Locker Room: Here in the attic where most of these columns get made under sweatshop conditions I have a book (surprised, eh?) which was published way back in 1996 and is something of an artefact. The tome is a collection of Sports Illustrated articles written about Tiger Woods, who that year was the Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year.

The assembled words predate the mildly amusing tigerwoodsisgod.com internet site by representing Woods (as was popular, profitable and fashionable back then) as the Second Coming.

A few months later Woods went and won his first Masters tournament, that unforgettable and mesmeric night when he won by 12 strokes and we thought the revolution would be fought on the fairways and in the country clubs.

Bah! At time of writing I have no idea whether Tiger Woods will win another Masters tournament.

The point is it doesn't really matter anymore. Tiger being in contention ensures that the TV audience swells obscenely on the final day of a Major. Beyond that the impact is small. In terms of social impact, Tiger Woods has settled for being a corporate shill.

Nobody goes around saying these days that Tiger Woods will change the face of golf.

He has changed things in the profit-and-loss department, he has raised the standards of excellence and has brought the art of commercially exploiting his talent to a new level, but back then when we spoke about changing the face of golf we meant something different, something a little bit more literal.

Woods is in his 30s now, his best years given to winning tournaments and exploiting his own perfect corporate blandness. Behind him, the young American stars are few and far between and as white as the golf balls they play with.

There has been no following army of hungry young prodigies springing from the neighbourhoods with Big Berthas in one hand and endorsement contracts in the other.

The country club is still a bastion of class and colour. Tiger has chosen to stand inside.

The last piece in the Tiger Woods collection which SI got into print back in 1996 was written by Rick Reilly and finished by striking precisely the hopeful note we all wanted struck back then.

Reilly told the story of the 20-year-old Woods at the Disney Classic in Orlando.

Everyone had the feeling they were riding the wave of history. Not golfing history but racial and social. The piece finished with a little colour story (in the journalistic sense of colour) which fits perhaps too neatly into the arc of the story.

"At the Disney," wrote Rick, "a young black man was wandering around with his buddies trying to follow Woods but looking lost. Finally, he discreetly approached a black cameraman.

"Brother," he said, "can I ask you something?" The cameraman leaned over the ropes to hear him: "Sure."

"Well," the young man said, "what do we do?" He'll have an entire era to learn.

More than a decade after Tiger burst out of the amateur ranks and went pro with that famous "Hello World" advertising campaign that hammered home the message that there were courses he could not play because of the colour of his skin, the thought of Woods being a leader anywhere else except on the leaderboard and in the endorsement-deals wars is preposterous.

No welcome and transforming wave of African American golfers has followed him to the PGA Tour. Woods's ultimate message would turn out to be rather less inspiring than his grand entrance. His message would be, "Buy Stuff."

Golf remains untouched. Woods has been whitened or at least made neutral. Tiger is distant from the controversies which rage about race or gender at Augusta. He is mute, as always, on Nike's working conditions in Third Word countries, never wondering, apparently, how Nike make the clothes which bear his name. He is the guy who wouldn't go to South Africa when Nelson Mandela asked him to.

He does his bit. He flies in to help JP down at Limerick. He runs his foundation.

He is nice but bland, a role model of sorts, and sincerely believes, I think, that it isn't up to him to be anything other than a wonderful golfer.

Perhaps he is right. In an ideal world, Darren Clarke, say, would rage against the absence of diversity on the PGA fairways just as loudly a Tiger Woods should.

Tiger, though, has consciously rejected a legacy. If we expect and hope for our Irish sports stars to be a little different and to remain consciously and identifiably Irish, Tiger is in a similar position. He could occupy a spot in a line which began in the early days of organised baseball with Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, a line which continued through Jessie Owens and Jackie Robinson and reached its highest point with Ali and perhaps Arthur Ashe.

Woods eventually would find himself in the last great sporting bastion of colour and money and decide after a promising start to keep quiet about it all.

It's his right to do that but it's a pity. In the end the silence, the malleability at the hands of the corporate suits, will be what separates Tiger Woods from heroism. He will have settled for excellence.

On Saturday he went to work in Augusta, ensuring the TV executives and Nike hacks he would be there in the familiar red shirt on the final round, thus saving the ratings and selling the gear.

There's no sense of emotion about it though, no sense that a sport is lapping over the edge of its natural boundaries and having a profound influence on real lives. Tiger's greatest legacy is in the profit-and-loss accounts to which he brings a whole string of happily compliant digits.

Tiger's own foundation concentrates these days on educational opportunities and back-up (commendable aspirations) and has given up waiting for the new Tiger to emerge (the name most mentioned as a coming phenomenon is young Cheyenne Woods, Tiger's niece. You can imagine how tough Cheyenne's life has been).

There are programmes in place to provide golf help for African Americans, like the O'Neal, when they are younger, but these initiatives are relatively new or small in scope.

The American Junior Golf Association, based near Atlanta, has programmes in 50 states, but only 5,000 kids nationwide take part.

Other organisations like First Tee report a jump in the participation of black kids early in the Tiger era and a steady falling off since.

Woods himself has given up on the race issue and 10 years on he doesn't even have the novel zest of youth to stir us with.

Golf in America is being returned to the middle class and middle-aged. His career remains a chase to overhaul Jack Nicklaus's haul of Majors, a relentless march towards an excellence which in the end will satisfy nothing more than one man's ambition.

Looking back to Tiger the kid and the hope he generated you can't but think that (oddly) his career is an opportunity missed.