One question that keeps circling back after a few years in the golf world is, how can we imagine the sport without the biggest name like Tiger Woods no longer being a part of it? Speaking to Front Office Sports, USGA CEO Mike Whan was asked a similar question as he shared his experience on how golf handles the fading of its biggest names.

“I was commissioner of the LPGA for 12 years, and when you’re in that moment, I know that those athletes and sometimes even their commissioner can feel like, ‘How are we ever going to get past Lorena Ochoa?’ Before me, they were probably saying, ‘How are we going to get past Annika Sorenstam or Nancy Lopez?’ Athletes step up, and now we’re talking about Nelly Korda’s run or Jeeno Thitikul.”

“It just happens. So, when you say no Tiger or Phil, I’ll never think about the 2026 Masters as that. I’ll think about it as the year that Rory threw a back-to-back on us. That’s what happens in sports. The next big ones step up, and the big ones are stepping up in the men’s and women’s game as well.”

The transition is pointed on the women’s side as the LPGA navigated the field after Sorenstam and Ochoa. Ochoa played from 2003 to 2010 and was the top-ranked female golfer in the world for 158 consecutive and total weeks. Sorenstam took her place afterwards, and now, it is Nelly Korda outshining Annika. Korda has now won three major championships and 17 LPGA Tour titles. As of May 2026, Nelly Korda has matched two historic records set by Sorenstam: the record for 5 consecutive wins in one season and then the record of starting the season with 6 top-10 finishes.

Similarly, on the PGA Tour side, Scottie Scheffler‘s era is taking over. The fandom can miss the 15x major winner as much as they want, but at the same time, they cannot help but compare Scheffler and Woods, and rightfully so. Here are the key records that Scheffler has matched or closely mirrored:

• Four Major Championships Span: Scheffler matched Tiger Woods by winning his first four major championships in exactly 1,197 days.
• Three Consecutive Player of the Year Awards: Scheffler became the second player in PGA Tour history to win the award three years in a row (2022–2024), matching Tiger’s feat (1999–2003 and 2005–2007).
• Dominant Scoring Average: In the 2025 season, Scheffler matched Tiger as the only player in the last 40 years to lead the PGA Tour in scoring average for all four tournament days.
• Single-Season Wins: In 2024, Scheffler won seven times, making him the first player to win seven or more times in a season since Tiger Woods in 2007.
• Consecutive Top-10 Streak: As of early 2026, Scheffler maintained a streak of 18 straight top-10 finishes, one of the longest in the modern era and in the realm of Tiger’s dominant streaks

When Tiger Woods missed the 2025 Masters, ESPN’s early rounds of coverage took a sharp hit and dropped down to 28% year over year, falling from 3.2 million viewers to 2.3 million. As some people say, Woods doesn’t move golf’s TV rating needles; he is golf. But that does not mean nobody else will try to take his place in the years to come.

For instance, in 2025, on Masters Sunday, the viewership was over 12.707 million, which was a 33% jump from the last year. In fact, during the peak time, 7 to 7:15, 19.543 million people were watching. The reason was simple. Rory McIlroy won on Sunday afternoon after 17 long years, and his completion of the career Grand Slam got people interested.

A similar decline in viewership was expected at the 2026 Masters. Yet, the opposite happened. The final round peaked at over 20 million viewers on CBS, the network’s best since 2013, as Rory McIlroy became the back-to-back champion at Augusta since Tiger Woods himself in 2002. So as USGA CEO Mike Whan said, the sport didn’t mourn the absence but instead found a new story and ran with it.

This year’s Masters was the first since 1994 that neither Tiger Woods nor Phil Mickelson teed it up at Augusta National Golf Club. Woods stepped away to seek treatment following a rollover crash, leading to a DUI scandal, in March 2026, while Mickelson announced in early April that he would be sidelined for an extended period as his family navigated a personal health matter.

Everybody on the field felt their absence, especially at Augusta. The 2018 Masters champion, Patrick Reed, had also opened up as he said, “Without Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in the events in golf, when both stepped away, I honestly felt it hurt the game of golf.”

Now, as the sport shifts its focus to the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club this week, it does not diminish the absence of those legends or what they did for the game. It simply shows that the transition is already here, for better or for worse.

With no Tiger Woods, the USGA’s effort for the next best story continues

The U.S. Open has always been about the best players competing on the same stage. That premise has gotten complicated when some of those players are on the LIV League, which operates strictly outside the traditional tour structure. The USGA became the first major to create a direct pathway for LIV golf players when it introduced a new exemption category ahead of the 2025 U.S. Open.

Mike Whan was asked whether that decision still holds up in the press conference and what it says about where the sport is heading. He has acknowledged the talent on the circuit and said the USGA simply wanted to ensure it wasn’t missing the best players.

“If somebody goes out there and is beating champions that are already qualified here regularly, we wanted to make sure we captured that.”

On the future of those exemptions, he was equally straightforward: the USGA will reassess year by year, depending on what LIV Golf looks like. The answer becomes important as PIF has confirmed it will withdraw its funding at the end of the 2026 season, leaving the league still searching for outside investors.

For now, the exemption pathway remains active, with Joaquín Niemann having claimed the first spot via last year’s final standing and a second spot still available heading into the May 18 deadline.