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Manne wrote: When the career of golf's top player and biggest star was in free fall in 2010, the brain trust of professional golf in the U.S. gathered in their Florida headquarters to contemplate life after Tiger Woods.

Huddling with consultants from their Austin, Texas, advertising firm, senior executives at the PGA Tour tried to figure out how to persuade fans, sponsors and television networks to stay invested in a sport whose biggest draw had been disgraced. The golf world looked like it was about to go through a difficult generational transition.

"Every 10 to 15 years you have a passing of the baton from one face to the other," says Ty Votaw, the tour's executive vice president. "We were about at that 15-year mark with Tiger." There was one problem, though—there wasn't any obvious candidate ready to grab the torch from Mr. Woods, and the consensus among sports-industry executives was that professional golf was headed for trouble.

Defying predictions, the post-Tiger collapse never happened, thanks to the rise of a flashy new crop of players. By nearly every measure, professional golf became richer, more competitive and more stable while Mr. Woods was dealing with the sex scandal and injuries that sent his career careening off course. Now there is an added boost: Mr. Woods, who will tee off on Thursday at the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club where he became a megastar in 1997, recaptured the No. 1 ranking last month. He did it with a win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando, just a few miles from the site of the car accident on Thanksgiving weekend in 2009 that began the unraveling of his personal life.

Tour revenues rose to a record $1.11 billion last year, compared with $1.02 billion in 2010. The tour's new nine-year television contract with NBC and CBS, signed in 2011 when Mr. Woods was tumbling down the rankings, will pay an average of about $800 million annually, a 33% increase over the previous deal, according to one person with knowledge of the deal.

The PGA Tour now has title sponsors for all 42 of its tournaments, each of them paying $6 million to $12 million, depending on the event. Last year, FedEx Corp. extended its deal through 2017 to provide at least $35 million a year in prize money, and tens of millions more in advertising, for the season-ending FedEx Cup championship.

Television ratings still spike when Mr. Woods is on the leaderboard in a final round, especially at a one of golf's four majors championships. But CBS, the tour's lead broadcaster, says more people are tuning in to final-round coverage even when Mr. Woods isn't in the field. "We're happy that he's back and that he's playing well, but we've always felt he spikes off a very strong base, and we think what we've done the past couple of years shows that," says the PGA Tour's Mr. Votaw.

At the Masters, Mr. Woods will resume his pursuit of Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 major championships. He has been stuck at 14 since 2008, when he began struggling with injuries. He lost the No. 1 ranking, which he had held for all but a few months since 1997, in 2010, eventually falling to 58th.

As he faded, the spotlight shifted to players who were teenagers or younger when Mr. Woods came of age. Those players don't look, act or dress like the golfer of yore, preferring flashy, bright colors and slim-tailored cuts to pleated plaids. More important, they have proven gifted, making the sport as deep and competitive as it has been since Mr. Woods's emergence.

"As he's gotten older the talent has gotten better," says Bubba Watson, the defending Masters champion, whose star rose just as Mr. Woods's dimmed.

The emergence of players such as 34-year-old Mr. Watson, Northern Ireland's 23-year-old Rory McIlroy, and Rickie Fowler, a 24-year-old American who grew up racing dirt bikes, came at a perfect time for the sport. They were golfers in the Tiger Woods mold—supremely talented and fit athletes who happened to play golf. Dustin Johnson, for instance, can dunk a basketball. Still, tour executives felt they needed a strategy. By the fall of 2010, the PGA Tour was starting negotiations on a new television deal, which provides the bulk of its revenues. Some of the tour's tournaments needed new deals for title sponsors. Millions of fans who associated golf with Mr. Woods and his aging rival, Phil Mickelson, couldn't pick budding stars like Messrs. Johnson and Fowler out of a lineup.

In the fall of 2010, PGA executives gathered in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., with a team from the Austin advertising firm GSD&M to concoct a way to sell the sport in a post-Tiger world.

One idea was to focus on the different type of fan that each of the emerging players attracted. Mr. Watson, for instance, a self-taught free spirit from the Florida panhandle, is a favorite with the beer-and-wings crowd.

Mr. Votaw says that approach didn't feel sustainable over time, and didn't reflect the emerging competitive tension between the new stars and tour veterans. Professional golf, he argues, was in one of those critical periods "where the young people come in and begin to overtake the stars that preceded them."

The resulting ad campaign, called "Vs.," would highlight younger players such as Messrs. Fowler, Watson and Johnson taking on the establishment and trying to break into the sport's elite.

