Why golfing world fears the loss of its iconic missionary

On Tiger Woods' popularity rides a coat-tail-holding industry of golf courses, equipment makers and, most of all, other players

Those who disparage the sport say "golf is a good walk spoiled". That is how it could feel for Tiger Woods from now on if he ever goes back to the fairways.

Holed up in a Florida gated community on "indefinite" leave from the game that made him a billionaire, Woods has enacted the great celebrity script of rise and fall. If F Scott Fitzgerald was right to think "there are no second acts in American lives", then the world's greatest golfer will stumble back to an unfamiliar landscape of sponsor hostility, audience coldness, and perhaps even a terminal decline in his golfing prowess if the old regal certainties desert him on tee and green.

This is the point of maximum darkness in his pro career, so judgments may yet turn out to have been excessively apocalyptic. Families survive infidelities and sportsmen endure divorce. But it's hard not to be mesmerised by the obliteration of the whole Woods myth, which bloomed in an industry of country club mores and shiny sporting values.

Team Tiger, the fabled say-nothing entourage of trouble-shooters and deal-closers, now appear as a gang of shambling amateurs who were powerless to save him from his amorousness and inept in their handling of the subsequent crisis, in which the old standby of PR haughtiness not only failed them but extended their client's writhings.

But the repercussions spread way beyond the International Management Group (IMG) and Mark Steinberg, Woods's manager. Golf is reeling at the prospect of losing its iconic market conqueror and missionary. By any standards, Woods is the foremost global sportsman since Pelé and Muhammad Ali, and on his continuing popularity rides a whole coat-tail-holding industry of golf courses, competitions, equipment manufacturers and, most of all, other players, who have seen their own earnings rise handsomely along with Woods's.

For the second consecutive year the gravy train will set off without the driver. Woods was out from July 2008 to February 2009 with a knee injury and golf felt the chill. TV ratings fell 50% and the winners of golf's major championships saw their victories downgraded by those who argued they had triumphed in "a Tiger-less year".

As his colleague and friend, Steve Stricker, said yesterday: "We knew before that he was coming back." This time there can be no guarantee that Woods will ever again brave the walk from the clubhouse to the first tee. "Indefinite is a scary word," said Australia's Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 US Open champion. "If Tiger Woods indefinitely doesn't play, that's not good for us."

If he is to walk through fire before his favourite tournament, the Masters (8-11 April), it could be in the Accenture World Match Play in Arizona in February: the event in which he returned 10 months ago from reconstructive knee surgery.

Accenture, one of his backers, last week removed his image from their website's homepage and the communications giant AT&T says it is "evaluating" its relationship with him.

This is a Ryder Cup year, too. High on ceremony, rhetoric and etiquette, golf's clash between Europe and America marches in September to the Celtic Manor Resort near Newport in South Wales, where the home crowd will doubtless be urged not to take its cue from the sadistic chants we hear at football grounds. If Woods has returned long before then, he might escape into the anonymity of continental team competition, but forensic scrutiny of his every move and mood will continue for at least a year.

Sport knows only one post-transgression plot – redemption – and already Woods is being urged by no less an authority than the "Wild Thing", John Daly, to "go to Oprah, get on a show, get things aired out, tell the truth".

But even the generally empathic Daly succumbed to anxiety about what Woods's absence might do to the golf circus. "I hope we get him back soon. They always say there is no one bigger in golf than the game itself. But Tiger is," Daly said. But a measure of the story's emotional impact is that Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, issued a statement yesterday saying his organisation "fully supports" Woods's decision to take a sabbatical.

"The entirety of someone's life is more important than just a professional career," said Steinberg in an email to the Associated Press agency. On his website, where all the important pronouncements are made, Woods has finally arrived at the point of full public contrition, which, the PR industry would say, is the vital prelude to resurrection.

"I want to say again to everyone that I am profoundly sorry and that I ask forgiveness," Woods wrote, in contrast to his earliest response, which rebutted the "false, unfounded and malicious rumours that are circulating about my family and me and are irresponsible". That statement has destroyed the credibility of "Team Tiger" and made Woods seem even more alone in the maelstrom that has blown him off the golf course "indefinitely". The Masters, the Open at St Andrews and the Ryder Cup in Wales all wonder whether their great tournaments will now take second billing to endless talk about the man who wasn't there.