Tiger Woods turned 50 on Dec. 30 with plenty of public well-wishes from fellow golfers and other sports and entertainment stars, but without any signs of a major birthday bash or other public celebrations.

It turns out the 15-time major champion was just waiting for the right time.

Woods will celebrate his 50th birthday Jan. 14 with an exclusive, A-list celebrity-packed event at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla., so big that the party has a title sponsor.

“RED: Celebrating Legacy presented by EY US” will bring together around 300 of Woods’s extended social circle. 

Hosted by Woods’s TGR Foundation, the party is doubling as the official launch of the nonprofit’s 30th anniversary campaign, and the accounting firm formerly known as Ernst & Young is the presenting sponsor.

“It’s a lot more than a birthday party, and it’s a lot more than an event,” TGR Foundation CEO Cyndi Court tells Front Office Sports. “It’s an event that’s culminating a year of work, and then launching a year of hard work going forward, and what we’re going to do as we expand and grow.”

Perhaps taking inspiration from Michael Rubin’s famous White Party in the Hamptons, the guest list includes PGA Tour players like Justin Thomas and confidants like Joe LaCava, Woods’s longtime caddie, as well as other sports like Pro Football Hall of Famer Michael Strahan and Falcons owner Arthur Blank, who also is a member of the Strategic Sports Group that has invested $1.5 billion in the PGA Tour.

“We definitely could have made it bigger,” Court says. “But we also wanted it to be intimate so that we could celebrate people that throughout the years have made tremendous commitments to Tiger’s vision of what could be possible in the future.”

Jon Bon Jovi will perform at the party, which will be unmistakably Tiger-themed. 

The dress code suggests that guests wear a “touch of red,” the color Woods wears in the final rounds of golf tournaments and was the inspiration for his Sun Day Red apparel brand that launched in 2024. 

The menu is built on the five Masters champions’ dinners that have been served in Woods’s honor. Those meals have featured dishes like steak and chicken fajitas, stuffed jalapenos, sushi (including an “Augusta roll”), porterhouse steaks, crab cakes, and even cheeseburgers, French fries, and milkshakes.

Court says she presented Woods with the idea for a combined celebration of his 50th birthday and 30th anniversary of his nonprofit foundation about a year ago. The event will have three main pillars, celebrating Woods’s accomplishments on the course, his legacy off the course, and looking ahead at what’s to come.

The TGR Foundation has set a fundraising goal of $50 million that will support the expansion of TGR Learning Labs, which provide free STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) education, career-connected programs, and wellness activities for middle and high school students. There are currently two locations in Anaheim, Calif., and Philadelphia, with two more planned in Augusta, Ga., and Los Angeles. “There might be another market that we might announce that night,” Court says.

Beyond the TGR Foundation, Woods has taken a leadership role off the golf course as the PGA Tour considers massive schedule changes that could arrive as soon as 2027. Woods cofounded the TGL indoor team golf league, which on Tuesday announced it is also launching a new women’s league. 

On the golf course, Woods has been marred by injuries recently. He is still recovering from yet another back surgery in October, which came after he ruptured his Achilles in March. His last major start came at the 2024 Open Championship, when he missed the cut. 

Woods could return to TGL action this season for his Jupiter Links Golf Club, but it’s unclear whether he’ll tee it up on the PGA Tour or major championships, or even the PGA Tour Champions, which is for players  50 and older.

The NFL’s Black Monday extended into Tuesday with one of the most seismic coaching dismissals in recent history, as John Harbaugh is no longer with the Baltimore Ravens.

Harbaugh had been with the Ravens for 18 years, was the second-most-tenured coach in the league, behind the Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, and led Baltimore to a Super Bowl XLVII title. His 180 regular-season wins is 14th in NFL history.

The firing, however, arrived two days after the Ravens lost on Sunday Night Football to the archrival Steelers, missing a last-second field-goal attempt and missing the playoffs for the first time since 2021. It has been a run of disappointment for Harbaugh while he’s had quarterback Lamar Jackson, a two-time NFL Most Valuable Player. With Jackson for the past eight seasons, Harbaugh has won just three playoff games and never reached a Super Bowl.

“This was an incredibly difficult decision, given the tremendous 18 years we have spent together and the profound respect I have for John as a coach and, most importantly, as a great man of integrity,” said Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti.

“We fully understand the expectations of our fans and everyone in the Ravens organization. Finding another strong leader and partner who will reflect these high standards is paramount,” he said.

