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For more than 15 years, Eldrick “Tiger” Woods has been the engine fueling the exponential growth of golf's revenues, purses, and endorsement deals, and he's a bigger draw for casual fans than the rest of the sport combined. For starters, he's brought in younger fans through his sheer cult of personality on the golf course. Woods, at the peak of his powers, was cool like Jordan or Ali—he can’t be compared to any other golfer in terms of his effect on the sport’s popularity among the masses. He's frequently referred to by his first name, a larger-than-life designation that he shares with such sports luminaries as Wilt and Rafa.

This is all a long way of saying that Woods is unique among all golfers, past and present. Golf pundits can debate whether Woods or Jack Nicklaus was the better golfer for the next 100 years, but there’s no debating who was the most influential golfer of all time. When Woods turned pro in 1996, the total purse at the Masters was $2.5 million and the winner got $450,000. The purse for this year’s Masters was $9 million, and Watson’s winning prize was $1.62 million. The impetus for that growth, before the FedEx Cup and its $10 million prize or the rise in golfers with lucrative endorsement deals, was tournaments like Woods’s 15-shot victory at the 2000 U.S. Open and commercials like his iconic spot for Nike.

Woods’s impact on fan interest in golf can be seen in Masters ratings since he turned pro in 1996. The Wire’s Eric Levinson found that weekend television viewership averaged 12.2 million when Woods was within five shots of the lead and only 11 million when he was more than five shots behind. That’s a 10 percent drop in viewers just when Woods fell out of contention, and this year’s anemic numbers showed the effect of his absence not just from the leaderboard, but the entire tournament.

Equally sobering for the business of golf is that there is no one waiting in the wings to maintain interest and attract young players to the game. The only pro golfer who comes close to matching Woods’s commercial appeal is Mickelson, the charismatic lefty who has won three Masters and five major championships overall. But Mickelson, 43, is battling psoriatic arthritis, and last week he missed the cut at the Masters for the first time since Woods’s historic rout in 1997. And even with Mickelson in a featured group for the first round, ESPN’s Thursday ratings fell off 30 percent from last year.

Woods’s demise is another blow to golf’s popularity worldwide when it’s taken some hard hits already. Roughly four out of every five Americans live in an urban area, a trend that threatens younger people’s access to golf courses. In 1920 roughly 50 percent of the U.S. population was in urban areas—by 2000 it was 81 percent. Despite golf outreach programs like The First Tee, which has a presence in most major cities, access to golf courses or even driving ranges remains limited. The cohort of people playing golf, too, is aging, and none of Woods’s potential successors as Undisputed Best Golfer in the World has ever matched—or even remotely approached—Woods’s appeal to younger fans.No golfer besides Woods and Mickelson cracked the top 20 on Forbes’ 2013 list of the 100 highest-paid athletes. Only three other golfers cracked the top 100: potential young superstar Rory McIlroy, 44-year-old Ernie Els, and Brandt Snedeker, who made the list thanks to the $10 million he earned for winning the 2012 FedEx Cup.