Do we like Tiger Woods?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or campaigning found, balanced by a 2026 driving conviction and a long-running record of letting people down off the course.
Tiger Woods is the golfer who made the sport mainstream: 15 majors, a Stanford dropout turned world number one, and a name known well beyond golf. That fame has also meant every misstep gets read around the world, and he has had plenty of them lately.
The big one is the 2026 crash. Police arrested him on 27 March after his car clipped a truck and rolled on Jupiter Island, Florida. No one was injured, he was charged with DUI with property damage and refusing a lawful test, and he first pleaded not guilty.
It ended on 2 September. He pleaded no contest to reduced charges, including reckless driving (second offense), and the judge fined him $1,500 and suspended his licence for five years, saying that was “for the safety of the public”. The DUI charge itself went away in the deal, so call it a conviction, not a DUI conviction.
Before that, the stain he owned was the 2009 and 2010 scandal. At a televised statement in 2010 he said he was sorry and that he had “brought this shame on myself”. A 2023 lawsuit from an ex-partner over his Florida home was dropped without prejudice, so the claims were never tested in court.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty. No remarks about LGBTQ+ or trans people, no vaccine or election conspiracy talk. The political note is Trump: in 2018, asked about his friendship with him, he said you have to “respect the office”, and he accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump in 2019. That is the company he kept, not harm from his own words.
The good stuff is real. His foundation, started in 1996, runs learning labs for students, and in January 2026 it announced a new Atlanta lab backed by a pledge from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. In June he also fronted the PGA Tour's new schedule plan, chairing the committee behind it.