In the latest fallout from Tiger Woods’ car crash, the 15-time major champion will not be the U.S. captain for the 2027 Ryder Cup.

The PGA of America delivered the news via a statement on Wednesday, saying that Woods had “shared with us that he will not serve” as captain for the U.S. team next year.

The decision ends months of speculation over whether Tiger would finally take the reins of the U.S. Ryder Cup team. It also leaves the PGA of America and the U.S. team without a captain with only 18 months to go until the 2027 event in Ireland.

PGA: Tiger withdraws from Ryder Cup captain job for 2027

Not long after the European team completed their second-straight Ryder Cup victory over the U.S. team at Bethpage Black, one thing was clear, though unofficial.

If Tiger Woods wanted to be the U.S. captain at the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor, the job was his. Given his busy schedule and recovery from surgery, it was never a sure thing that Woods would take the job.

But with the event inching ever closer, a decision was expected soon. We may never know what Woods intended to do.

On Friday, March 27, Woods was involved in a rollover crash near his home in Jupiter, Fla., and arrested and charged with DUI. Woods later pled not guilty to the charges.

Then on March 31, Woods announced he would be “stepping away” from golf and public life to “seek treatment and focus on my health.”

At that point, the Ryder Cup captaincy question was still up in the air, but the PGA of America provided us with an answer on Wednesday.

In a statement released on social media, the PGA of America confirmed Woods had decided not to take the U.S. Ryder Cup captain job.

“Tiger has shared with us that he will not serve as Captain of the 2027 U.S. Ryder Cup Team and we support his decision,” the statement read.

“The PGA of America stands in full support of Tiger Woods as he steps away to focus on his health and well-being. During this time, we are keeping Tiger in our thoughts and prayers, with sincere hope for his strength, comfort, and recovery. Tiger has meant so much to our Association and to the game of golf.”

The PGA also commended Woods “for prioritizing his long-term health” and said they “deeply respect the courage it takes to make such a personal decision.”

The recent car crash aside, this episode closely resembles the process the PGA underwent to choose the U.S. Ryder Cup captain for 2025. Woods was a top candidate for the job last year as well.

But in the end, Woods informed the PGA he would not accept the 2025 captaincy. Keegan Bradley took his spot.

In a statement read during the press conference announcing Bradley’s captaincy, Woods said, “With my new responsibilities to the [PGA] Tour and time commitments involved I felt I would not be able to commit the time to Team USA and the players required as a captain.”

He added, “That does not mean I wouldn’t want to captain a team in the future. If/when I feel it is the right time, I will put my hat in the ring for this committee to decide.”

Now we’ll have to wait another two years to find out if the 2029 Ryder Cup is the one where Woods finally serves as captain.

But now there’s a more pressing question. With Tiger out of the running, who will be the 2027 U.S. Ryder Cup captain? The captain crisis comes at a time when the Americans are desperate for some strong leadership. Fresh off an embarrassing defeat on U.S. soil, the team’s second-straight Ryder Cup loss, the U.S. needs a win. But they need a captain first.

The European team has no such problem. Luke Donald has already been announced as the European captain. He’s hard at work preparing to bring his team a third-straight victory in 2027.

You can read the PGA of America’s full statement below.

PGA of America full statement on Tiger Woods’ Ryder Cup captaincy

The PGA of America stands in full support of Tiger Woods as he steps away to focus on his health and well-being. During this time, we are keeping Tiger in our thoughts and prayers, with sincere hope for his strength, comfort, and recovery. Tiger has meant so much to our Association and to the game of golf. Since his Ryder Cup debut in 1997, he has been an enduring part of the PGA of America family. His connection to our PGA of America Golf Professionals, and his lasting impact on the sport, have inspired generations and profoundly shaped the game. We commend Tiger for prioritizing his long-term health and deeply respect the courage it takes to make such a personal decision. Tiger has shared with us that he will not serve as Captain of the 2027 U.S. Ryder Cup Team and we support his decision. The PGA of America will share further updates regarding the Ryder Cup captaincy when appropriate. – PGA of America

Tiger Woods, following a two-car crash last Friday that led to his DUI arrest, said Tuesday night that he is “stepping away” to seek treatment and “focus on my health.”

