With LIV and Tour players attending, Tiger Woods not sure what Masters Champions Dinner will be like

LOS ANGELES – Tiger Woods doesn’t know what to expect at the Masters Champions Dinner when PGA Tour and LIV players will convene for the first time in an intimate setting.

Woods has played only one official event since LIV Golf launched last June, when he was paired with Max Homa and Matt Fitzpatrick – both of whom are committed to the Tour – for the first two rounds at The Open Championship.

But the Champions Dinner promises to be different, after Augusta National announced that it would not ban the LIV defectors who were otherwise eligible to compete in the year’s first major.

Full-field tee times from The Genesis Invitational

“I don’t know because I haven’t been around them,” Woods said Tuesday at the Genesis Invitational, where he’s playing his first non-major round on Tour since October 2020. “I don’t know what that reaction is going to be. I know that some of our friendships have certainly taken a different path, but we’ll see when all that transpires. That is still a couple months away.”

LIV has signed a handful of former Masters winners – Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bubba Watson, Sergio Garcia, Patrick Reed and Charl Schwartzel – to at least create the possibility of some friction between the two warring sides, particularly with an outstanding antitrust lawsuit.

“The Champions Dinner is going to, obviously, be something that’s talked about,” Woods said. “But we as a whole need to honor Scottie [Scheffler]. Scottie’s the winner, it’s his dinner. So making sure that Scottie gets honored correctly, but also realizing the nature of what has transpired and the people that have left, just where our situations are either legally or emotionally, there’s a lot there.”