Tiger Woods will smack a golf ball real hard right around noon today -- stop what you're doing, obviously, to mull the man's omnipotence -- and this will mean the PGA's 2008 Tour has begun for real, not just in some clearly inauthentic sense defined by, well, the absence of Tiger Woods.

By amazing coincidence, this weekend's Buick Invitational also marks the return to the Golf Channel of Kelly Tilghman, last heard curdling some idle banter with analyst Nick Faldo via the now infamous suggestion that the Tour's young players "lynch [Woods] in a back alley."

Oops.

Yeah, that was unfortunate, albeit essentially in the way people who talk for a living will inevitably misspeak. It wasn't as if Tilghman had studied the full array of dialogue choices, turned to her vocabulary caddie and asked that a racially explosive transitive verb to be pulled from her rhetorical bag.

Though Tilghman was suitably embarrassed that the "L" word was in there in the first place, Golfweek magazine was so titillated it wound up putting a noose on the cover, a mindlessly insensitive calculation that cost editor Dave Seanor his job.

"We knew that image would grab attention," Seanor said last week, "but I didn't anticipate the enormity of it."

Hmph.

Woods, in remarks Monday at the Tiger Woods Learning Center, which sounds like a place everyone ought to have convened before this tempest, described what he thought of the whole thing, which was minimal. Some of these people, you'd suppose, might have learned somewhere that lynchings of blacks were an enduring cultural malignancy in this country from Reconstruction well into the 1960s, the number of victims ultimately incalculable but estimated at between 3,400 and 5,000.

Golf Channel didn't get it, at first, announcing there would be no punishment for Tilghman after Tilghman apologized to Tiger and Tiger gave her the official no-biggie. The case went cold until the Rev. Al Sharpton read about Tilghman's on-air apology in Newsday the following Monday.

"If I got on this show and said I wanted to put some Jewish-American in a gas chamber, I don't care what context I said it in, the entire Jewish community would have the right to say I should be put off this show or my radio show if I said it there," Sharpton said on CNN. "This is an insult to all blacks. Lynching is not murder in general; it is not assault in general. It is a specific racial term."

Three hours later, Tilghman was suspended for two weeks.

It is reasonable to say that Sharpton has never come across the perception of a perception of a perception of racial slight with which he couldn't gain national attention for himself, but it's more relevant that he's right and that people, even on Planet Golf, should know better.

For Woods' part, his interpretation of these events is probably as perfect in calculation and response as one of his 8-foot putts. It's a relief, frankly, to discover a public figure of some influence who can not only see something for what it is, but also refrain from spinning it into a dozen contiguous news cycles for the greater glory of their Q-rating.

"It was unfortunate," was as far as Woods would go. "Kelly and I did speak. There was no ill intent. She regrets saying it. In my eyes, it's all said and done."

That rang like something truly gracious and even magnanimous. In a sense, Tiger Woods sounded better last week on race issues than people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who continued to introduce race into the Democratic primary frenzy but always with a cover that began with a kind of startled "who, me?"

But it's a little trickier than just that for Tiger.

Just as The New Yorker pointed out that Obama has an "exotic ancestry -- Kansas-Kenyan," Woods is a self-described Cablanasion. His mother is Thai, his late father part Caucasian, part black, part Native American. It is possible, though a little convoluted, for Woods to consider himself genealogically immune to common American bigotry, but he apparently considers himself forever outside the fray.

"Woods doesn't have to become a civil rights spokesman," Sports Illustrated said this week, "but he could have at least acknowledged that he understands the meaning of the 'L' word, and how powerful and hurtful it remains. In other words, wouldn't it be nice if for once he saw himself as heir not only to Jack Nicklaus but also to Jackie Robinson."

Anyone who expects a sports figure like Tiger Woods to take even the most benign position politically, any position that has a 1 percent potential to turn off any of his thousand-and-one revenue streams in the prime of his career is simply too hopeful for the age. Woods is not Robinson, is not Muhammad Ali. He is more Michael Jordan, who we all said "transcended the game," but mostly in the ways made possible by Nike and the balance of his myriad corporate sponsors, including the television networks.

The so-called benefit of the doubt in this case goes like this. Woods is just a 32-year-old professional golfer who looked at the "lynch" next to his name and thought, "Well, let's not go there, not over this."

There's nothing wrong with that.