This little gang of golfheads had gathered at Doral while Tiger Woods was marching back into his personal paradise of stroke play after two-thirds of a year on the physical fritz.

The gang was talking about the best of the best of all time in any and all sports. Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Jim Brown, Jerry Rice, Muhammad Ali, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus. Well, me and my big mouth, I suggested that no one ever stood farther above everyone in his sport than Tiger.

I didn't say use the word ''athlete'' because of some doubts about placing golfers in the same category as football, baseball, basketball players and even boxers in terms of strength, agility, foot speed and stamina. It's coordination and concentration that makes the golfer. Understand, that's just a minor opinion -- not an obsession like the one about Tiger's astonishing dominance of the hardest game anywhere.

And just about then, Tiger strode out of the first round of Doral's WGC-CA Championship, and people all over the place were asking themselves, ``What sort of man can take eight months off for some fairly serious surgery and then on his very first hike back into the fray shoot a 1-under-par 71 that could have been a 67 if not for some putts that missed by about the length of a gnat's ear?''

ALWAYS FOCUSED

You think about the shocking power of concentration that Tiger brings to his work week in and week out. Try to imagine a father doing a better job of instilling the gift of focus in a son than Tiger's dad, Earl, did.

It's one thing to be 100 percent focused on your sport when you are young and single and have no other real responsibilities. It's another when you are only fairly recently married and have a 2-year-old daughter and month-old son to think about.

People used to speculate that things would be different some day. They said life would catch up with Tiger when he had to walk the floor with a beloved bundle in his arms in the middle of the night.

Whoa. He hasn't changed one bit. So you can scratch that concern, and probably credit his wife, Elin, with helping Tiger compartmentalize his life the way Barbara Nicklaus did with Jack.

For what it's worth, I thought for a long time that Nicklaus was the greatest ever. Of his 18 majors, he won seven after age 33. Now also 33, Tiger already has nailed 14 majors. Nicklaus remains the classiest competitor your ink-stained wretch of a correspondent has known, but barring some further and perhaps more damaging physical setback, Tiger is going to swing past all of Jack's biggest numbers.

IT WILL TAKE TIME

Don't expect him to take Doral's Blue Monster apart the rest of this week after all that time off. It still would be an awesome trick to win his fifth Masters, a month from now. But he was looking good out there Thursday.

''I hit so many putts that looked good,'' he said. ``I thought I hit my lines and thought I had the right speed, but they just didn't go in.''

He said he was putting the same way he has all his life, so it was nothing to panic about, a few refusing to drop.

''I'll just keep doing the same things,'' he said. ``It's not like I was playing poorly or struggling all the way around. It's all right. If you continue hitting good putts, they will eventually start going in.''

Not the least, he played evenly so much of the way around. Two birdies, three bogeys and the rest pars. Only six strokes off the lead at first day's finish.

And the crowd, naturally, loved every lick of it.

At noon, a half-hour after Woods teed off with Mike Weir and Robert Karlsson, people actually were sprinting from parking lots a good ways from the course, trying not to miss a single swing of sports history's most masterly figure.

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