Is This the Beginning of the End for the Tiger Era?

While skimming the recent Tiger Woods blog post on PGATour.com, an extremely scary thought hit me like that nightmare when someone takes out your family.

What if Tiger is never the same? What if Woods comes back and isn't the dominant figure we've grown to love on the PGA Tour? What if this knee surgery makes him an average golfer like the rest of them, taking away his ability to win tournaments like an 18-year-old in an elementary school dodgeball game?

All of these ideas came to me from one simple paragraph Tiger wrote.

I don't know what the doctors are going to tell me about playing golf down the road. I'm taking it day-to-day, week-to-week. All I'm doing every day is looking forward to my next day.

So you're telling me, Tiger, the near-billionaire with the trophy wife and an even better trophy case, and the huge yacht, and the private jet, and the pretty pearly whites is living like we live? He's human? He is just trying to get to the next day?Obviously, nobody can speculate how Woods will be once returning from this injury. He won on one leg and could probably do it again, nobody will doubt that.

The argument for his "downfall" comes down to a numbers game. Tiger has done something that nobody, not even Jack Nicklaus, has done to the sport. He made us, the fans, believe that winning tournaments, even majors, is an easy task.

I fall into the group that gives all other golfers are hard time because, honestly, it's easy to dog guys like Phil Mickelson and Sergio Garcia for not winning all the time when we have a guy like Woods doing it. He's recreated the idea of victory and we've been lucky enough to see this. He is clutch. He is consistency. He is dominance. These words don't just define him, they are him.

He has been on record to say this knee injury has been nagging him for years, and quotes like that are pretty scary. What if that pop he does with his knee on his downswing can't be recreated? What if he pulls an Ernie Els, and comes back from the knee injury good but not great? Could you imagine watching golf with Woods winning just one tournament a year? It would be as strange as a Chia pet.

Tiger will be 33 before he touches a golf club again, nothing close to the age when a golfer's skills start to decline, but past the prime age of winners this year on tour. The average age of the 27 winners on tour was 32.89, so it isn't like tennis where 23 is old, but the fact that he will be coming back from this injury right as he's peaking can't bode well. He will be rusty for the first time in his career and, almost certainly, will have to learn the "Tour" game again. Taking a couple of weeks off is one thing, but this could turn into a 10 month sabbatical before it's all said and done. If I took 10 months off I'd be happy if I could remember how to put a tee in the ground.

Our expectations at this point have become preposterous for Woods. I had people all around me saying "there is no WAY he misses this putt" on the 18th green at Torrey Pines to force a playoff with Rocco Mediate. No way? It was 12-feet downhill! If he misses that, people are disappointed. If he misses that, he's human again. The Tiger we knew never seemed to lip those out. Can a revamped Woods still bring the same magic?

I hope, for his sake, if he comes back a calmer and more middle-of-the-pack kind of Tiger, we all remember what he's done for us and not what he isn't doing now. After all, machines don't last forever.