Woods' Dominance of the Pines is Bad News for Opponents

Let us begin with the consolations for those who will be competing against Tiger Woods for the rest of the 2008 golf season, otherwise they may never recover from their feelings of inadequacy and there will be no "rest of the season" for us to enjoy.

On the back nine during yesterday's final round of the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines in San Diego, the world's No1 golfer didn't look out of place among his peers, by which I mean he hit a couple of bad shots and had a run of three bogeys. Alas - or at least alas for the other players who turned up in San Diego - Woods' visit to the world of mediocrity was temporary and served only to reduce his winning margin from 11 shots to eight.

There are a welter of statistics available to place Woods' victory last night in some kind of context, but only two are really worth committing to memory. First, he has now tied Arnold Palmer's 62 wins on the PGA tour - a staggering achievement given that he has been on tour for just over a decade. Sam Snead's all-time record of 82 victories no longer counts as a target but as a milestone to be whizzed past on the way to three figures.

Second, Woods has now won at Torrey Pines for four successive years. He has won this event six times in all. No player in recent memory has dominated a single event on the PGA tour to such an extent, and yesterday's victory has a special significance because the Torrey Pines course will host the US Open in June. The temptation to award Woods the year's second major, therefore, is impossible to resist. No one is unbeatable in golf, but a Tiger Woods intent on winning a major at Torrey is about as close as you can get.

Equally, there are those "experts" who want to present the world No1 with the three other major trophies, and the so-called grand slam of four majors, in one season. It is hard to accuse such people of being over excitable, not least because Woods himself, in an uncharacteristic piece of public bravado, suggested on his website (not in a throwaway line in a press conference) that the grand slam was "easily within reason".

The general rule in modern professional golf is what Tiger wants Tiger gets. Even so, the single-season grand slam is a risky proposition on which to stake the contents of your wallet, even when the greatest player in history is riding your horse. As great as Woods is, he is not immune to those elements that render golf ultimately unpredictable - the weather, the (un)lucky bounces, the tantalizing thought that someone else in the field could have the week of their life while the Great Man endures a temporary loss of form. Remember the third round of the Open at Muirfield in 2002, when the wind and rain blew Woods off the course with a scorecard in his hand that read 81?

And remember last summer, when Woods headed into the US PGA championship at Southern Hills with most people composing obituaries for "Tiger's major-less year". Southern Hills, they said, was too tight a golf course for the world No1. Woods ended up winning that tournament, of course, which proved both his greatness as a golfer and the ultimate folly of awarding major championship trophies before a shot has been struck.