Okay, okay … before I even get started and act like I know anything about the sport of golf, let me tell you straight forward that I know basically nothing about golf as far as picking up a club and playing.

In more recent years, several people have hinted that it might be good for me to take up the game as I encounter my years of senior citizenship. But I’m afraid that if I ever did take up the game, it is all I would ever want to do. I can just imagine myself when (or more likely IF) I made my first birdie --- BRING ON THE SENIORS TOUR!

I will say that I have known a lot of very good golfers. I am told that my grandfather, a minister by trade, was also pretty good at scorching a fairway back in the 1930s and 40s. I have a cousin in San Antonio who has long been a scratch golfer, and one his daughters went to college on a full golf scholarship. Bruce Lietzke and I were high-school acquaintances, and a boyhood friend of mine lived in the same house where Babe Didricksen Zaharias had grown up.

Heck, one afternoon in 1970 at the Colonial in Fort Worth, I got the autographs of Don January, Billy Casper and Julius Boros after one of the club caddies had helped me and a friend sneak into the clubhouse.

Unfortunately, the Bear was still out on the course.

That’s the only major PGA tournament I ever attended, and I have no idea where those autographs are today.

Still, while there is plenty I don’t know about golf, I have managed to pick up some knowledge about it along the way -- particularly the game’s history and its continuing growth and popularity through the past several decades.

I also feel I know enough to finally concede that the Tiger has overtaken the Bear. It’s probably been that way a while, but being the nostalgic person I am, I have had a tough time making that call.

I’ve been a Jack Nicklaus fan since I was 12 years old and he was first joining the PGA tour. After watching him so often dominate the game like he did for nearly three decades, I felt there would never be another like the Golden Bear. He was the greatest. The hero of all of us Baby Boomers.

Now I have to admit that even Nicklaus stands a rung below the captivating Tiger Woods.

While Nicklaus won a lot, he never literally walked away from the competition as regularly as Woods continues to do. I mean Nicklaus never won a Masters by 12 strokes, a U.S. Open by 15 or a British Open by 8. Guess who has?

I remember the Bear blowing some tournaments after holding some substantial leads. That does not happen to Tiger. Not many of the game’s great players have been forced to alter their game plans like they so often have when going head-to-head with Woods. What greater respect can be shown than that?

I suppose that there is a youngster now, probably between ages 8 and 12, going out to a course most days, who will likely is going to put the up the same type numbers as Tiger Woods. Surpassing him? Who knows?

Maybe that it why it the greatest game I have never played.