Tiger Woods Update: Friend Darius Rucker Weighs in on If He Thinks He’ll Golf Again

Darius Rucker has a message for Tiger Woods. The 54-year old country singer talked about Woods’ car accident on the TODAY show on Friday while promoting his new song “Beers and Sunshine.” Rucker was very concerned about Woods once he learned about the crash.

“When it first happened, you’re all worried about his health, but now that you know what’s going on, I think Tiger’s such a strong guy,” Rucker said, as reported by Entertainment Tonight. Rucker also shared his thoughts on Woods playing golf again. “The question of if he’s going to play again, I say if Tiger wants to play again, he’ll play again,” he said. “I just want him to get better, get healthy.”

Rucker and Woods are longtime friends as they met in the 1990s. At the time Rucker was the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, a group that was on the rise at the time. As for Woods, he was at the start of his legendary career.

“So we’re finishing up a string of clubs and we’re playing this club in East Lansing, Michigan. … We’d play a show and then we’d go out to a bar called Rick’s American Café,” Rucker told PGATour.com in 2019 when talking about the first time he met Woods. “We were sitting at the bar and I look over the bar and I’m like, ‘Isn’t that that Tiger Woods kid that everybody’s talking about?’ He’s 18. And he was going to Stanford and (our bass player Dean Felber) says like, yeah. So I went over and I said, ‘Are you Tiger Woods?’ and he says, ‘Are you the guy from Hootie and the Blowfish?’ and I sat down and we just hung out all night.”

Woods was involved in a single-vehicle accident in Los Angeles on Tuesday morning. He was transported to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and is currently being treated at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. It was reported that Woods suffered injuries to both of his legs. And that leads to the question of when will Woods return to the golf course?

“He is still in that acute phase where they may still have a lot of work to do in the present, in moments, in days to come,” Dr. Jeremy Faust, emergency physician Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told CNN Wednesday. “It’s unclear to me whether he will be going back to the operating room or not.”