Tiger Woods is still recovering from the injuries he suffered in a car accident in February and won’t be making any TV appearances anytime soon. NBC Sports held a media conference call on Wednesday to discuss coverage of the U.S. Open, which airs June 17-20. The broadcast team of Dan Hicks, Paul Azinger and Jim “Bones” MacKay were asked if anyone reached out to Woods to be part of the coverage.
“We were all thinking how good that would be, who better, if he couldn’t be there to play it, to voice it and have him a part of the show, but we were rebuffed,” Hicks said. “He didn’t want to do it, and I totally understand his situation. There is a lot going on in his world right now and there’s also a part of Tiger that doesn’t want to become this, I don’t want to, for lack of a better word, a sideshow at an event where we should be concentrating on what’s happening.”
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Other than a few posts on social media, Woods has not been seen much in the last three and a half months. Once he left the hospital in Los Angeles, Woods went home to Florida to be with his family as well as continue his rehab. It’s uncertain when Woods will return to action, but everyone understands it will take some time before he makes his first TV appearance since the accident.
“Also, I really believe that if you said yes to something, it would just be a non-stop parade of asks, and he would have to just, you know, start telling everybody no,” Hicks stated. “So, yeah, it would have been fantastic to have Tiger a part of it in that sense, but I understand that what’s going on in his world that he wanted to kind of keep it low key and stay out of the limelight for this one and just hopefully he’ll enjoy it at home watching it on TV and be inspired when we talk about what he did 13 years ago, and that’s the best we can hope for.”
Despite not being on TV, Woods did talk about his recovery to Golf Digest last month. “This has been an entirely different animal,” Woods said. “I understand more of the rehab processes because of my past injuries, but this was more painful than anything I have ever experienced.”
