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We’re less than two weeks away from the start of The Masters, and it’s still unclear if Tiger Woods will be healthy enough to compete at Augusta National for the 27th time. He hasn’t officially announced his status, but it seems like he may have shared some inside information with Donald Trump that the president subsequently broadcast to the masses.
It’s been more than a year and a half since the last time Tiger Woods competed in a professional golf tournament, and he’d been sidelined from every kind of competition for 13 months before he brought the hiatus to an end earlier this week in an unsuccessful attempt to help his TGL team win a championship.
Last March, the 82-time PGA Tour winner underwent surgery on his Achilles tendon and was forced to miss The Masters for the first time since 2021 (an absence that stemmed from the car crash that left him with some issues that seem to be lingering more than five years later).
The 50-year-old Woods sparked some speculation he’d be healthy enough to take to the course at Augusta National with his TGL return. However, he stressed his status was still up in the air after what ended up being the only match he took part in this season, saying:
“This body … it doesn’t recover like it did when it was 24, 25. It doesn’t mean I’m not trying…
I want to play. I love the tournament..We’ll see how it goes. I’ll be practicing, playing at home this week and keep trying to make progress.”
He has not provided any additional updates on that front, but we may have gotten a pretty major one courtesy of the President of the United States.
Donald Trump claims Tiger Woods won’t be playing in The Masters in 2026
On Thursday, Donald Trump phoned into The Five on Fox News for a lengthy and wide-ranging interview where he addressed a number of topics you’d probably expect him to address given the current state of the country, including the war with Iran and the funding issues that have resulted in some chaotic scenes at America’s airports.
The conversation eventually turned to golf, as Dana Perino capped things off by asking Trump who he’ll be pulling for at The Masters.
The president said he’d had a hard time choosing because he “has so many friends who are top professional golfers” before name-dropping Bryson DeChambeau, Rory McIlroy, and Woods, saying, “I love Tiger, but he won’t be there. He’ll be there, but he won’t be playing in it.”
There’s no way to know how Trump (who did not end up settling on a favorite at The Masters) got privy to that intel, although there’s a chance he heard it directly from the man himself. They’ve played together on multiple occasions, and the golfer who is currently dating his former daughter-in-law received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the Commander in Chief during his first term.
This does still seem like a fairly fluid situation, but it won’t be long until we find out if he was telling the truth.