Meanwhile, over at The Weekly World News, the supermarket tabloid's supermarket tabloid, panic has set in over Tiger Woods' stunning disappearance last Saturday. As the last newspaper in America that has not run out of ways to describe or discuss Woods, WWN was hoping for Woods to win the British Open so it could break out its array of meticulously researched and exhaustively reported stories about the greatest athlete of our age:

"Tiger Was A 195-Pound White Child At Birth."

"Tiger's Heat Vision Warps Competitors' Clubs: An Exclusive Report."

"Woods Emits Will-Sapping Spores To Keep Foes Pliant And Weak."

"Tiger To Play Krypton Open In November."

Then it all went horribly, gruesomely wrong. Like every other publication, WWN was caught flatfooted when The Man What Am shot his infamous 81 on Saturday, a blown radiator of unprecedented nature. They know that readers don't like to read about regular folks doing ordinary things; in fact, unlike most editors, theirs know that in many cases, readers aren't interested in folks born on this planet.

Now WWN doesn't normally have a sports section, except when a link to alien races can be definitively shown (see Anna Kournikova, Yao Ming or Daniel Snyder). They tend to concentrate on their strengths -- three-headed nuns, Sumatran eye-pecking hawks, Stephen Jay Gould's brain in a jar, stuff like that.

Woods, though, presented a challenge even to their army of wizened journalists. On his way to the orthodox Grand Slam, after having won the reformed Grand Slam, Woods had taken on an otherworldly profile, one which almost nobody has been able to capture with sufficiently nuanced insight.

In other words, we had run out of ways to talk about the guy. Left with either scratching our heads in bafflement or churning out opii like "The Arch Supports That Give Tiger His Edge" or "Tiger: Is He Better Than Charlemagne?" we had basically surrendered to the force.

	The thought of making "Tiger II" is a horrifying thought for Kultida Woods, left.

WWN, though, had not yet tackled him. They were working on pieces like "Tiger Woods: Robot," "Woods DNA The New Hot Item On EBay" and "Tiger Woods And Michael Jordan To Buy Florida," but they needed Woods to win the Slam. Like everyone else, they knew there was money to made off the indirect glow of Woods' dismemberment of golf as we once knew it, and they were preparing.

Then it all went south, and the WWN staff knew that everyone else was all over the "Tiger: What The Hell Happened Here?" and "He Shot What? Like Hell He Did" angles. They needed something fresh, something unique, and if possible, something interplanetary:

"Scots Terrorists Kidnapped, Drugged Tiger."

"Woods Attacked By Same Room Service Waiter Who Felled Kobe Bryant."

"Bill Murray Wins Bet With Satan, Plays Third Round In Tiger's Body."

True, they couldn't sell as many ads for space travel, brain salve or mail-order hypnotists, but these are hard times in the sporting game. Tiger was everyone's ticket out, with all due respect to Bryant, O'Neal, Williams-Squared, A-Rod or The Ghost Of Jordans Past. There were still products to push, books to hawk and just his placid, doe-eyed face on covers from Pot Bunker Weekly to Pravda could send sales through the roof.

Now we all have to start over, and that includes WWN:

"Woods Has Rare Flesh-Eating Disease."

"Tiger Watched British Infomercials Before Horrific Round."

"Woods Falls Prey To 'Haggis From Hell.' "

And it's just not the same. Certainly not the same as if there were stories in the can like, "Tiger Eats Sport Of Golf, Takes Aim At Tennis Next," or "Tiger To Replace Gandolfini in 'The Sopranos,' "

	And Anthony Jr. thought Tony Sr. and Carmella were strict.

No, this 81 business hit us all pretty hard. Now we have to start over, a year later, to capture those untold nuggets in the life of The Man. And while ESPN and your morning newspaper want to be at the forefront of Tigermania redux, the fact is that only our friends at WWN have the stories the rest of us would like to get:

"Earl Woods To Horrified Tita: 'Honey, I Think The Old One is Broken. Gotta Get Working On Tiger II.' "

"Cuba Gooding Rejects Starring Role In 'The Tiger Story' For Cameo In 'Snow Dogs: The Sequel.' "

"Tiger's Silence On Enron, WorldCom Destroys Investor Confidence, Stock Market Doomed."

And if he goes through 2003 without any messy par-or-worse screwups and wins the Slam next year, sources tell us that WWN has the field all beat again on the last Tiger story to be told:

"A 12-Page Special Report -- Subjugated But Oddly Euphoric, Enslaved Europe Pleads: 'All Must Worship Abjectly At The Feet Of Intergalactic Lord Ti-Gr.' "

Sure beats "Mutant Bats Attack Convent, Apologize, Convert To Catholicism," don't it?

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com