Tiger Woods, for the first time in 265 weeks (five years and one month) is no longer the number one golf player in the world. Maybe now a Calablasian brotha can get a break?

Tiger Woods held the number one position longer than anyone in history (since they started the stat in 1970). No player has done more for the game’s popularity since Arnold Palmer. No player – period – has had such a financial impact on the game. Nobody can triple the world’s slowest game television ratings like Tiger Woods. Nobody boosts the tournament gate like Tiger Woods. No one can draw enthusiasm (or animosity) like Tiger Woods. All he did was what he was supposed to do: win. Yet, he won in a game that was clearly a white man’s game, a game reserved for white men, a game, many obviously felt, deserved to be played by only white men, and if they let you play – you damn sure ain’t supposed to win. Yet, Tiger Woods not only won, he – in what cannot be described in any other terms—kicked a**. He demoralized the opposition. When he won, he won big and he won often. Then he won again, and again, and again.

The repeats. The three-peats. The majors. The Grand Slam (holding all four major titles at one time). If it could be done, Tiger did it. He got on his opponents nerves quite quickly, and often caused a few of the them to lose their minds, and their nerve. Remember David Duval, the last player to be number one? Fell out of the top 200. The pressure to keep up was too great. Phil Nickleson gained popular sympathy as the “unlucky loser” (before he finally won one last year) because Tiger beat him so often. What really pissed them off, was that Tiger didn’t even play every week. The average PGA tour pro plays 25 to 30 tournaments a year. Tiger plays an average of 18 tournaments a year. When he passes on a tournament, he (literally) gets hate mail. And don’t think for a second that race didn’t play into the equation somehow (i.e. Fuzzy Zoeller’s comment, “I’m sure we’ll be having fried chicken at the Masters Champions dinner”). They saw his daddy, so you know what they saw. And you know what the folk in the gallery see – Tiger is called that name in every tournament he plays. But we knew what we were seeing also, a black phenom taking over a white’s game, which is why we watched and for the first time people turned off football, baseball, and the lawnmower to watch Tiger “get that a**.”

One of my last discussions with golfing legend, Maggie Hathaway, was that no one knew that at every hole Tiger has five to ten undercover police or bodyguards in the crowd because the death threats are so frequent. In a so-called “gentleman’s sport” where winner’s are gracious and losers are more gracious, the game’s protocols were pushed to the limit. Tiger “hatin’” became part of the sport. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

From his fellow players who always had some “off the cuff” remarks, to the television commentators who could barely hold their disgust after Tiger made a shot that they had just analyzed as nearly impossible to recover from – when he made a mistake, you’d think a major sin was committed. You had game historians suggesting that it wasn’t “good for the game” for one player to win all the time, but it was fine when Jack Nicklaus and Sam Snead and Bobby Jones did it. Several tournaments modified or “Tiger-proofed” their golf courses to make it harder for Tiger to win. Most of the time, he won anyway.

He is an advertiser’s dream. Many surmised that his recent cool streak can be attributed to his endorsement commitments and the time he takes off to shoot commercials. Then there’s his recent engagement – and we all know that marriage can be a mass distraction. Spouses tend not to want to play second fiddle to anything. I’m sure Tiger is not exempt from the “You’re always playing golf, we never do anything anymore” drum that plays heavy on a man’s mind – not to mention his nerves.

Besides winning, all Tiger did was double tournament purses, enriching the whole field – whether he played or not. There was only one million dollar purse when Tiger joined the tour, now there are ten. Truth of the matter is that five years of Tiger beatings made the others get better, and they did. That’s the “Tiger effect” that all in golf – the players, advertisers, television, sports products and the public – have felt.

Let’s not get it twisted, Tiger may no longer be the number one player in the world (right now), but he’s still the best player in the game, and still has the greatest impact on the game.

But maybe now that he’s not where the other players want to be, some of them will stop hatin’!!!

Anthony Asadullah Samad is a national columnist, author and managing director of the Urban Issues Forum. His upcoming book, 50 Years After Brown: The State of Black Equality In America is due out in 2004. He can be reached at www.AnthonySamad.com.