The US Open starts tomorrow and as is always the case for golf majors, Tiger is the biggest story. This time though, instead of speculating about how many shots Tiger will win by, everyone is gleefully writing stories about how Tiger isn’t the favorite. The consensus is that there are at least four other golfers playing better than Tiger right now: Ernie Els, Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh and Sergio Garcia. Of course, all of these stories about how Tiger isn’t the favorite are really just offshoots of the top golf story of the past year or so: Tiger’s slump.
Is he in a slump or isn’t he? Every sportswriter worth his salt (or not) has written about this. And why not? It’s the perfect story. It has no wrong answer! You can answer it with either a yes or a no and build a perfectly solid argument.
If you consider a slump to be someone performing below their normal standard, then yes, it’s a slump. Tiger hasn’t won any of the last seven majors, just after winning seven of eleven. While Tiger won five times last year and was selected by his peers as Player of the Year, he lost the money title to Vijay Singh. Tiger doesn’t normally lose anything, so, yes, he’s slumping.
If you instead consider a slump to be subpar play overall, then no, of course Tiger isn’t slumping. He won those five titles last year and won the World Match Play Championship this year. In ten 2004 tournaments, he has six top-ten finishes and is fourth on the money list. For 99% of professional golfers, this would be the best year of their life.
Regardless of how you feel about his slump, there is no doubt that the field is gaining on Tiger. In years past, potential rivals like Els, Mickelson, Garcia, Davis Love and David Duval would rise up and Tiger would consume them like John Daly hitting a bag of Snickers. Eventually, it became blasphemous to even suggest that another player could be a rival for Tiger. No, it was Tiger against the field – advantage Tiger. The real match was Tiger versus history, Tiger versus Jack. Tiger was (and still is) winning that battle as well.
This year though, some of those potential contenders have stepped up and stayed up. Els, Mickelson, Singh and Garcia can all legitimately claim to be rivals of Tiger, at least for now. Singh laid his claim to that title last year. Many thought that he, not Tiger should have been the 2003 Player of the Year (and that’s ridiculous – yes Vijay won the most money, but he took about twice as many tournaments to do it. If the roles had been reversed, if Tiger had had to play a bunch of extra tournaments to catch Vijay, but Vijay had still won more tournaments, Vijay would have won the POY voting in a landslide.).
To see how close those four have come to Tiger this year, I looked at how they fared in tournaments that Tiger played in. To be the man, you have to beat the man, so I’m most interested in how they fared head-to-head. The numbers show that although Tiger is relatively down and all four are relatively up, they are still not there yet. Only one of those guys, Mickelson, is even .500 against El Tigre. The rest have losing records by at least two tournaments. Only Phil is close enough that he could pull ahead of Tiger by beating him this week.
Here is a summary of their 2004 seasons:

	World Ranking	2004 Wins	2004 Money	W-L Against Tiger
Tiger	1	1	4	NA
Els	2	2	3	2-4
Mickelson	5	2	2	3-3
Singh	3	3	1	4-6
Garcia	10	2	5	3-6

This tells me that Tiger is still The Man. He is right in the mix in wins and money and still owns them all head-to-head. That could change this weekend though. If one of the four contenders wins the Open, he’ll have a legitimate argument to being the Man. And then the biggest story will be about how Tiger is no longer the biggest story.