How to watch Tiger Woods live at Hero World Challenge online, TV schedule and more

We’ve waited more than a year. It’s finally time. Tiger Woods will make his return to competitive golf on Thursday afternoon, and the hype surrounding a typically low-key silly season event has been turned all the way up to 100.

The last time we saw Tiger play in a competitive PGA Tour event was August of 2015. It will be 467 days in between rounds, an interminable but expected wait after Woods announced multiple back surgeries last fall. We held out hope that maybe he’d find a way to get back this past summer and play a major or two. There were rumors and speculation that he was getting close and might announce a return, but nothing ever materialized. Then, when he did announce his official return schedule, he made a last-minute change, pulling out of the Safeway Open just two days before it started in mid-October. That prolonged the wait to December.

Now we’re here and Tiger is on the tee sheet, played a pro-am, and is ready to go for the crowd and cameras. Golf Channel will have the coverage of this offseason event, going live at 1 p.m. ET for a 3.5-hour broadcast that should end just before darkness in the Bahamas.

There’s just one problem. Tiger begins his comeback at noon ET with a tee time with Patrick Reed. We’ve waited so long and we’re not going to get a broadcast of Tiger’s official return? Well, we’re told Golf Channel will have its pregame show up and running at noon and will go live for Tiger’s first tee ball. It’ll also show highlights throughout the hour thereafter. I would imagine the Golf Channel will show just about his every shot, perhaps on a slight delay until it gets to the official broadcast window at 1 p.m.

If you have a day job and are stuck in a cubicle on Thursday afternoon, you will be able to watch a simulcast stream of the opening round via Golf Channel. It’s an easy way to ignore work and get to the weekend over these next two days.

The last time Tiger played, the ratings of the usually lower-tier sleepy Wyndham Championship eclipsed those of some majors in 2015. This event has almost no stakes -- it was created largely to raise money for Tiger’s foundation, and the best players in the world show up and make a nice chunk of change before the holidays. The pressure is not intense and it’s a fun week in the Bahamas while the rest of the country starts to freeze. Not this week, however. It’s one of the biggest shows of the golf year and should be an enormous boost to close everything out until 2017.

Here’s your media schedule for Thursday’s opening round in the Bahamas (all times ET):

1 to 4:30 p.m. -- Golf Channel simulcast stream