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GOAT talk.
That’s what we got Tuesday ahead of this week’s Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club where Tiger Woods will make his return to the PGA Tour.
His last competitive appearance came at the Open in July, however, his last non-major event was the 2020 Zozo Championship. He has since played in The Match series and the PNC “hit-and-giggle” with his son, Charlie.
Woods sat down with the media for a wide-ranging conversation about his health, goals for the week and unsurprisingly, the Saudi-backed LIV Golf League.
However, the long-time Laker fan also reflected on LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the National Basketball Association’s all-time scoring leader.
“What he accomplished is absolutely incredible of just the durability, the consistency and the longevity,” he said. “I never thought — I grew up watching Kareem here, never saw him play in Milwaukee, but he was the cat, that’s all I remember, the Showtime Lakers and watching Cat run down there with goggles and hit the sky hook, that record we never thought it would be surpassed.
“But what LeBron is doing — but also the amount of minutes he’s playing, no one’s ever done that at that age, to be able to play all five positions, that’s never been done before at this level for this long.”
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Tom Brady recently announced his retirement from the National Football League, leaving behind a resume that puts him in rarified air not only in the NFL history books, but in the world of sports.
Air in which Woods also resides.
“I don’t know how —Tom playing as long as he did and the level that he played at was phenomenal,” he said. “We just have to just look at him as an outlier of how great that was. I remember as a kid growing up watching John Elway speak and just cried that I could do it but my body won’t allow me to do it anymore. He won the last two Super Bowls, but he could just not physically do it anymore. I’ve got to that point a couple times where you kind of think about it, but our sport, there’s no contact, I don’t have 300-pound guys falling on top of me.
“It’s just a matter of shooting the lowest score. We have the ability to pick and choose and play a little bit longer. We’ve seen — my hero, Arnold Palmer, like all of us, hell, he played in 50 straight Masters, 50 straight. I’m not even 50 years old yet and he played in 50 straight Masters.”
Woods will play with Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas, as comfy a pairing as you could think of, for the first two rounds of the Genesis. The threesome tees off at 3:04 p.m. ET Thursday.
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