Certain events off the course are likely to occur in the next decade. He has become a father. His characteristic sense of responsibility and the strong family feelings he has evinced as a son may cut into his already severely rationed playing time. Family life supposedly settles athletes down, but Phil Mickelson’s late summer disappearance from competition hasn’t helped his statistics, or his image. In the coming decade, Tiger’s own image will age; already, his once cherubic visage is marked by countless competitive hours in the sun. Now, on camera, when he squints and grimaces in the wake of an imperfect shot, it is the creased grimace of a fully grown man—a veteran.

From the standpoint of the advertisers (Gillette, Nike, Buick, Accenture) who provide most of his prodigious income, he may still appeal to the much-courted 20s demographic, but he is no longer of it. The magnetic presence he exerts in his light-hearted television commercials depends on his continuing to shine in golf tournaments; a great ongoing weight of tangible and intangible assets rests on a slender edge, the difference between good golf and winning golf. A few long putts not dropping, a few more pushes off the tee, and his dominance could end as irrevocably as Palmer’s did after he blew a seven-shot lead in the 1966 U. S. Open.

Perish the thought. Tiger has been sustained as a young man by a genuine love of the game and an innocently rapacious desire to beat everybody else. In his book How I Play Golf, he says to the reader, “You may find this hard to believe but even when I’m grinding on the final nine of a tournament, I’m having a blast.... I believe even the most stoic player is having the time of his life when the game is on. If he isn’t he shouldn’t be playing.”

He began playing in public early, as a child prodigy performing trick shots on television, and then as a teenage sensation racking up an unprecedented three consecutive U.S. Amateurs. He is a Bobby Jones who didn’t retire, who didn’t stay amateur, whose professional success is corporation scale—a private jet, a 155-foot yacht, his own golf course design company. A question is, how playful can a corporation continue to be? For a curious gaiety of relaxation—of not trying too hard, of not trying to bully the course but flowing along with it—is part of golf’s incorruptible magic.

In the decade ahead, not only his body but his spirit might show wear. Could success begin to bore him? Any golfer knows the pitfalls of the wandering mind, of no longer granting golf’s measured pace and finicky adjustments the focus they demand. Look at the greatly gifted John Daly’s appealing but crippling diffidence. Tiger’s triumph is that he not only shouldered great expectations but exceeded them. His announced goal, to surpass Nicklaus’ record of 18 majors (or call it 20, counting U.S. Amateurs as majors) should be reached in the next decade, barring calamitous infirmity or distraction.

But the goal may be achieved in the soured, so-what atmosphere that has clouded the successful assaults, beginning with Roger Maris and ending, for now, with Barry Bonds, on Babe Ruth’s epochal record of 60 home runs in one season. The equipment did it, or chemicals. A sentimental vengeance is taken on those who shatter sacred marks and dethrone old gods. They will be forgiven if they do it in divine style. Style is what makes strivers into heroes. If he overtakes Nicklaus comfortably, as his natural right, Tiger will be certified as the greatest golfer since Young Tom Morris. If he struggles at it, and makes it look laborious, he will go from being a wonder to being one more plugger in the lucrative workhouse of sports.