
The four-time PGA Championship winner will tee it up for just the third time this year at Valhalla next week, following on from finishing last of the players who made the cut at The Masters in his first completed event of the year.
15-time Major champion Woods said his plan was to try and play once a month, and certainly compete in all four Majors, and realised he would have to do more prep work for the others as he knows Augusta National inside out.
“This is a golf course I knew going into it, so I’m going to do my homework going forward at Pinehurst, Valhalla and Troon,” Woods said at The Masters. “But that’s kind of the game plan.”
Woods has now been pictured at Valhalla – the Kentucky course that was the site of the second of his four PGA Championship victories, and also the third leg of his famous Tiger Slam when he won all four Majors in a row finishing with the 2001 Masters.
Woods lifted the Wanamaker Trophy in 2000 after winning a playoff against Bob May saw him become a back-to-back PGA champion – something he also later achieved when winning the PGA Championship in 2006 and 2007.
It’s a sequence that Brooks Koepka is hoping to repeat this year as the defending champion looks to go back-to-back at Valhalla having also previously done so in 2018 and 2019.
Woods missed out on the 2008 Ryder Cup through injury when it was held at Valhalla, but did take part in the 2014 PGA Championship at the same venue – an event won by Rory McIlroy.
Woods missed last year’s PGA Championship and was forced to withdraw from the 2022 event won by Justin Thomas after playing his third round.
The 82-time PGA Tour winner will hope his body can this time hold up to the stress of playing another Major just a month after admitting how tired and sore he was after completing The Masters.
As for his hopes of winning a fifth PGA Championship title to add to his 15 Major victories, that’s something he refuses to write off too.
As he appeared on the Today Show with Carson Daly, he expressed his desire to “ruin” his new Sun Day Red apparel brand’s logo.
He explained: “The logo is a tiger. It’s a simple thing – it’s nice and clean. There is some representation of what I have done in my career. If you look at the stripes, there’s 15 stripes, and as you alluded to earlier I’ve won 15 Major championships. My goal is to ruin this logo. I want to keep ruining the logo. If the trademark is this, my job is to ruin it.”
