We come not to praise Eldrick, nor do we come to bury him. The evidence would seem to suggest that young Master Woods has done a fairly effective job of that all by himself.

If 1998 was supposed to be the Year of the Tiger, it has not been. Woods has exactly one PGA tour win to his credit since the new year dawned. Since winning the 1997 Masters by a dozen strokes at the age of 21, he has won four times, one of those victories coming in a relatively obscure tournament in Thailand, his mother's ancestral home. He finished tied for 18th place in last month's US Open at the Olympic Club. Instead of speculating on his chances in the British Open at Birkdale next week, even his admirers are wondering: What's wrong with Tiger Woods?

The simple, and obvious, answer is that he has recently found himself in the grip of what is commonly an old man's disease, to wit: the yips. Woods's putting has ranged from mediocre to awful, witness the stunning four-putt green that removed him from contention in San Francisco. We suspect, however, that the root of this evil runs deeper than that. One doesn't have to be a psychologist to recognise that Tiger doesn't seem to be a very happy person these days.

To be sure, there was resentment among tour veterans when Woods, winner of three straight US Amateur titles, signed contracts that ensured he would make $40 million before he struck his first professional shot, but for the most part his elders were prepared to welcome him with advice and open arms, both of which he largely rejected.

For several years now American tour professionals Brad Faxon and Billy Andrade have run an annual tournament for the Rhode Island Children's Charities, and at the accompanying auction one generous bidder had paid $50,000 for a collection of golf balls signed by every living Masters champion. Touched by the largesse of the benefactor, Andrade had approached Tiger following his win at Augusta and asked him to sign a ball to add to the collection.

"I don't sign golf balls," Woods said, flatly refusing.

Last spring Woods also declined to turn up for the annual Fred Haskins Dinner, at which he was to have been the principal honorand as the recipient of the prestigious award for having been voted the nation's top collegiate golfer the previous year. Organisers were forced to cancel the affair and refund the ticket money.

Later, after the error of his ways had been explained to him, Woods apologised and agreed to attend a rescheduled Haskins dinner, but even in doing so he could not restrain himself from taking pot shots at the media, who had, he claimed, "slaughtered" him for his precipitate rudeness.

"People fail to realise that when you're 21, or when you're young, period, you're going to make mistakes," said Woods.

Fair enough. But when you're a 21 year-old multi-millionaire who has sought a place in the spotlight, you can't expect the mistakes to go unnoticed.

Given the astonishing margin of his victory at Augusta, Woods possibly deluded himself into believing that golf courses around the world could be conquered with the same ease, but the experience of the past year may have taught him a lesson in humility that was sadly lacking when he arrived at Royal Troon last July for his first British Open as a pro.

On Monday, while most of his contemporaries were out surveying the links in practice rounds, Woods was off in Valderrama, familiarising himself with September's Ryder Cup venue, a case of misplaced priorities if ever there was one.

On Tuesday he played his first practice round, and appeared in the press tent afterward. One of his inquisitors there asked for his impressions of the Postage Stamp hole.

"Excuse me?"

The blank look on Tiger's face made it clear that he had no idea what the man was talking about. Press officer David Begg attempted to clarify matters by nudging Woods and stage-whispering "the eighth, Tiger. The par-three."

"Oh," Woods did his best to recover. "Well, it's a very . . . short hole."

Now, the Postage Stamp may be an unassuming little devil of 126 yards, but it is among the five or six most famous holes in all of golf, one that can require anything from a four-wood to a sand wedge, depending on the wind conditions. That Eldrick Tiger Woods had come to Troon in such blissful ignorance was a circumstance many found nothing short of appalling.

(The winner in the end proved to be the Postage Stamp itself. Two days later the hole exacted a triple-bogey six out of Woods that effectively removed him from contention for the week.)

One more word on Woods's Open preparation last year: On the eve of the tournament virtually any caddy worth his salt is out painstakingly walking the course, taking measurements from every bush and bunker. At five o'clock on Wednesday afternoon before the tournament commenced at Troon, we ran into Tiger's caddie Mike (Fluff) Cowan some 25 miles down the coast at Turnberry. We were playing the eighth hole on the Arran Course; Cowan was playing the adjacent 16th.

All of this might seem mere nit-picking had Woods's links game not been so badly exposed over the ensuing few days. Besides the disaster on the eighth, we can recall one occasion when he attempted to hit a twoiron out of a heathery lie in the rough and advanced the ball but a foot or two, and another when he took an eight-iron for a downwind approach and flew the green by a good 30 yards, ill-conceived decisions that might have been tempered had he and his caddie bothered to familiarise themselves with the idiosyncratic vagaries of links golf.

Woods will obviously arrive at Birkdale better prepared than he was in Scotland a year ago - after his links preparation in Waterville and Ballybunion this week - but he doesn't even own the most famous under-25 smile in golf any longer. (That honour has gone, by default, to the young US Amateur champion Matt Kuchar, who captured a legion of admirers by grinning his way through Olympic last month, and is sure to gain a host of new ones in Britain next week.)

Woods doesn't smile as much as he used to, but then four-putts will do that to you. It doesn't explain away his putting woes, but it would appear that Woods has found himself increasingly dismayed by an acute loss of privacy and innocence spawned by his early success. He may only be 22, but it will soon dawn upon him, if it hasn't already, that his youth is gone forever. His childhood friends have scattered to the winds, and he hasn't made many new ones on the PGA tour.

Michael Bamberger, the author of To the Linksland, addressed this very point in the American magazine Sports Illustrated a couple of weeks ago.

"Tiger can fly his buddies in to tournaments, drink beer and play computer games into the night, but it's not the same as before, and that truth must be a shock.

"Getting there," wrote Bamberger, "is almost always more fun than being there."