Tiger Woods reflects back on Bellerive tournament that never happened
Tiger Woods is at the PGA Championship this week, but his mind isn’t far away from the 2001 event that was supposed to happen here but didn’t.
Tiger Woods was at the top of the golfing world in Sept. 2001.
He had already won five times that PGA Tour season and was the No. 1 golfer in the world. His victory at the Masters was his fourth major championship in a row, completing the Tiger Slam. He also won the Players Championship. And he was coming off a win in the NEC Invitational two weeks earlier as he arrived at Bellerive Country Club for the WGC-American Express Championship.
The tournament never happened.
On Tuesday morning, as players were out on the range or playing a practice round on the course, two hijacked airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City. America was under attack. Suddenly a golf tournament no longer seemed important. Tim Finchem, then PGA Tour commissioner, made the decision to cancel the event.
Seventeen years later, Woods is back at Bellerive for the start of the PGA Championship. Coming to this course, however, makes him reflect on that fateful day back in 2001.
“(It) was a surreal time, at least for me, anyways,” Woods said at his Tuesday press conference before the year’s final major. “I had done an American Express clinic there, here in town. I played a practice round with (Mark Calcavecchia), and, you know the tragedies that happened transpired. We tried to play the next day. I believe I was playing with (Mike Weir).”
The Ryder Cup, scheduled to begin on Sept. 28, was also postponed until the next year.
As he remembers that day and the decision to cancel the event, Woods says Finchem made the right call. No one was in any mood to play a golf tournament after everything that had happened to the country.
“One of the towers had fallen on the American Express building, and a lot of people lost their lives. The people at American Express were struggling at the time,” Woods said. “I think Tim made the right move in cancelling the event. That was on the 11th and I drove home on the 13th, 17 hours to get back home to Florida. It was a very surreal time for myself on that drive. A lot of reflecting.”
The PGA Championship is the first time Woods has been back at Bellerive since 2001. He missed the last event held here, the BMW Championship in 2008, because of a leg injury.
Not playing that week did have one benefit for Woods. While on the long drive home he realized he could better help young people through his Tiger Woods Foundation, and assess the direction the foundation was heading.
“We were a golf-based foundation. I did a lot of clinics around the country and tried to raise money for the local areas and try to bring awareness…That’s what we tried to do,” he said. “When the tragedies happened on the 11th and I drove home on the 13th, and I reflected if I had been part of that, what would our foundation be. Well we wouldn’t be really anything. I called it basically a travelling circus.”
Woods talked with his father, Earl, about the best way to change the foundation for the better.
“A couple of weeks later I sat down with my dad and I said, hey dad I think we need to change the foundation and our directive and how we go about it. He said, well what do you have in mind. I said it has to be along the lines of how I grew up. It was family, then academics and then golf.”
That discussion led him to open his first learning lab in Anaheim. Now the foundation has 53 different curriculums based in STEM and has served more than 175,000 students.
“That one drive changed our entire directive with my foundation,” Woods said.
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The American Express Championship at Bellerive is now so long ago that few players there that week are still playing. Only eight players are in the field at the PGA Championship who also qualified for the tournament back then: Woods, Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia, Davis Love III, Padraig Harrington, Jim Furyk, Stewart Cink and Vijay Singh.
Woods would end up winning the tournament five of the next six years. But for him and the other players who were preparing for a golf tournament that September, they will always remember the one that never took place.