Patrick Reusse: This time, it's Mickelson giving golf a wedgie

Tiger Woods was golf's favorite for corporate America and for the general sporting public. In two months, he has gone from the world's most famous athlete to the world's most famous cheater on a spouse.

Phil Mickelson was the favorite for both the aging television regulars that didn't want to see Jack Nicklaus' records surpassed by Woods and for beer-filled rowdies that now populate galleries. It took Mickelson only one round of his 2010 debut to be labeled a "cheater" by PGA Tour regular Scott McCarron.

Woods has had a solid relationship with his fellow players, based both on the hundreds of millions he brought to the Tour and to treating his peers with respect in the clubhouse.

Mickelson's arrogance has made him largely unpopular with players, and that arrogance surfaced dramatically in recent days at Torrey Pines in San Diego. It goes like this:

Tour players were using irons and wedges with specially cut grooves to get more spin when playing from the rough. The U.S. Golf Association and the Royal & Ancient, golf's ruling bodies, finally decided to act -- outlawing U-shaped (square) grooves in favor of V-shaped grooves.

There was a loophole based on Ping's lawsuit against the USGA that was settled in 1993. The agreement prevented the USGA from making illegal square-grooved Ping-Eye 2 clubs developed in the late '80s.

John Daly and Dean Wilson played two weeks ago in Hawaii with the older, square-grooved Ping wedges. Inspired by that, Mickelson showed up in San Diego with a Ping wedge from 1989.

"I certainly don't think he's playing in the spirit of the rules change," Mackenzie said. "He doesn't need to do that.

"Last summer at Oakmont, a friend of mine was talking to him about his short game. Phil said, 'I'll show you something.' And he put a ball on the green 5 feet in front of my friend, and hit a shot over his head, without putting a dent in the green. When you have that type of talent, you don't need a Ping-Eye 2 wedge."

Mackenzie, aware of several fruitless conversations between Mickelson and USGA senior technical official Dick Rugge, added: "Phil knows what he thinks, and what everyone else has to say, it isn't of much interest to him."

The haymaker of Woods turning out to be far different than his magnificent image, and the straight jab of Mickelson being a proud rules-bender, only add to the punches taken by the game and the PGA Tour: a devastating economic downturn, a decline in TV audience and many millions of Americans fewer with enough interest to play regularly.

Consider today's event in San Diego, a Tour stop that dates to 1952:

According to the Wall Street Journal, ticket sales and corporate hospitality revenue also were down 20 percent from 2008, when Woods last played in the tournament. He was recovering from knee surgery last year, and now is allegedly trying to recover from sexual addiction.

The most serious financial blow for the PGA Tour could arrive after 2012, when the lucrative contracts with CBS and NBC expire. The expectation is the Tour will receive far less from those networks -- based on the evidence that a tournament without Woods has virtually no audience and thus minimal value.

Tiger will draw huge ratings when he first returns, but long-term, this humiliation figures to cause him to play even less and to cut substantially into his general appeal.

Woods' presence was the main reason that CBS and NBC signed six-year deals that started in 2007. Those millions -- along with the Golf Channel's (signed through 2021) -- has permitted a situation where 60 percent-plus of the purses come from the PGA Tour's home office. Cut into the TV money substantially and there will be more pressure to find big-bucks sponsorships.

The odds of the PGA Tour being able to do that in post-meltdown corporate America are the same as Elin Nordegren giving Tiger a big smooch, saying all is forgiven and actually meaning it.