Tiger Woods Never Really Left

The 18-man field of this week’s Hero World Challenge¹ — a tournament that seems to function mostly as an excuse to wrangle the world’s best golfers and Derek Jeter for a hang in the Bahamas — features eight players ranked in the top 10 and nine others ranked no lower than No. 32. Rounding out the field is the world’s 1,199th-ranked golfer, otherwise known as Tiger Woods. Take a guess at who’s getting the lion’s share of attention?

Woods made his latest return to professional golf on Thursday, giving us another excuse to indulge in a long-running national obsession. Tiger hasn’t won a tournament since 2013, and he hasn’t made a cut since 2015. He played just four meaningful² rounds of golf in 2016, and the event in the Bahamas is his first start in 10 months.

But Woods’s prolonged absence hasn’t sidelined his status as golf’s biggest celebrity. To measure this using the Media Cloud — a database that collects news published on the internet every day — we looked at every time the words “Tiger Woods” appeared in a headline on a mainstream U.S. media outlet from the beginning of 2014 to the eve of the Hero World Challenge. Tiger garnered 4,489 articles³ despite making just 22 starts in that time. This number exceeds each of the five players who have held the No. 1 world ranking since Woods last gave it up: Rory McIlroy (3,844 headlines), Jordan Spieth (2,682), Dustin Johnson (1,207), Jason Day (995) and Adam Scott (512).

The injuries and the extended absences gave Tiger ample time to fade into the background while a crop of young stars like McIlroy and Spieth ascended. But Tiger never really went away: Even though he hasn’t spent much time on the golf course, he still managed to garner more headlines than the others in this group in 24 of the past 47 months.