The Ravens’ coaching opening is now one of seven around the league as this year’s Black Monday was another busy one. The other teams with vacancies include the Browns, Cardinals, Falcons, Giants, Raiders, and Titans. Some of those teams are expected to now have interest in Harbaugh. 

None of those teams or their ousted coaches, however, have had the level of success that Harbaugh and the Ravens had. It was expected, though, that the loser of the Steelers-Ravens game on SNF, a winner-take-all clash for the AFC North division title, could be dismissed. Even with the victory, Tomlin is still eyed as a future broadcasting star. 

Harbaugh, meanwhile, signed a three-year extension prior to this season and is under contract through the 2028 season. He earned $16 million this year, tied for fourth-highest in the league.

The Athletics are facing a curveball over their new name as they prepare to move to Las Vegas—efforts to trademark “Las Vegas Athletics” have thus far been denied by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

On Dec. 29, the USPTO issued a second refusal of trademark applications to register “Las Vegas Athletics” and “Vegas Athletics.” Experts say the refusal doesn’t threaten the team’s relocation plans, but it highlights a quirk of U.S. trademark law: Even one of Major League Baseball’s most storied franchises can’t automatically carry brand protections with it when it moves cities.

Representatives for MLB and the A’s declined to comment, but two sources familiar with the matter tell Front Office Sports that MLB handles trademark applications for all 30 teams.

Trademark attorney Josh Gerben explained in a blog post that the USPTO denied the A’s application because it determined that “Las Vegas Athletics” is “primarily geographically descriptive,” meaning the name combines a well-known place name with a generic sports term. Granting exclusive rights to the phrase could prevent other legitimate athletic organizations in Las Vegas from using common language to describe their activities, according to the USPTO.

“The examiner is taking this very literally,” Gerben tells FOS. “The USPTO is basically saying ‘if we give the team unfettered rights, then any youth or amateur athletics association in Las Vegas could suddenly be in violation of the trademark.’ It’s a weird result.”

It might be weird, but experts say the refusal is hardly extraordinary.

Part of the A’s problem is that they aren’t yet playing in Las Vegas. The team is playing in Sacramento while its new stadium is being built, and the A’s aren’t expected to take a swing in Las Vegas until 2028. Because of that, the team has not been able to prove to the USPTO that consumers already associate “Las Vegas Athletics” with a single source—one of the key requirements for overcoming a refusal based on geographic descriptiveness. In trademark law, it’s known as “acquired distinctiveness” when a phrase becomes legally protectable because consumers have come to associate it with a single source.

In filings with the USPTO, the A’s have attempted to bridge that gap by pointing to their long history as the Athletics, including prior trademark registrations for “Oakland Athletics,” “Philadelphia Athletics,” and “Kansas City Athletics.” But Gerben says trying to register trademarks is not like fighting a case in state or federal court, where precedent from other cases can help a party’s cause; in front of the USPTO, each application is judged on its own merits, and prior approvals don’t guarantee a new mark will be accepted.

“They don’t get the benefit of the Oakland Athletics trademark,” Gerben tells FOS. “It doesn’t just transfer that way.”

Trademark attorney Carissa Weiss says the team’s relocation has complicated matters. 

“The problem the team has here is that the move to Las Vegas is a new development, so they likely don’t have sufficient use to claim acquired distinctiveness in the full mark ‘Las Vegas Athletics,’” Weiss tells FOS.

That doesn’t mean the door is closed. Because the refusal is non-final, the A’s will have another chance to respond.

Trademark law expert and Northeastern University law and media professor Alexandra Roberts says their next argument could be to assert “acquired distinctiveness.” That would involve showing the USPTO that consumers recognize “Las Vegas Athletics” as identifying a specific team rather than just a descriptive phrase. Evidence of acquired distinctiveness can include the length and manner of use, merchandise or ticket sales under the mark, advertising spend, third-party coverage such as news articles, and survey or consumer testimony demonstrating public recognition. 

“If the applicant goes back to the USPTO after it starts using the mark and provides evidence of widespread use and sales, extensive advertising and news coverage, and consumer recognition, it will be able to secure the registration,” Roberts tells FOS.

Even if the team ultimately gets rejected again by the USPTO, it could still appeal to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. And if it were to lose there, it could take its case to federal court.

“They could appeal all the way to the Supreme Court,” Gerben says. He points to a U.S. Supreme Court case from 2020 that saw Booking.com win the right to register its name as a trademark, despite the USPTO’s argument that its name was too generic.

“That’s expensive, though, and would take a lot of time,” Gerben tells FOS. “The path of least resistance is to keep these applications active until they start playing in Vegas or can prove the mark has acquired distinctiveness through use and consumer recognition.”