The 15-time major winner’s announcement came over X, in a two-paragraph release. It read as follows: 

“I know and understand the seriousness of the situation I find myself in today. I am stepping away for a period of time to seek treatment and focus on my health. This is necessary in order for me to prioritize my well-being and work toward lasting recovery. 

“I’m committed to taking the time needed to return in a healthier, stronger and more focused place, both personally and professionally. I appreciate your understanding and support, and ask for privacy for my family, loved ones and myself at this time.”

Earlier Tuesday, the Martin County Sheriff’s Office released additional details on the arrest and crash. According to the report obtained by GOLF.com, two white pills were found in Woods’ left pant pocket, which were marked as Hydrocodone, an opioid commonly used for pain treatment. Woods said that he takes “a few” types of medication and had taken prescribed medicine that morning. Multiple medicines were redacted from the report. 

The report also said that Woods said he was looking down at his phone and changing the radio station at the time of the accident. After investigating the crash, Martin County Sheriff Deputy Tatiana Levenar noted that Woods was “sweating profusely,” and though he was “lethargic and slow,” he was alert throughout the investigation. Levenar also said that Woods walked with a limp but also stumbled.

Friday’s crash and the 2017 incident are two of four incidents involving Woods inside a car. In 2021, Woods was involved in a one-car crash outside of Los Angeles, sustained multiple injuries, and was hospitalized for three weeks following surgery. In a statement at the time, a doctor said Woods “suffered significant orthopedic injuries to his right lower extremity that were treated during emergency surgery.” The injuries included “comminuted open fractures” in the tibia and fibula, requiring a rod to be inserted into the leg. In November of 2009, Woods crashed his SUV into a fire hydrant and tree outside of his home and was cited for careless driving.

According to Woods’ statement, it was unclear what treatment he would seek, and how long he would be away from golf. Next week, an event Woods has won five times, the Masters, is set to start, and Woods has said he would be on the grounds at Augusta National, though it was unknown whether he would have played after he had undergone a back procedure last October. Woods was also supposed to be in attendance at Augusta Municipal Golf Course after helping with the course’s recent redesign. 

Woods has not played tournament golf since the 2024 Open Championship. Three days before Friday’s crash, he played with his team in TGL, the simulator-based league he co-founded.

It has been an open secret in the tight circle around Tiger Woods for years: If you want to have a serious conversation with Woods — about his charity and architecture work; about the future of the PGA Tour; about his 15 wins in Grand Slam events — you do it in the morning. Woods, famously, is a poor sleeper and an early riser. The broad picture you get, from people in position to know, is that if you’re in the circle, you can get him early. As his days wear on, Woods becomes less available and less predictable. This is not idle, mean-spirited speculation. More like observations borne in care, if not worry.

At around 2 p.m. Friday, Woods flipped his Range Rover on narrow, two-lane Beach Road, near his home on Jupiter Island, in South Florida. He “blew zeroes,” in the parlance of DWI investigations — he had not been drinking. He refused to submit a urine sample but police officers surmised that he was on prescribed drugs to address the pain from his many surgeries and back issues.

The officers saw what they saw and heard what they heard. Woods was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of driving under the influence — the influence of something. He was taken to the Martin County jail, where he spent at least eight hours, as county law requires in these scenarios. At around 10 p.m., Woods’s mug shot began circulating on social media.

As the Martin County sheriff described the accident scene with clear-eyed professionalism, Woods tried to pass a truck towing a pressure-washer heading north on narrow residential road with no shoulders and a 30 mile-an-hour speed limit. The truck driver was about to turn into a driveway. Woods, in the sheriff’s description, caught a back corner of the trailer with the passenger side of his Range Rover, causing the SUV to rollover 90 degrees, so that the driver’s side doors were face down on the road. Woods escaped the vehicle by way of the passenger door. There were no injuries. Had the vehicles been going in opposite directions, “this could have been a lot worse,” said the sheriff, John Budensiek. Both for Woods and the other driver.

If this all sounds depressingly familiar, it’s because it is. In 2017, Woods was arrested by Jupiter Police department in South Florida at about 3 in the morning on a DUI charge. He was found asleep and incoherent on the side of four-lane road, about 10 miles south of the scene of his Friday crash. He spent that night in the Palm Beach County Jail. A breath test that night revealed that Woods had not been drinking but a blood test revealed he had five prescription drugs in his bloodstream.

