Golf’s PGA Tour still isn’t ready for his exit.

Before he was even on the tee on Friday at the PGA Tour event he hosts, onlookers crowded around the clubhouse and first tee to get a look at Tiger Woods. This is always how it is, wherever Woods plays, but it was an especially pretty scene overlooking the first hole at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles. The tee sits on a cliff, and at the top of the vista, a mass of people stood there to see Woods. They tolerated the group ahead of him, clapping politely for actual tournament contenders Jordan Spieth and Patrick Cantlay. The first roar came when Woods showed up behind them and walked into a makeshift kitchen next to the tee. The loudest roar came when Woods actually hit his tee shot. He was the second player of three in his group to do so, but the crowd started to scatter after Woods’ shot, because nobody was there to see Gary Woodland.

Not two hours later, Woods was on a golf cart, riding away from the seventh hole and back toward the clubhouse. Woods is about 90 percent of the attraction at any event he plays, and so the audience had erupted with speculation about what had gone wrong. The quick speculation in the galleries was that it was his back, which he’d said had gone into spasms when he shanked a shot on the 18^th hole the day before. A little bit after 2 p.m., a convoy of emergency vehicles pulled up outside the clubhouse. Medical personnel backed up an ambulance to the building, and a throng of media crowded around expecting to watch Woods get transported to a hospital. But Woods did not leave in an ambulance. It turned out to be the flu.

The day was painfully microcosmic of what the Tiger Woods experience looks like in 2024. Nobody in golf has the ability to hold attention like Woods, even now, five years after his last Masters win and during a period in which he struggles to start, let alone finish, tournaments. Woods has played six events since 2022’s Masters and withdrawn from three of them. He is 48 now, old enough that he is probably done winning tour events but not so old that winning is impossible. Golf’s most immediate existential crisis these days is that the Saudi Arabian government is on the verge of either partnering with the tour or trying to overtake it, depending on the outcome of ongoing negotiations. But the other problem confronting the sport is that there is only one Tiger Woods, and he will only be around so much longer before he exits.

As the Genesis Invitational wore on, the problem only became more obvious. For most of the weekend, one of the PGA Tour’s marquee events had as much energy as a nap. During a brief period on Sunday, the tournament looked primed for a tight finish, with five players tied at one point on the final nine holes. The event became a three-shot victory for Japanese star Hideki Matsuyama, who shot a brilliant 62 on Sunday to pull ahead from six shots down entering the day. It was a quality finish to what had been a…