Two days after taking golf fans on the ride of their lives, Tiger Woods took a knee for the rest of the season, which has got to register as one of the great letdowns in the history of the sport.
One minute you're wondering what he's going to do for an encore after that amazing 91-hole performance at Torrey Pines; the next minute he's gone from World's Greatest Golfer to World's Greatest Stay-At-Home Dad, though I hope he's careful to bounce his new daughter on the good knee.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, from a personal perspective. Tiger might look back on this lost season as a wonderful break during an important developmental year for 1-year-old Sam Alexis, but you'll have to forgive the PGA if it doesn't share that sentiment. For the people who promote golf and put on the big events that benefit so greatly from Tigermania, yesterday wasn't a very good day.
There are a lot of great golfers out there, but it's not like the Miss America Pageant, where Miss Indiana automatically assumes the crown if Kirsten Haglund (Miss Michigan) cannot perform her duties. Rocco Mediate probably looks fine in a two-piece, but he's not going to be able to carry professional golf until next year's Masters.
OK, maybe I'm overstating it a bit. It's not as if everybody who used to watch the PGA Championship is going to switch to NASCAR this August, but the excitement level - at least for the casual golf fan - is not going to be nearly the same as it would be with Tiger in the field.
I suppose the case could be made that the absence of golf's dominant player and personality simply opens the door for someone else to step up and temporarily capture the imagination of the golfing public, but the circumstances of Tiger's sudden exit from the tour make it hard to detect any silver lining.
He didn't just announce that he was taking a few months off. He did it after winning the U.S. Open in a 19-hole playoff on a left leg that we now are told was not just sore from April surgery, but also had new ligament damage and a pair of tibial stress fractures.
So much for the ridiculous Internet chatter that he was milking the knee injury for dramatic effect during the five rounds and approximately 20 miles he had to walk on that gimpy leg over the extended weekend. Just for comparison purposes, I haven't walked a total of 20 miles since high school.
