Rich Hofmann: Tiger Woods: Why now, and why at Augusta?

IN CASE YOU missed this along the way, amid all of the years of hushed reverence, the holes at Augusta National are named after flowering trees or bushes that they feature. The hallowed 18th, the scene of so much Masters drama over the years, of so many sporting conquests and triumphal processions to the green, is named Holly - as is one of Tiger Woods' other, uh, conquests, the porn actress Holly Sampson.

You know, because it's all part of the story now.

America's Guilty Pleasure is coming back - and not a moment too soon. After careful consultation with all of the important advisers in his life - his accountants, his public-relations specialists, his swing coach in Orlando, his stop-swinging coach at the clinic in Mississippi - Woods has announced that he is going to do what everybody should have known he was going to do all along. That is, he is going to play this year at the Masters.

There will be a lot of talk, and a certain amount of tsk-tsking and such. Ignore it. The words never meant anything anyway. From the moment when Tiger crashed the vehicle and his wife teed off on its windows, the rest of this was always about public relations and plotting a return to the world of multimillion-dollar endorsements.

The endgame here was not about Tiger as husband or father or philanderer. He was never a personable guy and we don't really care about his personal life, other than the opportunity for spectacular voyeurism this incident has afforded us all.

So forget the forthcoming rationalizations and explanations. Tiger issued a statement yesterday but, well, come on. Forget it. Just watch the golf. Watch this transcendent media figure - a man who has now managed to dominate his sport, make TMZ respectable and single-handedly create an off-label use for Ambien - as he re-enters the arena.

I mean, wouldn't it be something if he was in contention on Sunday? I have had the great good fortune of walking the back nine on Sunday at the Masters. Tiger's coronation in 1997, when he lapped the field and won by a dozen, was transformative - and you knew it when you were standing there. A couple of years after that, when Jack Nicklaus found himself in real-live contention on the final day as he approached retirement, you could feel the ground shake.

This would be bigger, greater, more consuming, all-consuming.