Sideline Cut:Watching Craig Stadler rumbling around the fairways during the first round at Augusta brought to mind the old chestnut: is golf a sport or is it a game? Having won the Masters title a full quarter of a century ago, Stadler is entitled to treat the most famous golf tournament in the world as his pleasure dome and during a tricky first round, the Walrus showed a deft hand and unerring eye as he drew the television cameras away from Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson and all the other young guns who were meant to set the pace.

There is something irresistible about a fat man triumphing on a golf course, even more so about a tubby fairways master who admits to liking a beer.

John Daly was, of course, the ultimate anti-hero in this regard, the epitome of the couch-potato slob who seemed to one day stand up, brush the Pringles crumbs off his tee-shirt, stick his Marlboros in his butt pocket and, in one swift leap, jump from Trailerville to the world of elite golf.

In Daly's absence, Stadler was decent compensation, huffing and puffing his way around the course, the bulky frame and trademark whiskers marking him out as an easily identifiable and almost radical figure in a field dominated by golfing clones.

Still, by the back nine, the concern was less whether Stadler would be able to remain high on the leader board (he was not) than whether he might not need a snack or a brew in order to get back to the clubhouse.

Now approaching his mid-50s, Stadler is cheerfully unbothered by his own weight, remarking not so long ago that he only ever hit the gym to sip a beer and watch others work out. His days of challenging for titles are long past. But the very fact that this middle-aged, porky American was, however temporarily, able to live on the scoreboard with the contemporary giants of the game served to remind us that if golf is a sport, it is at odds with those sports which demand more explicit forms of athleticism.

Much is made of the fact Augusta is one of those rare institutions that genuinely venerates its past champions. The old tradition of allowing former champions to play in the tournament until they signed their last scorecard was a quaint one. But with old guys living longer and feeling more vigorous, the whole show was in danger of turning into some kind of golfing version of The Golden Girls.

The low point was reached of course when Billy Casper, the 1970 champion, headed off for an 18-hole ramble one fine Thursday morning and found the water so many times that he finished his round a week or so later wearing a scuba mask. After that, it was decided to try and keep the wrinkly ex-champions on the safer side of the fairways.

But there was still sentiment enough this week for Arnold Palmer, who is 118 years old now or thereabouts, gamely emerging to a rapturous reception to begin this year's tournament with a ceremonial tee shot, a wickedly dangerous moment that sent the golf ball shooting no more than five feet in the air while travelling at about 100 miles an hour so that nobody other than Ian Woosnam could watch it without crouching down in terror. With Arnie sent packing, the field was left open to those aged 80 and younger - and white.

A full decade after Tiger Woods appeared to radicalise golf by winning at Augusta as a 21-year-old, the suburban game remains as gentrified and overwhelmingly white in profile as ever. Over 10 years after Earl Woods declared at a prize-giving that his son would "transcend this game and bring to the world a humanitarianism which has never been known before", golf has settled down again.

The idea that Tiger Woods could emancipate golf, that he could somehow bring the brothers from the ghettos to the country clubs, was both thrilling and naive, probably as deluded as the currently fashionable notion that America is ready to put a black-skinned man in the White House will ultimately prove.

Whether Tiger ever fully shared his old man's vision of his ability to shape history or just wants to win a bunch of majors is unclear. But rather than Tiger changing golf, the sedate game has assimilated him. He has dominated so much television time at majors for the past 10 years that his skin colour, his heritage and the idea of his representing the ethnic minorities have gradually disappeared. He is simply the Tiger, predator of the fairways and money machine, the guy who may or may not be on his way to becoming the greatest golfer in the history of the game.

Tiger, though, looks like an athlete. One of the most interesting views in the annual debate as to whether Tiger would triumph over Jack Nicklaus in his prime came from Gary Player, now in his 70s and enjoying a round for old times' sake. Player contended that in terms of development of the golfing physique, the game was only in its infancy.

He was basically applying the old football maxim that "a good big 'un will always beat a good little 'un", suggesting the day would come when a gargantuan man with a feel for the game would arrive on the scene - a Shaquille O'Neal equipped with Woods's poise and Nicklaus's velvety touch - to blow all other competitors out of the water. The day will come, predicted Player, when courses will be 8,000 yards long.

And you can be sure that will be the day that the Walrus decides to quit to slurp ice cream and sink beers for good. That will be the day when golf will turn into orienteering with a set of clubs strapped onto your back.

The consolation for the Walrus, however, is that right now he could tee off with Michael Jordan, one of the greatest athletes of the last 100 years and a helpless golf fanatic, and beat him, sipping beers as he went.

In golf, it isn't so much about the body as the hands and the mind, and so even if Player's prophesy does come true, there may always be room for the chubby natural who won't cut down on the chicken wings for love or money.

And no amount of natural strength or conditioning can legislate for freaky genius of the kind demonstrated by another South African, Tim Clarke, who holed an extraordinary, around-the-world, 60-foot putt on the final green on Thursday.

As Homer Simpson - the man with the ultimate golfing physique - once declared in admiration, "Jack Nicholson himself could not have made that shot."