AS Nick Faldo continues his seemingly inexorable slide down the world rankings - at the last count he was down to 88th - he is increasingly regarded as a figure from the past by those who dominate the present.

In a quite remarkable interview at Bay Hill here in Florida this week, Ernie Els indicated strongly that he felt the game itself had moved on, even in the three years since Faldo won the Masters. The South African said that the future belonged to the big hitters and that there was already a hard core of players ready to win most of what is available.

To illustrate his point, he compared Faldo's game with those of David Duval and Tiger Woods, and for around five minutes spoke of the Briton in the past tense.

Els was asked whether he still thought, as he did after his win in the Bay Hill event last year, that six to eight golfers who all hit the ball a long way and attack courses would dominate in the future. Or was there, the questioner asked, still a place for the "position-management" type of player?

"I think it's the big hitters," said Els. "In the past you had guys like Nick Faldo; he just played an absolute controlled game. He never hit his driver very far but he was always in play. He was a great iron player.

"But nowadays you've got guys hitting it as straight as Nick did in his heyday but they are hitting it 50 to 80 yards further. I mean, you've got Duval at number one in the overall driving statistics, which means that he hits it a long way and he also hits a lot of fairways."

Duval, in fact, averages 285 yards off the tee and hits 76 per cent of the fairways at which he aims, a phenomenal percentage.

For the purpose of comparison, Sandy Lyle is 105th. The Scot is 18th in the driving-distance category, at 281 yards, but 171st in the driving-accuracy column, hitting only 56 per cent of the correct fairways.

"This is the way that the game has changed, the way the guys are playing these days," Els went on. "They are averaging 290, 285 and hitting it on the fairway so that they can go at the par fives in two. I mean, you are going to hit a seven-iron a lot straighter than a four-iron.

"The way Faldo played Augusta was a controlled game; and the way Tiger played Augusta was to hit seven-irons into the par fives. You are going to see youngsters coming through like Sergio Garcia and Hank Kuehne, and these guys are playing the modern game; and so will we now, so the game has changed."

Kuehne is the US Amateur champion, Garcia, of Spain, the British Amateur champion, and whereas Garcia is only extremely long, 300 yards plus, Kuehne is held by some judges to be the longest in golf: longer than John Daly, longer than Woods.

Kuehne is in some ways the embodiment of what Els is talking about and why he implies that there is no way back to the top for Faldo. At 24, the young American has had a crowded life, including a bout with alcoholism brought about, some feel, by trying to compensate for the success of an elder brother and sister.

His big brother Trip was a finalist in the US Amateur in 1994, losing to Woods, and his sister Kelli won the US Women's Amateur twice, in 1995 and 1996. With such success on all sides, the parents often did not know which way to look, and frequently one would go with Kelli, the other with Trip, and keep in touch with their mobile phones.

Woods became a friend of the family and yesterday Brett Avery, the editor of the United States Golf Association magazine, said: "He has had a marked influence on the family and particularly Hank. He swings in a completely different way since meeting Tiger, and generates amazing clubhead speed.

"Tiger is making a huge difference to the younger players. When Phil Mickelson was champion in the early Nineties everyone wanted to be like him and swing easily and gracefully. Now they want to hit it miles."

Kuehne, at 6 ft 3 in, is so flexible that he can stand upright, bend down from the trunk and place the palms of his hands on the ground. He brings to mind the figure of the future so frequently proclaimed by Gary Player.

"Mark my words," Player is fond of saying, finger-wagging, "soon we will have a player who is 6 ft 10 in tall, built to match, who works out, looks after himself and has done nothing but hit balls since he was three. This player will hit the ball 400 yards off the tee and have a touch like velvet around the greens. Mark my words, it is not far away."

The future is long, it is arriving shortly and it is not, it seems, Faldo-shaped.