America loves the Tiger Woods story, and the PGA Championship ratings prove it

LeBron James is the unquestioned king of U.S. sports media.

But there’s one man who’s been there before and is proving he still has the swag to challenge James for his throne. That man, of course, is Tiger Woods.

Love him or hate him, if you’re a sports fan, you can’t turn your eyes away from Woods when he’s competing. Compete he did on Sunday at the PGA Championship, and the ratings bore out what we all know. People watch Woods.

CBS announced that Sunday’s final-round coverage from Bellerive that saw Woods shoot a brilliant 6-under par and come up two painful strokes short of Brooks Koepka was good for an average rating of 6.1, a whopping 69-percent ratings boost over last year’s final round from Quail Hollow.

Woods’ performance had folks glued to their couches with their thumbs on the Twitter button on a summer Sunday afternoon.

Sunday’s ratings bump comes on the heels of the The Open Championship, which saw Woods briefly take the lead on the back nine on Sunday and account for a 38 percent ratings surge, the best numbers the event had seen since 2000.

In general, the average American sports fan does not care about golf. The average American cares about Tiger Woods. Given the highs of his highs and the lows of his lows, his comeback has the potential be one of America’s greatest-ever sports stories.

If Woods manages to contend or even win at The Masters next April, where he opened as the No. 5 betting favorite, it will officially announce 2019 as the summer of Tiger.

You know you’ll tune in.

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