Tiger Woods, August 1996

THE second-best African-American golfer in the world is currently 41st on the Nationwide Tour money list with earnings this year of just over $80,000. A former Georgia amateur champion, Tim O'Neal has never won a professional tournament, twice came within a single shot of getting his PGA Tour card, and counts Tiger Woods and Will Smith among his former sponsors. At 33, his chances of making it to the big leagues are starting to fade so, just like every other week, Woods will be the only black American teeing off at Medinah come Thursday morning. And some would point out his heritage is as much Asian as anything else.

One decade into the revolution, Woods may be sitting on the throne but the gates of the palace remain firmly locked. There are less black professionals playing at the top level today than there were thirty years ago.

Between 1964 and 1986, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, Charlie Sifford, Jim Thorpe and Pete Brown won 23 tournaments on the American tour. Since Thorpe's triumph at the Seiko-Tucson Matchplay in 1986, Woods is the only African-American to lift a trophy, or in his case 50 of them. That O'Neal is the lone representative of his race on the Nationwide Tour is an even more worrying statistic. Where are the legions of kids who once boldly declared "I'm Tiger Woods"?

"I thought there would be more of us out here, but then again, it's a matter of getting enough players. You've got to have a base big enough, " said Woods last summer. "At junior level there are some players with some talent. But as you continue to move up in levels, the process of screening kind of weeds them out. It's hard to make it out here. It's not easy. A lot of these kids don't have the opportunity to practice and play and compete around the country in junior golf events or individual amateur events.

"You have more players at the ground levels just getting introduced to the game, kids, and hopefully that will facilitate more AfricanAmerican players out here."

Although the number of African-Americans golfing almost doubled between 1999 and 2003, the transition from recreational hackers to elite performers isn't just a matter of ability or waiting for some outrageously gifted tyke to break through. Rather than opening up the sport, the Tiger impact has, in many ways, had the opposite effect. While the great black players of previous eras were largely self-taught graduates of municipal courses and/or caddying jobs, golf is now so competitive from an early age that talented teenagers require extensive lessons and coaching. Any youngster nurturing serious hopes of making it needs to be crisscrossing the country measuring himself against his peers in the junior tournaments that are the breeding ground for the next generation.

"What strikes me is that when black players were allowed on the PGA in 1961, ending the Caucasians-only clause, there was an influx of players: Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder and Calvin Peete and so on, " says Orin Starn, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University. "All of these guys got their starts in the caddie shacks. And if you go back farther, caddying was a way for the poor, working class and sometimes immigrant kids to climb their way into the blue-blooded world of golf, as with Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen."

Taken in tandem with rising equipment costs and green fees, huge economic obstacles have essentially replaced the old racist barriers. Through an initiative called First Tee, the United States Golf Association has tried to take the game into urban areas, hoping that if children can gain access to the sport they may legitimately aspire to imitating Tiger. The enormity of the task can be gauged by the fact that there isn't a single black kid ranked in the American Junior Golf Association's top 100 players between the ages of 12 and 18.

With many at the collegiate level of the sport openly admitting the majority of players competing there come from country club backgrounds, perhaps nothing sums up the way the game has gone than the fact the best 16 year old in the world is Peter Uihlein. His father Wally is chief executive and President of Titleist.

Nine years after Earl Woods boldly declared his offspring was destined to change the wider world, not to mention golf, the kid many tip to eventually challenge his hegemony is the son of one of the wealthiest men in the sport.

I'm Tiger Woods indeed.