Golf: Tiger links that bear comparison

Andy Farrell draws a parallel with the only other man to have played a different game

"Have you just come in? Have you been away? Have you been on holiday." It was Colin Montgomerie's way of suggesting that his statement that Tiger Woods, with a round to go, could already be crowned the 61st US Masters champion needed no further justification.

Woods, for anyone who was on holiday or visiting Mars, waltzed to a record low total of 270, 18 under par, won by a record score of 12 strokes and become, at 21, the youngest ever Masters champion. In short, Woods had rewritten history. The next day, he opened a couple of restaurants, politely declined President Bill Clinton's offer to join him at a baseball match where he was marking the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the colour barrier, and left the country for a holiday of his own at a secret location.

Should Woods make a habit of such behaviour - winning by 12 shots, not going on holiday - then golf may be reduced to a brief mention in some futuristic Encyclopaedia Britannica saying that it "died out as a competitive sport early in the 21st century when one player of notably superior skills to anyone else won every tournament, every year, for 20 years". In the dream sequence in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, the hero first shoots a 67, his best score by 20 shots, and then regularly shoots in the 50s. It is realising that he will one day shoot an 18, which can never be beaten, that prompts him to wake up.

It is time to wake up. Woods is not a lock to win a grand slam, even if the odds have been slashed from 5,000-1 to 33-1. "It's going to be up to a lot of guys to stop him," said the former Bear apparent Phil Mickelson. "Tiger can't win every major," Davis Love said. "But he is going to be a factor just about everywhere. That's where we are going to be from now on."

We have been here before. Woods is not the first player to play a different game from the rest of his peers. "Jack Nicklaus is playing a different game than the rest us," wrote the US tour player Dave Hill in his autobiography, Teed Off, published in 1977. "I would like to see Jack win the Grand Slam. Maybe then he would feel he had no more worlds to capture and would retire and leave the tour to us mortals."

What Hill said about Nicklaus must be how his present-day equivalents feel about Woods. "When Jack is playing well, nobody beats him. We don't talk about it in those terms, but we accept it as a fact of life. I'm not saying the rest of us have written ourselves off against Jack. He's human, and if he is a little off and I play up to my capacity and make all my putts, I can beat him. But he has to be almost mediocre to lose.

"It all starts with his tremendous tee ball. He has more accurate length than anyone else. He beats you to death on the par-fives. They're damn near eagle holes for him. On most courses he can count on birdieing at least three of the four par-fives, and he's going to make some eagles hitting the green in two.

"Nicklaus has a great advantage on longer par-threes because he hits his long irons so high that he can drop them softly on the green, when I'm hitting a three-wood that will hit and run. On par-fours he has an edge because he can carry the fairway trouble with his high driver shots. He flat airmails the bunkers and water hazards, which are where most pros drive it.

"His finesse is underrated. His touch putting on fast greens is unbelievable. He rolls it so well from 20 feet. He's the best lag-putter, getting long putts from 30 to 100 feet to within 'gimme' distance of the hole. He wouldn't three-putt a supermarket parking lot. I wouldn't rate Jack the best putter in the world overall because he hits so many greens in regulation that he doesn't need to sink a lot of putts to beat you. But if I had to have somebody putt a 20-footer for everything I own - my house, my car, my family - I'd want Nicklaus to putt it for me. He's a great playing partner, but I hate to be paired with him down the stretch in a tournament if we're both in contention because his power makes you feel so inadequate. You tend to start pressing to hit it as far as he does, and then you're off your game."

Woods's shattering performance at Augusta can be compared with Nicklaus's nine-shot win there in 1965. Yet the Bear was in his fourth year as a professional and had already won the Masters once, plus two other majors, but not until then did he think he had "arrived". "I don't think I want to go back and be 21 again and compete against him," Nicklaus said of a player who has only been a pro for seven months. "He's not a pretender any more."

What happens next? The USGA will be piling the fertiliser on the rough at Congressional, scene of the US Open, and the R & A might want to invest in a wind machine in case the sea breeze takes a day off during the Open at Troon.

The R & A have already announced plans to lengthen the Old Course at St Andrews by 200 yards to bring more fairway bunkers and hazards into play.

As for Augusta National, history suggests they do not stand for people playing silly buggers on their course. After Nicklaus had won for three times in four years, a couple of bunkers appeared on the left of the 18th fairway where he also used to drive the ball. But short of taking up Jesper Parnevik's suggestion and institute special "Tiger tees" 50 yards behind the present tees, there is little they can do.

Golf courses cannot keep on getting longer. Some time the ruling bodies will have to think about standardising equipment for tournament play. Nicklaus has been banging on about "bringing back the ball" for years. We hackers need all the help we can get; the pros do not. "When Jack came out in the Sixties, everyone else took 30 years to catch up," said Tom Kite. Will Tiger ever be caught?