For the first time since 1996, Tiger Woods is not one of the top 100 players in the Official World Golf Rankings.
Woods has not been on the outside looking in since Sept. 29, 1996, when he was ranked No. 225 and had only been a professional for one month. The next week, Woods won his first PGA Tour event at the Las Vegas Invitational and jumped to No. 75 in the world, the lowest he would be ranked for the next 19 years.
The major winners in 1996 were Nick Faldo, Steve Jones, Tom Lehman and Mark Brooks. The top 5 ranked players were Greg Norman, Lehman, Colin Montgomerie, Ernie Els and Fred Couples.
In his career, Woods has accumulated a record 683 total weeks as the world’s No. 1 ranked player, including 11 different runs at the top. The 14-time major winner set the record for most consecutive weeks atop the rankings in a span from August 1999 to September 2004 and topped his own record with 281 straight weeks at No. 1 from June 2005 to October 2010. Woods’ last run as No. 1 was from March 2013 to May 2014.
Woods has not announced if he is playing in next week’s Masters. It would be his second consecutive missed Masters, a tournament he has won four times. Notah Begay, a close friend, has said the odds for Woods showing up to Augusta are 50-50. He is staying busy, as Golf.com reported last week that Woods had been tapped to redesign a golf course in Beijing, China, a project that will pay him $16.5 million.
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