HOME. It is a couple of weeks before the Masters and David Duval is at home at Ponte Vedra, playing in golf's richest tournament. He made a breakthrough win here last year as he streaked through the early season on his way to a cool $3,641,906.

Here he is, home again, sleeping in his home, shared with Julie, his longtime girlfriend. People want to know where it all went wrong. He's trying. Lord knows he's trying. Home. Every player on the Tour, every pampered millionaire, every courtesy car brat, every overpaid, underhitting last one of them has a place that is home. It is hard to imagine one of them who is more fascinating to watch in that environment than David Duval. There is a scratchy tension in Duval's character which he has struggled to deal with all his adult life. He has an arrogance to him which seems not to be totally backed up by inner belief.

He comes over like a man who has finally accepted that he has to present himself to the world but is still figuring out how. Practice day and Duval finishes up on the ninth, stoops for his golf ball and makes his way toward a knot of people who are politely applauding him.

"Good to see ya Dave."

"Good to see ya too, Sam. How you been?"

He works the rope line like a candidate in heat. How ya doin', he says, and how ya been and oh how's that swing of yours comin' along?

The Florida sun beats down mercilessly. He has taken that sun on his shoulders here in Ponte Vedra Beach more afternoons than he could possibly remember. If he has a key golfing memory which he can pluck from a troubled adolescence it is lying on his stomach on the grass just off the sixth green watching Seve Ballesteros and Jose-Maria Olazabal fool around with chip shots.

"Just one of those things which make you think that this is the life I want to have for myself and that's how good I want to be. I would come down here, and my dad - he would be a volunteer worker here - he'd usually be in the scorers' tent and I'd go off and watch a round or follow someone to the practice range, and I'd leave him a hat or something to get me autographs on."

Ten, maybe 12 years later he's signing kids' forearms in the sunlight. It's a happy scene. Duval is the local boy and they agree around here that, as he has made good, so too has he matured into his skin. It's a pleasure to be around him now.

"Lookin' good Dave. You been watching what you're eatin'?"

"Every little spoonful." Then the talk evaporates as if by a law of nature and for a minute, with his caddie yards ahead, and not knowing what else to say, Duval just stands there with the uncertain loop of a grin on his face. A man not sure what to do.

His eyes flicker about the place looking for a cue. Things are written on that face.

He ain't a natural. Small talk doesn't flow from him as from a faucet. He is fighting a battle against invisibility and finding it tough.

They beam back across the rope at him, this guy they've known since short pants and pimples days, and in their faces there is nothing but goodwill. They want him to play the star.

"Well, thank y'all," he says at last, "thank y'all for coming." And he turns and lopes away fiddling with his glove.

"Good guy," they say among themselves. "He looks really good."

"Oh David is so sweet," says a woman. "Deep down he is so sweet."

The Invisible Man. A couple of days before the big money business at Ponte Vedra begins Duval gets the last part of his prize from last year's tournament: he gets to coach the Coca Cola kids clinic in the afternoon warmth.

You can feel the prickles in him. This isn't like Bill Murray clowning around at Pebble Beach. This is coaching kids with adults watching, not just any adults but folks from home, people who know his father, Bob, and people who watched him grow up tall and skinny and solitary in this dusty place. He starts slow, pitching his words first to the adults as if they were his primary audience. He notices quickly that he is losing his pupils and after a brief look of confusion he immerses himself in their needs. He talks about coming out here and to other courses in Jacksonville Beach and playing on his own for hours on end just for the fun of it, and his eyes dance around to see if any of the eyes staring back at him share the same lonely needs. He liberates them from the burden of excellence, grants them fun.

There is enough boy in him still to allow us to see him scooting off on his own on a bicycle down through St John's County to Timuquana, where his father was the club pro. Every dusk would find David Duval whacking balls into the sunset. Golf was an escape from a home which was breaking under the weight of mourning for his dead brother, Brent. But this afternoon Duval paints the picture of his boyhood and it's nothing but blue skies. "You know," he says to his young audience, "the best fun you can have with a golf club is just trying to hit the ball as far as you can. And then walk after it and do it again. When I was your age I'd do that for days. Right here. I'd walk this place just walking after a ball trying to hit it as far as I could every time. That's what she's all about." "For Tiger it is anyways," drawls a voice from the adult gallery.

There are smirks and nudges and shaking heads, and if Duval has heard he gives no other sign than to replace his wraparound glasses, turn his back and tend to a kiddie's swing.

