Tiger Woods, who had previously announced he
would skip the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in La Jolla
this year, instead will make his 2012 PGA Tour debut Feb. 9-12 at
the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.
Woods played at Pebble Beach for the 2010 U.S.
Open and tied for fourth, but he hasn’t played the Pebble Beach
event since 2002, when he tied for 12th.
LOS ANGELES
Tiger Woods, who had previously announced he
would skip the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in La Jolla
this year, instead will make his 2012 PGA Tour debut Feb. 9-12 at
the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.
Woods played at Pebble Beach for the 2010 U.S.
Open and tied for fourth, but he hasn’t played the Pebble Beach
event since 2002, when he tied for 12th.
Woods announced his plans for Pebble Beach on
his website Monday.
More often during the last decade, Woods has
started his PGA season at Torrey Pines, but in November, Woods said
he was skipping Torrey Pines this year to play in the Abu Dhabi
HSBC Golf Championship. Woods has won the Farmers Insurance Open
six times and also won the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines.
Woods told reporters late last year, when he
made the decision to skip Torrey Pines, “I’ve always enjoyed
playing in HSBC events around the world, so I have been interested
in including the Abu Dhabi event in my schedule for some time.”
When Woods last played the Pebble Beach
tournament, the field was 180 players, leading Woods to complain
that greens became bumpy and long rounds were wearing. The field is
now 156.
A new course has been added to the three-course
rotation since that time, the Shore Course at Monterey Peninsula
Country Club, which replaced Poppy Hills.
On his website Woods said, “I’ve never played
Monterey Peninsula and am looking forward to it. From all I’ve
heard, it’s a wonderful course and the greens are fast.”
Woods finished the 2011 season in an upbeat
fashion, winning his own tournament at Sherwood Country Club in
Thousand Oaks. The victory ended a two-year winless streak.
Woods tied for 30th at the Frys.com Open at
CordeValle in October.
“I have a lot of good memories at Pebble. It
will be fun going back,” he said on his website.
Of his many memorable career performances, two
came at Pebble Beach. In 2000 he holed out for eagle on the 15th
hole and birdied two of the final three holes to surge past Matt
Gogel and that summer he went back and won the U.S. Open by a
staggering 15 strokes at Pebble.
AT&T was one of the corporate sponsors to
drop Woods in 2009 when information became public about several
extramarital affairs Woods had engaged in that eventually resulted
in his divorce from Elin Woods, the mother of his two children.
AT&T, though, still is the title sponsor of the AT&T
National, a PGA Tour event in suburban Washington, D.C., that has
the Tiger Woods Foundations as a charitable beneficiary.
The PGA Tour arrives in California on Jan. 19-22
at the Humana Challenge, played at the Palmer Private Course at PGA
West, Nicklaus Private Course at PGA West and La Quinta Country
Club. Last week, Phil Mickelson and Greg Norman entered that
event.