In 2021, about 22 months after his stirring win in the 2019 Masters, early on a dry weekday morning in Southern California, Woods drove off a rural road, over a median, across two lanes and down a ravine. His vehicle was stopped by a tree, pirouetted and flipped. Woods’s injuries were extensive and his golfing life was permanently compromised. Asked once in a press conference to explain the incident, Woods said tersely, “It’s all in the police report.” But police reports revealed nothing about Woods’s state of mind in the single-vehicle crash. A report did indicate that, per the car’s black-box recording device, Woods had the gas pedal virtually floored through the incident, driving well over 80 miles an hour in a 45-mph zone. Los Angeles County police officials did not test Woods for drugs or alcohol and no arrest was made.

In 2008, in the middle of a night during the Thanksgiving weekend holiday, Woods ran over a hydrant outside his home in the gated Isleworth housing development. There were no tests for drugs or alcohol in that incident, either. The crash rendered Woods bleeding and unconscious. In the weeks and months to come his private life was exposed for the world to see.

Looking at these four incidents, it is easy and convenient to say what Woods needs is a full-time driver. That may be true, but Woods is a deeply controlling person. You almost never see Woods as a passenger. Leaving and arriving from hundreds of tournaments over the years, Woods is almost always the person doing the driving. It’s hard to imagine Woods with a chauffeur, and he’s been incredibly lucky not to have hurt others in these incidents. But when you do some rough human math on these four events, you reach the same conclusion again and again: It’s not easy, being Tiger Woods.

It’s not easy being an inherently shy person who is one of the most famous people in the world. It’s not easy leading a public life when your private life has been revealed to the world. It’s not easy being a single father even when you have all the financial resources in the world. It’s not easy becoming singularly talented at one difficult thing — playing tournament golf like nobody before has ever played it — and then to have to find meaning in your life when that chapter of your life is over.

There is unlikely to be a consequential legal event here, as a result of this Friday arrest. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Woods still show up at the Champions Dinner at Augusta National in less than two weeks. His m.o. has always been move on, move on, move on. Tiger Woods is 50 years old. Like all of us, he has no promised tomorrows. He is in charge of his own life as all of us are in charge of our own lives. He’s always putting up a brave front. There are holes in it. We can see them. It doesn’t matter what we can see. What matters is what he can see.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.

Tiger Woods was involved in a rollover crash on Friday afternoon near his home in Jupiter Island, Fla., according to reports. 

The Martin County Sheriff’s Office, according to reports, is investigating, and details of the crash, including any potential injuries, have yet to be released. WPTV has posted photos from the site of the accident. 

In 2021, Woods was involved in a one-car crash outside of Los Angeles, sustained multiple injuries, and was hospitalized for three weeks following surgery. In a statement at the time,  Woods “suffered significant orthopedic injuries to his right lower extremity that were treated during emergency surgery.” The injuries included “comminuted open fractures” in the tibia and fibula, requiring a rod to be inserted into the leg. 

In 2017, Woods was also arrested in Palm Beach County on suspicion of driving under the influence. Woods later pleaded guilty to reckless driving, agreeing to pay a $250 fine and attend DUI school.

On Tuesday, Woods played with his team in TGL, an indoor simulator-based league. 

Editor’s note: This story is developing. Please check back for updates. 

Many observers of the life and times of Tiger Woods would know he has won 15 major championships and 82 PGA Tour events. But here are two other numbers at the core of the Tiger Woods Numerology Experience: 9 and 8, and that’s not a reference to a Stephen Ames match-play result. (But, since we’re there: check out this golden oldie, from the Match Play Championship, 20 years ago.) The main reference here is to the eight times Woods won Arnold Palmer’s tournament, and to the nine occasions he won USGA national championships. That is, his three USGA junior titles, his three U.S. Ams, plus his three U.S. Open wins at a holy trinity of public courses: Pebble Beach (2000), Bethpage Black (’02) and Torrey Pines (’09).

You know who has won more USGA titles? Nobody.

Also: Woods eight victories at Bay Hill? They came in a 14-year span, all full-field(ish) events. Astonishing.

If Woods had done nothing else in the game, that monumental run alone would put him in the pantheon.

Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Club & Lodge (its full name), where the fellas are playing this week dreaming about the $4 million winner’s payday, is a living tribute to Arnold Palmer his own self. Maybe someday Tiger will get a bridge at Bay Hill named for him or something. For now, you can see his name eight times on metal plaques underfoot at the club’s Champions Walk. In 2022, the R&A made Woods a member of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, which gives him preferred tee times at the Old Course, among other privileges. He has a lifetime honorary membership at Augusta National, care of his first win there, in 1997. (He’s had four more Masters wins since then.) There’s a Tiger Woods Villa at Trump Doral, where Woods has won seven times. But the biggest thing is the most recent thing, straight out of Pinehurst, N.C., and the USGA HQ.

What the USGA did last week, at least when viewed through the prism of eternity, will top the other honors cited here: Golf’s most influential and tradition-minded organizing body (or at least right up there with the R&A), announced that from here on out the winner of the U.S. Amateur will receive the Tiger Woods Medal, and the winner of the USGA junior title for boys will receive the Tiger Woods Trophy. As for the phrase here on out, let’s get it down to one word: forever.

But wait — there’s more.

The subtext here that might not seem obvious but it’s hiding in plain sight. If there was ever any question about whether Tiger Woods was ever going to go LIV, the USGA answered that question with this news of naming rights of the freebie kind. Hang close here: The USGA, by political temperament and mission statement, is not going to align itself with LIV Golf or a LIV player in meaningful way. The two groups are just too . . . different. Along those same lines, nobody with a LIV Golf association is likely to ever receive the Bob Jones Award, the USGA’s most celebrated honor. At the annual pro-member event at Seminole Golf Club, a USGA winter hangout if ever there was one, you never see LIV players in the field. Similar logic, really.

Nobody from the inside would say this out loud, but there really is a USGA-LIV Golf divide. That’s because LIV Golf is a for-profit business, and its business model is rooted in selling star-driven golf. The USGA is golf’s equivalent of a great university, with a teaching-research hospital in its backyard. A core value of the USGA, if not the core value, is merit. Shoot the scores (while playing by the rules), get the prizes, no matter your life story. J.J. Spaun’s win at the U.S. Open last year at Oakmont was out of the merit tradition. When Spaun was a walk-on golfer at San Diego State in 2008, nobody was predicting he would win the Open. He got better at golf. That is, he made himself better. It takes your breath away, because the odds are hugely against you. 

The byword of Tiger’s life in golf is merit. The presenting sponsor of the numbers being dropped here (82, 15, 9, 8) is . . . Merit Inc. The PGA Tour on which Tiger was born and raised, the same. Merit, merit, merit. Woods’s origin story — raised by a Black father who grew up in tough circumstances in a segregated America and by an immigrant mother from Thailand — cannot be overstated. What the USGA is saying here, by naming these great pieces of hardware for Tiger Woods, is that the doors of golf are open to all. This naming business is low-cost, but a big deal.

The PGA Tour, in a naked attempt to make sure it does not lose more star players to LIV Golf, has done a number of things that come right out of the LIV Golf playbook. The whole model for the PGA Tour’s Signature events, including this week’s API, is borrowed from LIV Golf. The creation of the PGA Tour’s for-profit division — PGA Tour Enterprises, with its private-equity investors — is another nod to LIV. (Woods is the vice chairman of E.) The field this week at Bay Hill comprises only 72 players — so LIV. (That number would leave Arnold Palmer ill.) There’s a goofy 36-hole cut for the top-50 and ties, or any player within 10 shots of the lead. That bit of bookkeeping is really a nod to Arnold’s belief in the sanctity of the cut as an elemental part of tournament golf, and that’s really all it is.

And let’s not get all high-and-mighty about the role of the USGA in the game. In negotiating TV rights and choosing venues for U.S. Opens, the USGA can take its leads right from the Gordon Gekko (“greed is good”) playbook.

But we’re here today to put a trophy on a pedestal. These new USGA prizes, the Tiger Woods Trophy and the Tiger Woods Medal, they tell a great deal. That every player managed by Mark Steinberg, Tiger’s longtime agent, is not a LIV Golf golfer, the same — it’s telling. And this is what’s being said. In theory and really in practice, anybody can grow up to win a USGA championship. When you get right down to it, that’s everything. Arnold did it. (He was 24 when he won the U.S. Amateur.) Spaun did it. Bob Jones (nine USGA titles) did it. Ben Hogan did it. And so did, most spectacularly, Tiger. The Tiger Woods Trophy. The Tiger Woods Medal. How fitting.