Tour Championship 2018: Tiger Woods’ tee time, plus full pairings for Sunday

It’s the last event of the PGA Tour season and Tiger Woods will begin it with a three-shot lead. This is all you ever wanted.

It has been five years since Tiger Woods won on the PGA Tour. Given the last few years, it’s a surprise he’s even playing competitive golf again, yet alone in contention to win a real, actual golf tournament.

But that’s the opportunity that arrives on Sunday. Tiger not only has a chance to win a tournament, but a chance to win the season-ending Tour Championship. That is the smallest, most exclusive and hardest-to-get-into field of the season. Jordan Spieth did not even qualify for the Tour Championship. Tiger Woods, the one who was supposed to never be competitive again, qualified and now leads by three shots with only 18 holes to play at East Lake in Atlanta.

This seems like an appropriate way for Tiger to end this incredible comeback season. If he wins or does not win, the comeback is an unqualified success. Now he’s got a chance to run away with the season-ending championship.

Tiger leads Rory McIlroy and Justin Rose by three shots. That’s a hefty margin for a final round, but the spread was actually five shots for a lengthy period of time during Saturday’s third round. The three shot cushion is still plenty for Tiger to work with in pursuit of his first win in more than five years.

The tee sheet is kind of everything we want from sports. There is the all-time legend in Tiger and there is the next generation of superstars that have taken over the game chasing him on a Sunday in the season finale. Woods will play with Rory McIlroy, held out as the one to carry the torch in the post-Tiger era. That’s changed over the years, but it’s hard to argue that Rory is not one of, if not the most talented player in the world. Now he gets Tiger — the real, live actual Tiger posting legit competitive scores — and he gets him with a three shot lead.

The final pairing of Rory and Tiger tee off just after 2 p.m. ET. The Tour Championship has a small, efficient field of just 30 players. This is not like some of those events earlier in the year in which the fields push 150 players. The 30-man number makes it the most exclusive and smallest tourney of the year. But it also yields a speedy pace of play, with twosomes all week and almost no traffic jams out on the venue with a small group playing the course. These rounds should come in well under four hours and set us up for finish before 6 p.m. ET on NBC.

The PGA Tour is never going to compete with the NFL. But Tiger sitting on a lead, playing alongside Rory McIlroy, is a perfectly strong way to put some sort of dent in the NFL’s monopolization of sports minds across America. You should watch Tiger instead. The pace of play should be under four hours and he’s playing with a three-shot lead and against Rory freaking McIlroy. This is what you want.

Here’s your full tee sheet for Sunday at the Tour Championship:

• 11:45 a.m.: Patrick Reed, Phil Mickelson
• 11:55 a.m.: Keegan Bradley, Bubba Watson
• 12:05 p.m.: Brooks Koepka, Francesco Molinari
• 12:15 p.m.: Kevin Na, Patrick Cantlay
• 12:25 p.m.: Bryson DeChambeau, Cameron Smith
• 12:35 p.m.: Jason Day, Rickie Fowler
• 12:45 p.m.: Marc Leishman, Patton Kizzire
• 12:55 p.m.: Tommy Fleetwood, Hideki Matsuyama
• 1:05 p.m.: Justin Thomas, Webb Simpson
• 1:15 p.m.: Gary Woodland, Xander Schauffele
• 1:25 p.m.: Aaron Wise, Dustin Johnson
• 1:35 p.m.: Tony Finau, Billy Horschel
• 1:45 p.m.: Jon Rahm, Paul Casey
• 1:55 p.m.: Justin Rose, Kyle Stanley
• 2:05 p.m.: Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy