Emboldened by Tiger Woods' abject effort in the final round of the HSBC Champions tournament in China (he finished a distant sixth to his final day playing partner and eventual winner Phil Mickelson), the obituarists will be out in force, writing their lament for the era of Tiger dominance. He is not the player he once was and he will never be again, they might write. Or if they are feeling really brave, they might even suggest that he will never fulfill his life's ambition of surpassing Nicklaus' record of 18 majors.
Woods will be grateful to the naysayers, whose scepticism will be stored up in his steel-trap memory and used to fuel his efforts in the months ahead. The world no1 shares many personality traits with his friend and one-time mentor Michael Jordan and taking great offence at the slightest criticism and even great pleasure in making fools of the critics is one of them.
As it happens, the 2010 major championship venues offer Woods the ideal opportunity to make fools of us all. He is always capable of winning at Augusta (even though he hasn't for the last four years) and Whistling Straits, site of the PGA Championship, could present the kind of attritional challenge around which the world no1 excels. We will see. As for Pebble Beach (US Open) and the Old Course (Open Championship) – given his record at these venues it might qualify as a surprise if Woods didn't win both events. Or at least it would if he wasn't playing the way he is playing right now, which brings us back Sunday's events in China and the notion that Woods is waning force.
The first point to make is that we have been here before; in 1998, when he decided to change his swing and, consequently, won only once on the PGA Tour; and again in 2003, when he again decided to change his swing and was replaced, in 2004, as the world no1 by Vijay Singh.
On both occasions, Woods came back a better, more dominant player. Will the same thing happen again?
Blind sycophancy (which abounds in golf where Tiger is concerned) demands the answer 'Of course he will', while prudence requires us to say 'Don't bet against it'. But there is, I believe, a more honest answer to the question, and it is this: yes, but the chances will be diminished if he continues on his current path.
If you were compiling a list of the most traduced people in professional golf Hank Haney, Woods' long-time swing coach, would be somewhere near the top. Poor man. His only crime it to be a very good swing instructor who happens to work with the greatest player who has ever played the game. For this, he finds himself constantly scrutinised, and seldom in a fair way. If Woods wins, it all down to Tiger. If Woods loses, then it is all Hank's fault.
Apparently, Haney has a very thin skin. He also, apparently, reads everything that is written about him and, in the States at least, has been known to email journalists to point out the folly of their thinking, helpfully attaching statistical data pertaining to Tiger's game "proving" that the world no1 is as good, if not better, than before.
Never having been the recipient of such an email, I can only note that since starting work with Haney in 2003 Woods has won six majors and 37 PGA Tour events. For long stretches during the last six years – the summer of 2005, the second half of 2006 - he looked, and indeed was, unbeatable. But that was then. As for now?
He was out injured until February of this year but after coming back Woods won six times on the PGA Tour. This is a career effort by any other contemporary player but perhaps not for the world no1, who by his own achievements demands to be judged by a different standard. For one thing, he didn't win a major championship. For another, of those six victories, three ( Bay Hill, the AT&T National and the Buick Open came against a weak or, in the case of the latter, a very weak field).
Of course, he would never accept this (a win is a win, right?) - at least not publicly. Instead he says things like this, as he did after an eight-shot victory at the BMW Championship in September
"It's one of my best years. There's no doubt about that. I haven't won as many times as I did in 2000, didn't win any majors this year. But I've never had a year where I've been this consistent, either, this many high finishes and the number of events I've played. To have an opportunity just about every time I tee it up to win the championship on the back nine, that's something that I can't tell you how proud I am."
Woods was quick to praise Haney after the BMW, saying that working with the swing coach had given him a better understanding of his swing. He also added this:
I feel that my overall plane and my swing and my release and how I play now is just so much more efficient. Bad shots aren't what they used to be, and that's what we were trying to get to. Anybody can play when they're hot, but it's how poor are your miss-hits, can you control them, and more importantly, can you fix it?"
Covering top-class professional golf in 2009 is, I sometimes imagine, a bit like covering the machinations of the old Soviet Politburo. For reasons that are mystifying (it is only sport after all), secrecy abounds, which means the reliance on the public utterances of our golfing heroes or whatever PR guff emerges from PGA Tour headquarters is greater than it really ought to be. You can either reprint it all unquestioningly, or you can treat every word as an inexactitude and work your way back from there. Take your pick.
