What we really want to know is whether Tiger Woods will play in next month’s Masters. He left that question unanswered in his return to professional golf on Tuesday. Instead, Woods played in the championship round of the TGL, a golf league he co-owns with fellow pro golfer Rory McIlroy and former NBC Sports executive Mike McCarley.

Unlike the PGA tour’s format, which determines winners based on individual scorecards after 18 holes, TGL has six teams, and Woods’ Jupiter Links Golf Club fell to Los Angeles Golf Club, 9-2, handing LAGC the SoFi Cup championship in a league that started play last year.

Woods, 50, had moments reminiscent of the dominance of his 20s and 30s, at least to the extent that playing in an indoor arena with a massive golf simulator and lots of other technology can be reminiscent of the courses at Augusta National Golf Club or Oakmont Country Club.

That still wasn’t enough to help Jupiter score a victory. 

Woods last played on the PGA Tour in the 2024 British Open. Since then, he’s had surgery on his left Achilles tendon last March and his back last October. He was noncommittal about whether he’d try to play in this year’s masters, saying in a post-match interview that he’d been working to recover from a spate of injuries, but at 50, his body just doesn’t recover as fast as it used to.

Last night’s winners split a $9 million purse, while the runners-up shared half that much.