SIDELINE CUT:Golf lacks something when Woods struggles with his game. The prodigal son is making a comeback, and his opponents are glad to see him, writes KEITH DUGGAN

GOLF needs Tiger Wood more than ever.

The Chosen One intimated that he might be on the verge of becoming interested in golf again when he won the Arnold Palmer Invitational tournament last week, a victory that led to fevered speculation about the second act of Tiger’s public life and a budding rivalry with Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy.

It is a perfect teaser in the build-up to the Augusta Masters next week, but as if that wasn’t enough the latest work of literature on Woods was published yesterday and, among other things, it contains a shocking passage on the golfer’s fondness for . . . frozen ice popsicles.

Although Tiger’s beleaguered public relations team has sent out reproachful statements on his behalf denouncing Hank Haney’s book The Big Miss as a betrayal of a friendship, they needn’t have worried.

If the excerpts are anything to go by the swing coach actually manages to portray golf’s fallen idol in a sympathetic light.

And those of us who will never read the book can safely bet that nothing in its content will beat the following the vignette which features Hank and Tiger settling into a wild evening of . . . watching television.

If you ever wondered what the elite sports stars on our bedraggled planet are like on their down time this passage sums it all up.

“When we were watching television after dinner some times, he’d sometimes go to the refrigerator to get a sugar-free popsicle,” Haney recalls in the tone of a spurned sweetheart. “But he never offered me one or ever came back with one, and one night I found myself I really wanted one of those popsicles. I didn’t feel right just going to the refrigerator and taking one, and I kind of started laughing to myself at how hesitant I was to ask Tiger for one. It actually took me a while to summon up the courage to blurt out: “Hey, bud, do you think I could have one of those popsicles?”

The Tiger regally asserted that Hank could indeed join him in a popsicle.

Hank is clearly so aggrieved by the episode that his telling of it manages to be both pathetic and touching at the same time – although he is lucky that Woods didn’t blow a gasket at being addressed as “bud”. He would have been entitled to.

Put yourself in Woods’s shoes in the months after the world he had constructed fell apart. Here he is battling Osama bin Laden and Dubya Bush as the most vilified man in America. He can’t win golf tournaments anymore.

He knows there are about a million Tiger Woods jokes circling the globe. Nobody shouts “you da man” at him anymore.

And he is sitting in a living room with an older white man who tells him things about his swing. For company.

He takes some comfort in a popsicle habit he might well have cultivated during his frat boy days at Stanford University, back when his father was comparing him to Jesus Christ and life was much simpler.

Maybe he didn’t offer Haney a popsicle because there was only two left in the carton, both cola flavoured, and, as it happened, his favourite. Maybe it didn’t occur to him that a distinguished, serious golf man like Haney would deign to slurp on a popsicle. Unless the issue is raised at the Masters press conferences next week we will never know.

Nonetheless, there is something haunting about the image of Tiger slurping on flavoured ice in television twilight; if Norman Rockwell was to come back to paint him he would surely choose to present him in that mode rather than on one of his ecstatic days of victory.

And ridiculous as the popsicle story is, it does serve to illustrate one powerful point: Woods wasn’t raised to go fetch popsicles for other people.

Like so many elite athletes, when he inherited his kingdom he became accustomed to deferential treatment.

Watch an NBA game: a player is substituted out of a game and no sooner does he plant his butt on the bench than a towel is wrapped around his shoulders and a refreshing drink placed carefully in his hand – the star doesn’t even have to turn around.

In golf – it is even worse. Caddies are part of the great tradition and their knowledge is crucial and all that stuff. But there will always be something of the glorified valet about the caddy. At the end of the day he is lugging another man’s luggage around and handing him tricks and revitalising snacks on demand.

Hank made the mistake of believing that he was more than part of the entourage.

The amazing thing was not that Tiger didn’t fetch him a frozen treat but that he had him in his house to watch television at all.

There are a few other harmless revelations that also do Woods no harm, such as the detail that he was fuming after the English golfer Ian Poulter bagged a lift to some tournament on the Tiger’s private jet, enraging the Tiger to the extent that he referred to the English man as “that dick” in a text he sent.

Poulter might well be the nicest man on the golf circuit but there is something amusing about the idea of the English man settling back into Tiger’s leather suite and making plummy remarks about the views, cheerfully oblivious to the fact that his host is seething at his effrontery.

It should be fun when they are next paired together.

If the rivalry with McIlroy materialises as so many hope, it will pit a young Irish man who is helplessly affable and natural with the public with a man who has never quite learned how to do it.

McIlroy has so far managed to live a very famous and public life with a degree of normality. He can show up as the star turn at the US Open tennis tournament but he can also hang around the local pizzeria in Portrush with Big Darren.

Tiger must envy the Irish man’s carefree approach to life and maybe he could learn a thing or two.

Much schadenfreude accompanied the downfall of Woods. He was central in transforming golf into the global television spectacle it has become but his appeal was always based on the power and invincibility he evinced. He was never going to be loved like Arnie or Seve or the Golden Bear.

When it turned out that his private life resembled the outtakes from The People versus Larry Flynt, people smirked. Guy got his comeuppance, etc. But in the year that Woods has struggled with his game – not to mention the weirdness of his life – golf itself has lacked something.

Take away McIlroy’s exuberance and it is just a bunch of identikit golfers playing for dough.

So the news that Tiger may be back is encouraging. After Tiger’s private world became global news, it suddenly became apparent that golf was just something that he fitted in between his other nocturnal activities.

And yet he still won tournaments.

It must be sobering for his opponent’s to consider just how much he would have won had he really been concentrating on the game. So golf’s prodigal son is back and they are glad to see him.