Keith Duggan Sideline CutAs the funeral service to top them all took place in Rome this week, it was perhaps inevitable that shades of death and mortality would colour the sporting arenas also. They were most starkly visible at the poignant meeting of Liverpool and Juventus almost 20 years after the black evening at Heysel.

The coldly eloquent refusal of many dozens of Juventus fans, standing at the Anfield Road end, to engage in the pageantry of commemoration before the match by simply turning their backs to the famous Liverpool field spoke volumes about the depth of anger over those 39 needless deaths.

The unanswerable power and finality of that gesture must have pierced the heart of boozy and sentimental Liverpool, a city that takes pride in its easy, irresistible friendliness.

And in very different circumstances, the passing of life and time was writ large over the strange and fitful first day of play at the Masters tournament in Augusta. It was interesting to consider the trials of Tiger Woods when set against the place where Jack Nicklaus finds himself now.

It was not so long ago that Woods's march towards claiming Nicklaus's sobriquet as the Greatest Golfer of Them All was being treated as little more than a coronation, a question of when rather than if. Now, at 29 and his haul of majors having stalled at eight, the odds have shifted and the considered opinion is Woods maybe - just maybe - has time enough to edge out Nicklaus's formidable trove of 18 major titles.

Unlike so many of America's sporting heroes, Nicklaus has managed the task of fading with grace. The longevity that golf alone offers its competitors meant he never had to face being cast into the wilderness as happens so many of the brightest in the more athletic ball sports once they are burnt out. Nicklaus has made the transition from slightly aloof young phenomenon of LBJ's America to inspirational, grandfatherly figure for the younger generations of golfers who cannot - with the lone exception of Woods - ever hope to emulate his mastery.

In addition, he has been exceptionally supportive and magnanimous towards Woods. After Tiger strolled to the 1997 title (remember how the carefree, youthful certainty, the smart attire and the athlete's physique made the rest of the field look like a collection of Apple executives out on a junket?) he was spoken of in genuinely awestruck terms.

Woods's contemporaries shrank back from the challenge he presented and as the major tournaments fell before him, professional golf was in danger of lacking the most basic of sporting requirements: competition. So golf, with the help of the media, just invented the contest between the prowling Tiger and the ghost of the Golden Bear. The quest for the most majors ever wasn't exactly the stuff to get the heart thumping but it did give Woods's suffocating domination some sense of scale.

Nicklaus responded to the appearance on the horizon of the cocksure undoubting young American with open arms. When he said that Woods's passing him out on the all-time honours roll would be a good thing for golf, it was easy to believe him.

Nicklaus's presence at Augusta this weekend has been driven by the terribly sad accidental death of his baby grandson. As the family continues to grieve, Nicklaus changed his mind about declining to play this year's tournament at the persuasion of his bereaved son. He is ihis mid-60s now, and his golfing peak is long past, but though he is more portly and stooped, the golden mane still has the lustre of youth. And even for spectators too young to remember his last great Masters charge in 1986, the thrill of standing next to an icon and watching him tee off must make their visit to Augusta seem all the more special and authentic.

But as the sky over Georgia was electrically charged and moody, it was hard not to wonder what was going though Nicklaus's mind as he persevered around an old course suddenly made to look vengeful and angry in the unfamiliar light and sodden conditions. Here was a sporting icon returning to the scene of so many triumphs in the hope of discovering, in going through the motions of playing, some sort of passage through an unbearably sorrowful period.

After a certain period of time, all sports arenas are filled with apparitions. The feats of Nicklaus's past are there for all to see on archive film. But when he roams places like Augusta, certain spots along the way, or the way the light falls, or even a face in the crowd must trigger memories and instances that he alone has recorded.

Playing the course on that dark Thursday afternoon, his mind must have flashed back to the sunnier moments of his greatness when he was the invincible figure in the yellow polo-shirt and chequered trousers. And he could not possibly have guessed in the times of those triumphs that his journey would lead to the sombre circumstances that instinctively brought him to Augusta this week. And how many of those hard-fought, glorious titles would he relinquish if it meant alleviating the pain of those he loves right now? Every last one of them, one imagines, without a second's thought.

So it was worth considering Nicklaus's quiet, reserved grief when watching Tiger Woods struggle against a course that seemed so obedient in his first flushes of youth.

Sport is so absurdly overblown, it has so much money to inflate it and it commands so much of our time and attentions that the famous saying by the humble old Liverpool man Bill Shankly about football being more important than life or death is sometimes taken at face value. Sport can be a tremendously worthwhile and admirable medium in which to pursue one's life goals and it is true the death of great sports icons has the power to move people uncommonly. But against death, sport is powerless.

God knows how many more realistic shots at winning Augusta Woods is going to get. Today, with the Golden Bear almost certainly having taken his leave from the players' board - probably for the last time - the sun will probably blaze across the course and Tiger may well have tapped into the imperial form of three seasons ago. He must be the favourite to win the thing for a reason and watching the doubt and confusion and vexation flicker over his face as he putted the ball into Rae's Creek at the 13th hole on Thursday, you had to kind of root for him.

Because it will seem like no time until he is back at Augusta as an old-stager, a smiling grey head who either did or did not win the race against the Golden Bear. By then, he will have his own distractions and worries, though hopefully none so tragic as touched Nicklaus this year. Woods will be an old man offering wisdom on some young blade whose like has never been seen before. That is the law.

And if there is one thing they should never do at Augusta, it is to limit the age that old champions may return because there comes a time when the game is all that matters and not the score.