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Cape Town - Tiger Woods revealed that he won’t be playing as much as he did next year once the PGA Tour gets into full swing in January.
The former world number one hit his last competitive stroke of 2018 at his own Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas on Sunday. While it was a somewhat poor end to the year - finishing second to last at one under par, 19 strokes behind winner Jon Rahm - 2018 was far from a failure for Woods.
The former world number one made 19 starts this year, the most since 2013 where he also made 19. Woods earned seven top ten finishes but most importantly, he got back in the winners’ circle for the first time in five years.
“I’m not going to play as many as I did this year," he confirmed on pgatour.com.
"I played in too many this year, and that was from adding an event because I missed the cut at L.A. to qualifying to get into Akron.
"Who knew that I could make it through all the Playoffs events? So all those events told a lot. That was just too much for my body to handle and I was not physically prepared for it. I hadn’t trained for that, so we’re going to make some adjustments for next year.”
Woods’ victory came at the zenith of the PGA Tour - the TOUR Championship - and it backed up his T6 and runner-up finishes at The Open and PGA Championship respectively, proving that he hasn’t lost it on the highest level.
While his skill and guile may still be at the level that brought him 14 major championships, Woods admits that after over 20 years on Tour, a knee surgery and four back operations, the body is struggling to keep up.
“I know that I can win because obviously I just proved it,” continued the 42 -year-old.
“It’s just a matter of getting everything kind of peaking at the right time. … The will and the want and the desire hasn’t changed; it’s just a matter of is the body willing to do it.
“There are days or weeks that they don’t cooperate, so that’s just part of the injuries I’ve gone through and aging. The older athletes just don’t perform as consistently as they once did. I’ve been out here for 20-some odd years."
