One week removed from the ostensibly unthinkable, I still can't believe that people still can't believe that Tiger Woods lost the PGA Championship, even though Tiger has now lost every major tournament of 2009.

That's right; it has a slightly different vibe when you label it 0-for-roar.

Perhaps it was last Sunday's final round 75, the worst Sunday scorecard Woods ever autographed in a major, that has so many of his fans, and particularly his fans in the media, virtually frozen in disbelief over the notion that Tiger could be brought down from behind in a major event by anyone, perhaps least especially Yong-Eun Yang.

Even Yang, the wonderfully nervy Korean, whipped out the appropriate sports cliché for his interpreter.

"It hasn't sunk in yet," he said.

No, and with Tiger, it never does.

Not when he loses the Masters to Angel Cabrera. Not when he loses the U.S. Open to Lucas Glover. Not when he loses the British Open to Stewart Cink. Not when another week-long avalanche of Tiger hype melts in the medium weekend heat of relatively unknown competitors.

Failure runs off Woods like a cloudburst off blacktop. There is no absorption whatsoever, nothing that might introduce any entropy into the inexhaustible media forces that have built Tiger deification into an industry. It's not an industry unto itself either, it's little less than a leading economic indicator.

It's important to admit, in this discussion, that to a large extent Tiger has commanded this unparalleled attention with a singular excellence, in the way that Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali once did. But I'm not sure Jordan or Ali, even at their height of their powers, were afforded the universal presumption of victory as Tiger is by the world's media.

"Tiger has the ability to make people feel uncomfortable," Johnny Miller once said. "That's the mark of a truly phenomenal player. You can just feel he's better than you, and that widens the gap."

But as Woods completes his first calendar year since 2004 without having won a major championship, you have to start wondering if that gap is still widening, or if the opposite is true. How many more times can Tiger be shocked until it's not shocking any more?

Woods won the two tournaments before last week's PGA, but because he now plays to his own unprecedented standards, he is judged almost exclusively by what he does in the majors, and no one legally is permitted to even consider the possibility that he won't surpass Jack Nicklaus' record 18 major championships.

That will happen, but Y.E. Yang certainly postponed it, and might have inspired others to postpone it further.

By 2:45 EDT a week ago today, Woods had not only won 14 majors, but he'd won 14 consecutive majors that he led after three rounds, 16 of 16 tournaments overall from the Sunday pole position, and 47 of the 50 in his career.

But he'd never played a round with Yang, who apparently didn't have the translated Johnny Miller quote book in his back pocket. Evidently, Yang isn't ninth on the money list for nothing. He turned modern golf orthodoxy inside out on the back nine, and what was getting called one of the greatest upsets in sports history by midweek first had to endure another matter-of-fact analysis from the guy nothing ever seems to surprise, Eldrick Woods himself.

"I didn't make the putts and certainly he did," Woods said. "I was in control of the tournament most of the day, but Y.E. played great all day. He hit it great all day and it was a fine battle. Unfortunately I didn't putt the way I needed to make them. I hit the ball so much better than my score indicates. I just had a terrible day on the greens. I either misread putts or made bad putts."

I think it's all right to wonder now what it is, exactly, that's being misread.

No sooner had Woods shaken Yang's hand than was launched another round of serious knee discussion, reminding no one that needed it of Tiger's offseason knee surgery and the vagaries of surgical convalescence.

Ultimately this is what has to change about the Tiger phenomenon. He can't always be the prohibitive favorite and then, when he loses, it can't always be explained away as something not entirely his fault. It's possible that he just gets beat because, very much like the humans, he's beatable.