Alternatively, you could ignore every word that comes from the mouth of Tiger Woods or Coin Montgomerie or anyone else and form your opinions based not on what you hear but on what you see.
So what exactly did we see at the Sheshan International Golf Club on Sunday?
Firstly, as Sport Illustrated's Gary Van Sickle pointed out yesterday in his Twitter feed, we saw the world no1 lose while playing in the final group for the third time in the last four occasions. That is bad enough, from Woods' perspective, but what was so striking in China was the manner in which he lost. After a couple of poor shots the question was asked of the world no1 "Can you fix it?" and answer came there none. He looked bereft. Worse still, he looked completely defeated for most of the day, his spirit drained away.
Mickelson outplayed him. Hell, Nick Watney, the third member of the final group, out-played him. The left-hander in particular, was startlingly better than his great rival. He drove the ball better (and, incidentally, much further – often taking three-wood when Woods would use driver), he hit his irons closer and, crucially, he holed the putts that counted, not least on the 16th green. Leading brings its own exuberance but, still, it striking to watch the body language of two men. Mickelson was bouncy, talkative, smiling. Woods was the opposite.
In competitive terms, one Sunday afternoon capitulation could be dismissed (even the great ones have bad days etc etc) but three such capitulations in the space of a few weeks suggests there is something afoot. We can assume Woods will be working hard to make sure he isn't similarly embarrassed in the future, although that idea begs the question – wasn't he already working hard?
Of course he was, which answer in turn begets another question: so why is this happening with such unwanted regularity? One answer, surely, is that Woods could be working hard on the wrong things. That, funnily enough, brings us back to his relationship with Haney.
Last month the former PGA Tour player (and now brilliant TV commentator) Brandel Chamblee offered this fascinating analysis of what Haney has done to Woods' swing.
I have huge respect for Hank. I took lessons from him out of college. But you can say that we agree to disagree in terms of swing philosophy. In my opinion, Tiger's still struggling with his golf swing, and it hurts him in major championships. He doesn't hit the ball as far or as straight in majors, and subsequently he has to rely on his putter more. He's not [winning majors by] five shots anymore. He's not intimidating players the way he used to because he's not 40, 50 yards ahead of them anymore. He's not hitting short irons [into greens] while they hit middle-irons. He's playing from where they play. He's still better. He's still smarter. But now he's one of them. He's not blowing them away.
No doubt Chamblee was the recipient of a Hank Haney email after that out-pouring but watching Sunday's golf in China unfold it was hard to disagree with the thrust of what he had to say: Woods, right now, is not the dominant player. It is 1998/2003 all over again. But with one important caveat.
The difference then was that Woods' "slump" was almost by design. He chose to get worse (temporarily) in the greater cause of getting better. This time around, he is not the author of his own misfortunes, merely the unwilling victim. He is not in a place of his own choosing as he was back then, but somewhere he would rather not be.
The question is how does he get out of it? He could do what he did in 1998 and 2003, which was to blow everything up and start again. The first time he did it in tandem with Butch Harmon, the second he did it after sacking Harmon and replacing him with Haney.
It could be that the world no1 and his faithful sidekick are working on a master plan which will bear fruit in the very near future, with Woods wining the single season Grand Slam in 2010.
However, if Woods is simply searching for something, or looking to play his way back into top form, then perhaps the time has come for a major overhaul in thinking. Inevitably, that raises the question of whether or not he should fire Haney. For months, there have been rumours swirling around that the world no1 is very taken with Dale Lynch, an Australian swing coach who works with the likes of Geoff Ogilvy and Aaron Baddeley. But that seems daft, not least because Lynch says he has never even met the world no1.
Only a fool would under-estimate Woods desire to get better (and to do whatever is required to help in that cause, as Harmon will attest) but, frankly, it is hard to imagine he would fire his current coach and hook up with Lynch, not after his countless public statements in support of Haney over the last few months.
Unless, of course, Haney himself declared it was time for a change; that he'd had enough of the criticism and second-guessing; that he had sent his last statistic-crammed email; it was time to go back to Texas and let his record with Woods (brilliant as it is) speak for itself.
