Golf- Mickelson and Tiger Woods will miss this years Accenture Match Play Championship

This year won't be the same in the PGA Tour - no one is quite sure when Tiger Woods will return to play. He is missing the first event, the Accenture Match Play Championship. Phil Mickelson will not be involved in the event either.

Both players had until 5pm last Friday to confirm their attendance, but the day and time passed by with no news, not even a word. Some time later several sources revealed that both players appealed to personal reasons to explain their absence from this week's event.

Mickelson is going to take his family on a vacation already planned with his wife. Tiger Woods, on the other hand, has not yet made an official statement, but one can only assume that the sex scandals and rehab - for, surprise surprise, sex addiction - have taken their toll.

The golfer, then, is putting his marriage and reputation before tournament majors, perhaps the right choice at this time. But the question is: when is he coming back? Neither Woods' silence nor his absence from the past 8 tournaments this year bode well for his attendance for the rest of the year.

Woods' wife left him, and he lost sponsorship contracts valued in the millions. The golf superstar then chose to enter into therapy. This year seems a strange repetition of years past, when a knee injury forced him out of the competition for a year. When he returned last year, it took some time to regain his rhythm. No one is quite sure what will happen to his rhythm when he returns this time.

The tournament reunites the 64 top best players. The absence of Woods and Mickelson benefited Ross McGowan, who is ranked at 66 and has never played in the tournament before.

The event, which began on Wednesday, opened with Steve Stricker as the No. 1 seed. In the last 15 years, Stricker has won the tournament on four different occasions.

"It scares me a little bit, to tell you the truth," he said. "Just because you never know who you're going to get, or who you're going to run into."

The tournament director Wade Dunegan said that he has been working on the organization for almost one year and that he is very pleased with the results.

"We never know until Friday who is going to play, and we're pleased to have the field we do," he said. "Tiger and Phil are missing for personal reasons, but every other top player is coming."

Tiger has won the Accenture Match Play Championship three times. Since the scandal in November, Accenture took away the sponsorship for Woods and on December 11th Woods announced an indefinite leave from golf. Since then he hasn't made any more statements.

Through his career, Tiger has won 71 PGA Tours and holds 14 major titles. Is pretty unlikely that he will be participating in the Waste Management Phoenix Open, where he has not played for years, or the Honda Classic, where he has never played as a professional. Still, fans are waiting for him to come back; as some say, golf is not the same without him.

This is the first time since 2001, in Australia, that Woods has skipped the Match Play Championship.