Fortuitously, as the PGA Tour rolled out the commercials, those players began winning. Mr. Watson captured two tournaments in 2011, then won the Masters last year with a miraculous shot out of the woods on the final playoff hole. Keegan Bradley, 26 years old, won the PGA Championship as a rookie in 2011. Golf had found a new story to tell, and with the economy recovering, sponsors and television partners were ready to listen.

"We all got spoiled for more than a decade with Tiger's performances," says Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports. "But we looked at the incredible strength of the young players and thought there was a gre

Manne wrote: Tiger Woods dominates golf again. For a long while, there was a real question whether that would happen. He did go more than two years without winning a PGA Tour tournament. He struggled with injuries and swing changes. He snap-hooked drives into the wilderness. A few more putts lipped out. He seemed to drift mentally – he stopped thriving on Sundays.

Now, though, he looks reborn. He is back to hitting his driver so well he spins the club and does not even need to watch the ball land. He stalks putts like the Tiger of old. He’s putting away golf tournaments on Sundays. Yes, he looks reborn.

And, again, we can ask the question: Can Tiger Woods win five more major championships and pass Jack Nicklaus as the greatest golfer who ever lived?

Why it matters: There is a compelling argument to be made that Tiger Woods does not have anything left to do, that he is already the greatest golfer who ever lived.

Look: Woods already has won 77 PGA Tour events, four more than Nicklaus and just five behind the all-time record held by Sam Snead (and as many as Snead won as an individual). He will break Snead’s record. He has already won more than $100 million in prize money. Nicklaus, in case you are wondering, won $5.7 million in his career.

Now, some business people have done studies comparing Nicklaus and Woods prize money based on inflation and the much smaller purses of Nicklaus’ time and calculate that Nicklaus actually won as much or even more money than Woods. But Woods’ amazing prize money number is telling for two reasons.

1. Woods’ $100 million is $35 million more than any other golfer.

2. Woods’ popularity almost singlehandedly transformed golf and drove those purses through the stratosphere. In other words, he didn’t just win more money. He CREATED more money.

Woods has what almost everyone would concede is the greatest peak in golf history – four consecutive major championship victories (the Tiger Slam), seven major championships out of 11, the most dominant performances ever at the U.S. Open, Masters and British Open and so on. Then there is the argument that Woods plays in a time when the fields are much deeper than ever before, when the new technology in golf shrinks the gap between the good and the great.

So, yes, you could argue that Woods – even though he has 14 major championships to Nicklaus’ 18 – is the best ever.

But I don’t think that argument is viable, and here’s why: Tiger Woods personally set the guidelines. When he was a kid, he had a poster on his wall of Jack Nicklaus and those 18 major championships. That was the grail. Woods can win 100 PGA Tour events and win $500 million and dominate the game for another decade, but unless he gets to 19 majors, the journey is incomplete.

And nobody understands this more clearly than Tiger Woods himself.

Why Woods will break Jack’s record: There has never been a player quite like him.

Tiger Woods’ story is so familiar, it is just a part of the sports landscape. Golfing prodigy. Brilliant amateur. Historic dominance at Augusta. The Tiger Slam. The U.S. Open on one leg. Long putts that always drop. Magical shots from behind trees. The fist pump, the scowl, the rage, the red shirt on Sunday.

It is all so familiar that it no longer feels miraculous. But Tiger Woods, for much of his career, has been miraculous. Golf was not made to be tamed. Nicklaus finished second at 19 major championships. Ben Hogan, after his magical 1953, never won another major. Tom Watson started missed the come-backers, Nick Faldo stopped being a metronome, Greg Norman never could quite harness all that talent, Phil Mickelson has alternated brilliance and breakdowns his entire amazing career.

But Tiger Woods, for the longest time, seemed able to tilt the game to his will. He could always hit the ball farther, hit the approaches higher, chip and blast with more feel, read the greens better. But there have been other golfers with something close to his talent. What pushed him beyond, it seems, was a sixth sense, this ability to make the long putt or the wonder shot precisely when he needed it.

You will remember his famous chip at No. 16 at Augusta, when he aimed for a sliver of sunlight that was glowing on a hill, then watched the ball roll back down that hill and back down and back down until it stopped at the hole, posed for photographs, and then plopped in. Hitting it close might have been good enough to win the tournament. But with Tiger Woods, good enough was never good enough. It had to fall in the hole.

With that sort of wizardry … well, of course he will break Jack’s record.


Read More: Will Tiger Woods Break Jack Nicklaus' Majors Record? | Golf Channel