Looking back
The 2012 Memorial Tournament airs on CBS
After having been postponed this year (you get three guesses as to why), the 2020 MemorialTournament is set to begin on July 16.To help prepare for the return of live golf, CBS is airing the MemorialTournament from 2012 on Sunday, June 7. Fans of Tiger Woods likely remember the event, as it was his last great game before a series of unfortunate career lows that many thought were signs that his prolific career was coming to an end.
Jack Nicklaus, the “Golden Bear” who needs no introduction, founded the Memorial Tournament in 1976. Ever since that first tournament was held more than 40 years ago, the game has been played at the Muirfield Village Golf Club (a course that he also designed), in his home state of Ohio. Hoping to honor the place where he grew up, learned to golf and raised a family, Nicklaus spent close to 10 years dreaming about a tournament that would not only give back by supporting local charity organizations but attract fans to the game of golf on a global scale.
The Memorial succeeded in both aspects: it has benefited children’s hospitals and Ohio’s needy since the inaugural event, and, by the 1990s, it was the first nonmajor PGA game to achieve sold-out status. Each year, the aptly-named tournament honors an icon in golf for their achievements in and out of the game. The 2012 tournament honored the notably long career of Tom Watson, the first honored Masters cofounder-slash-golfer-slashlawyer Bobby Jones, and the most recent Memorial Tournament paid tribute to 26time LPGA Tour event winner Judy Rankin, who began her professional LPGA career at just 17 years old.
Woods took the title for the first time in 1999, then again in 2000 when he became the first Memorial Tournament champion to successfully defend the title. Then he did it again the following year. Woods would take the championship once again in 2009, and for the final time (so far?) in 2012. That final comefrom-behind victory tied him with Nicklaus himself for second place in total PGA Tour wins, with an astounding 73 titles earned. The following year, Woods would play the worst back nine on his record, only to somehow top that unfortunate milestone in 2015, when Round 3 of the Memorial Tournament became the single worst showing in Woods’ entire career since going professional in 1996.
As we now know, those poor showings did not signify the end forTiger, merely a low point, much like the rest of us have had, and seemed to be forgotten in the years surrounding his extremely public “fall from grace” in 2009. The 44-year-old Presidential Medal of Freedom-earning game-changer is now tied for first in PGATour wins, stunning absolutely everyone when he took the 2019 Masters after 11 years without a major event win. Who knows what this year will hold for the sports icon once the game returns, but you can get hyped for his return, and maybe even that elusive sixth win, by watching the 2012 Memorial Tournament on Sunday, June 7, on CBS.