The question is pertinent now, because it has to be.
With the first leg of the FedEx Cup to begin on Thursday at Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J., and with this season seeing the continued physical degeneration of Tiger Woods … well, what kind of state is golf in?
“I think golf is at left looking at what it will be like in the Tiger-less era, and let’s see if people watch it,” Paul Azinger, one-time major champion and 12-time PGA Tour winner, told The Post by phone. “Tiger brought more people to the game than ever before. As that era slips away, in his absence, will people still be interested?”
The question bounces off the walls as if in an echo chamber, one that sounds like a high-pitched squeal to those in the PGA Tour offices. Yet as Woods recovers from his microdiscectomy back surgery, and after he officially pulled himself from the running to be a member of the U.S. Ryder Cup team come next month, his future as the game’s most dominant figure is up in the air.
Which means the future of the game is up in the air, as well.
There has been an attempt on his throne from Rory McIlroy, the 25-year-old Northern Irishman who has won two major championships in a row, taking this year’s British Open and PGA Championship, sandwiching a big-time World Golf Championship event in between. McIlroy has four majors all together, still 10 short of what the 38-year-old Woods has and 14 short of the top rung of the latter, where Jack Nicklaus looks more and more comfortable with his 18.
But what has become clear is that no longer is this Woods’ game alone, and no longer does he dictate the entire storyline at each event he plays.
Yet Azinger, who has been pigeonholed as one of Woods’ harshest critics, is the first to attempt to put his analysis into context.
“It’s insane to write Tiger off,” Azinger said. “Everybody in this game losses their way a little bit, and he has lost his way. But he absolutely can get it back.”
Then Azinger delivered the line that has gotten his name in headlines before.
“He has gone from Vincent Van Gogh to paint-by-numbers,” Azinger said. “That’s what most people in the game and [what the] players feel, they’re just not saying it. What I’m saying is the greatest player ever is changing the fingerprint of his swing, and it’s been changed under the auspice that it’s a fundamental. He’s become over-engineered.”
Tiger has gone through three teachers in his professional career, starting with Butch Harmon, then going to Hank Haney, and now working with Sean Foley. Trained as a physical therapist, and the first to quote Plato or Aristotle, Foley is a new-age teacher in all the ways possible. And yet there is Woods, still sidelined with an aching lower back, as old a golf injury as there is.
“My son had that surgery twice,” said CBS analyst Peter Kostis, whose son, John, was forced to have a second microdiscectomy because he tried to come back from the first one too fast — an eerily similar situation to what Woods did in returning to the PGA Championship two weeks ago at Valhalla.
“Golf needs Tiger,” Kostis said, “but it needs Tiger healthy.”
That PGA Championship finished in the Kentucky twilight, with McIlroy finishing off his first major where he slipped in the final round and needed to come from behind. It was high drama, and it earned CBS its highest rated weekend in five years, with an estimated 30.9 million tuning in over the two days.
The slip into the prime-time hours surely helped, but it didn’t help that Woods was out of the picture, having missed the cut in a major for just the fourth time in his career. Woods was hobbled for his two rounds, and was hard to watch as he limped from place to place and hit his ball all over the course.
And there will be no Woods at Ridgewood, and no Woods at any of the FedEx Cup events.
“It’s still important to the players with the amount of money at stake,” Kostis said about the $10 million that await the winner of the four-tournament playoffs. “And everyone will have four shots at Rory.”
Because Rory is now the closest thing there is to a target in the game. And it’s to be determined just how healthy that position is.
“This is a glimpse at the future,” Azinger said. “We’ll see what happens.”