Tiger Woods resembling a relic from a bygone era

AUGUSTA, Ga. – The Grill Room here at the Augusta National Golf Club includes a wall with three display cases built into it. Tradition holds that a Masters champion donates a club from his victorious year to be displayed, often the one most critical to winning.

So there’s Arnold Palmer’s 1-iron from 1958 and Ben Hogan’s 4-wood from 1951 and Bubba Watson’s pitching wedge from 2012. It serves as a small, understated, yet completely mesmerizing trip through golf history.

There in the middle display case sits a King Cobra Driver, circa 1997, the weapon a then-21-year-old Tiger Woods used to annihilate the field and this famed course. He finished 18-under par, producing records in both margin of victory (12 strokes) and television ratings (an estimated 44 million tuned in on Sunday). It changed just about everything in a sport that is resistant to change much of anything.

They don’t hang banners or retire numbers around here.

So we’re left with not much more than that old, now comically undersized driver, which is not even viewable by a general public that doesn’t have access to the Grill Room.

It is about all the proof there is that Tiger Woods so dominated this place that they actually tried to Tiger-proof it.

Tiger will not play in this year’s Masters, which tees off on Thursday. He’s still dealing with a debilitating back injury. This is his second missed Masters in three years, the first was also due to injury. As the downtime piles up and the public appearances dwindle, you begin to wonder if the 40-year-old will ever return for anything more than jetting in for the Champions Dinner on Tuesday Night, as he’s expected.

The azaleas are in full bloom as ever – Augusta National can control that. The excited patrons still pour onto the grounds – perhaps nothing can stop that. No one can fix Tiger’s back though, and even if he were to fade into middle age as a sometime contender rather than the central figure of this annual April drama, his presence would still draw the most attention.

Tiger’s impact is everywhere.

It’s not just that in the famed effort to curb Woods’ power and distance, the course was lengthened and trees and rough were added starting in 1999. What was 6,925 yards long when Woods first won is now stretched to 7,435, with guys like Bubba Watson and Dustin Johnson making a mockery of what Tiger used to do.

Woods inspired a golf boom like few others. The technology investment changed the equipment. The driver Adam Scott used to win the 2013 Masters – a Titleist 913D3 (Graphite Design Tour AD DI-8X), 9.5 degrees – sits just above Woods’ in the display case and makes Tiger’s stick look like something Hogan would’ve swung. And Scott is now three generations newer. All over the practice tee, players swing in front of TrackMan technology, which measures everything down to precise ball spin stats.

Augusta National has changed also, and not just by admitting its first women members in 2012.

This place was always popular and always wealthy, but the worldwide interest in Tiger-era golf drove television revenues and merchandise sales. Augusta National would never reveal by how much, but since 1997 it’s added a state of the art driving range, dozens of new hospitality buildings and bought large swaths of adjacent land to better control parking. The city of Augusta even rerouted roads.

And if you want to get a badge to watch Thursday’s opening round, they were going for $2,375 on StubHub.com as of Tuesday afternoon. That’s one ticket for one day. It wasn’t anything close to that pre-Tiger.

Woods helped make Augusta National mythical to a new generation of golf fans. It was perfect for his game, whether he was bombing away on par-5’s, or delivering magical shots on the par-3 16th.

He won here four times and racked up an astonishing 11 top fives. In a seven-year stretch from 2005-11, he never finished lower than sixth, meaning on Sunday afternoon, he was in it, clad in red, followed by galleries that were epic in size.

A Woods birdie on some distant hole would cause a roar through the Georgia pines that someone else’s hole-in-one couldn’t produce. If he wasn’t intimidating a playing partner, the sheer number of his fans would.

Woods rarely failed to deliver. In 2010, he returned from a knee injury and a highly publicized personal scandal. He was greeted with jokes in the gallery and a plane flying overhead that was tugging mocking banners – “Tiger: Did you mean Bootyism?" and "Sex addict? Yeah. Right. Sure. Me too!"

He still finished tied for sixth.

This was his playground. Now it isn’t.

“After assessing the present condition of my back, and consulting with my medical team, I've decided it's prudent to miss this year's Masters," Woods said in a statement. He offered no timetable for a return to the PGA Tour. His agent said he expects him back “this year” but offered no specifics.

In general, news from the Woods camp holds the same reliability as that time the North Korean state news agency reported that its supreme leader at the time, Kim Jong-il, shot a 38-under-par 34 in his first ever round of golf (it included 11 aces).

So no one is holding his or her breath around here. Whether knowingly or not, they speak of Tiger in the past tense, an interloper in an era of Tiger-inspired youth.

“I lived through the Tiger dominance,” Adam Scott said with a laugh. “We all just felt at times we were playing for second.

“It’s a different point in the game,” Scott continued. “I think it’s going to be awhile before … we see dominance like we saw from Tiger Woods. … There are probably 10, 12, 15 guys you could make a good case have a real shot to win this tournament, even with the standard of golf that high. Whereas before, when Tiger set the benchmark, Tiger controlled the outcome so much. It didn’t always happen, he didn’t win every time; but if he was playing on his game it was very, very hard to beat him.”

You can’t blame current stars for moving on. Woods hasn’t won here since 2005. Hasn’t won any major since 2008. Hasn’t won anywhere since 2013.

“It was fantastic golf to watch,” said Jason Day, the world’s current No. 1. “I mean, he did things that no one else could do. … Changed the game of golf for the better. And now you see the results [in the younger generation]. There’s numbers and numbers of guys that are young, because of what Tiger did back in the day, that got us into the game of golf.”

So golf, as always, goes on. And the Masters, for 80 years now, does too. The main event may be gone, but the sun is out. The pimento cheese sandwiches are being consumed. The excitement is building across the practice rounds.

Woods isn’t ready to join Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson on the ceremonial first tee, but in that Grill Room display case, that King Cobra keeps looking more and more like its from a hopelessly ancient era of the game that’s never coming back.