Tiger Time: The wonder of an American hero.

Sometime last season, I e-mailed a friend of mine, an ex-pro golfer and a keen student of the game. "Are we ready to concede that Tiger is the best ever?" I asked. His answer was slightly ambiguous; I couldn't tell whether he was being sincere or sarcastic. So I asked for a clarification. "Oh, let me be perfectly clear," he replied. "Nicklaus in his heyday couldn't carry Tiger's clubs. Really."

Now, my friend and I were Nicklaus worshipers from way back-we still are. When it comes to Nicklaus, we are dangerously close to violating the First Commandment. So acknowledging the truth about Tiger came hard. Jack Nicklaus-this is gospel in golf-dominated his sport as no other athlete ever dominated any sport. I once began a piece about Nicklaus roughly this way: Boxing folks can talk about Louis versus Ali; baseball people can talk about Cobb and Ruth and Mays (or whomever); tennis people can have a high time about Laver and Sampras; but in golf, there's nothing to discuss.

What's more, no one else was ever supposed to dominate the game. Nicklaus was supposed to be the last giant, the last player ever to make the others quake, the last to win predictably. You see, "parity" had arrived: That was the big buzzword on Tour. There were now thirty, forty-maybe sixty guys who could win in any given week. Golf instruction-swing science-had equalized things. Advances in equipment had equalized things. Conditioning, nutrition, etc., had equalized things. If a guy won, say, three tournaments in a season, that would be practically a freak, and the fellow would be Player of the Year, for sure. We would never see anything close to Nicklaus again.

Furthermore, his mark of 18 professional majors-twenty majors, if you counted his two U.S. Amateurs (and most of us did, because we loved that round, awesome number)-was an inviolable record. It would stand forever. It was the most unapproachable record in golf.

All of this needs to be remembered, because people forget. I've seen this in my own (not terribly long) lifetime. When I was young, the greatest record in baseball-the one that would live unto eternity-was Lou Gehrig's 2,130 consecutive games. That, all the experts said, was the one mark no one would ever reach. But then, when Cal Ripken closed in on it, they changed. They cheated. Now they said it was Joe D's 56- game hitting streak that was numero uno. Ah, but I remember: I won't forget. Ripken's achievement must not be slighted-everyone said it was impossible.

And now Tiger: The non-golfer will simply have to trust me that no one was supposed to be able to do what Tiger has, in fact, done. His achievements are-or were-unimaginable. The question arises, Has Woods won the Grand Slam? I, for one, don't care: He has won something like it-four consecutive majors-and no one else has (forgetting Bobby Jones, in the "premodern" Slam). I vow not to forget-no matter how fuzzy the past becomes-that Woods has accomplished what was proclaimed by one and all unaccomplishable.

How to talk about Tiger Woods? I don't know. Start with this (a cliche, but a useful cliche): When Nicklaus first showed up at the Masters, Bob Jones said, "He plays a game with which I am not familiar." The same has to be said of Woods. Another friend of mine-a pro golfer and a genuine philosophe-made the following, arresting statement: "It's not just that Woods is the best ever to play the game; it is that he is the first ever to play it." Think about that for more than a second or two, and you grow dizzy. What does it mean? It means, I think, that Tiger is the first truly to exploit the possibilities of the game. That he is the first to swing the club as it ought to be swung. That he-this gets a bit mystical-sees a game that others have been blind to, or have caught only glimpses of.