At 28 he's closing in on his best years, getting comfortable with his grip on a potential which he has lived with since he used to skin college kids for easy bucks in driving contests on these northeast Florida fairways. It's harder than he ever imagined, in that he could never have imagined it all in the face of a force of nature. In another era David Duval would be king of the hill by now. He knows that. This, after all, is the kid who insisted on being on the front of the Georgia Tech media guide when he arrived in the college as a freshman. Instead he lives in the backdraft of the boy wonder. Just look at the deal Duval got. Last year he got to Ponte Vedra beach riding a streak which had him winning one in every three tournaments he entered for 18 months. He was number one in the world. He was the first since Johnny Miller to win four tournaments before the Masters in a season. He'd carded a 59. Then . . .

"I think the form I had back then brought a response from Tiger. He stepped up a little, he wanted to be number one again and I guess I tired a little. You know, you have a streak when you sink everything and then you miss a few putts and miss out on a few wins and the form is running the other way."

Tiger Woods has made even Duval's top form look mildly anaemic. Woods hovers above the field on a cloud of such pure celebrity, such daunting excellence that all a golfer can hope for is that he won't choose this week to rain on the parade. Expectations have changed. Being good isn't good enough. You pick up Duval's CV and the blank space after the word Majors looks like a malignancy rather than an invitation. Duval has the misfortune to live in interesting times. Who was busy doing the second-best stuff when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel? Who did friends and family feel was every bit as good as Mozart if he'd only got the breaks? For $64,000 - who was David Duval? Need to call a friend?

Getting out of the shadows has been a lifetime's work. He hit college at the same time as Phil Mickelson, and the lefthander's white-bread image pinched the headlines for a few years.

Then, after a year on the Nike Tour, when he pulled his career out of the grave, he managed to lose PGA rookie of the year honours to Woody Austin. Now, Duval has been toiling up the mountainside while Tiger has been lowered onto the summit. Duval is grind. Woods is grace. Woods tosses the galleries back the emotions they crave. Duval doesn't let you see the whites of his eyes, never lets you share the bumpety bumpety of his pulse.

He's changing slowly. There was that little spasm of fist pumping at Brookline when he put away Jesper Parnevik, and there are the witty, self-deprecating advertisements running on American television where the running gag is people recognising his playing partner, the comedian Paul Reiser, but having no clue who Duval is. That's the nature of the struggle against invisibility in Golf Year 2000.

"It gives people a chance to see me in a way they haven't seen me before. And the advertisements were fun to do."

This week brings Duval to the cusp of a forlorn little anniversary of invisibility. One week before the Masters will mark a year since he last won a tournament, a long desert journey which apparently has had its impact on both body and soul. Duval is making the effort with his personality now, doing the little things which he would have regarded as phoney a season or two ago. And his body has changed, he has that ripped, Baywatch look stretching his black top.

Boy! A few years ago it was all so simple. You had a problem, you picked up the phone and you dialed 1-800-LEADBETTER. You got your kinks ironed, your yips soothed and had your ying reconciled with your yang and went back to the eternal inner game. Now to be a Tour golfer is to revolve around Tiger Woods like a troubled satellite. All the stuff about being the best little David Duval you can be is phooey. You need to bridge that gap; you need to be better than your best or you will be footnote.

The Invisible Man. Count the ways Tiger wins. Not just tournaments, but every way. The crowds, bigger and more bellicose and often more inebriated than any galleries golf has seen trample the fairways in his wake.

He communicates with his constituency Michael Jordan-style: not through interviews, but by selling them things, by bouncing back the emotion they feel, by creating his personality through the medium of advertising. A tournament is not a real tournament unless Tiger is playing in it.

And he dominates the mind set in the clubhouse and the press tent: every press conference no matter who you are involves answering questions about Tiger, every conversation whispers his name.

Count the ways Duval loses. Not just the tournaments (mind you, in the craved-for Masters he's sure had traumas: 1997 misses the cut and, big punchline, takes a nine; 1998 and he is sitting in a log cabin in Augusta watching Mark O'Meara nibble his three-shot lead like a fat termite. So Duval shot five under on the final day at Augusta and left in the same jacket he'd arrived in).

He loses every time somebody confronts him with a Tiger question, every time the greyness of his image is held up in a specimen jar beside that of Woods, every minute he spends thinking about Woods rather than about himself.

Woods has that down too, he knows how the psychological levee breaks. Woods can speak of the business of wiping out opponents, or, as he puts it, "stepping on necks", and he can get away with it. He can coldly remove all the personnel who were with him when he had his breakthrough Masters win because he is Tiger Woods and he operates on a different level. Duval is earthbound.

The comparison most often made is to Woods's good friend Michael Jordan, whose pomp was perhaps the last time that the gulf between best player in a sport and second best player seemed so wide. Jordan's competitiveness, like Woods's, was a thing to be celebrated and marvelled at. The only option for everyone else was to placate him. Duval speaks happily of his growing friendship with Tiger Woods, about time spent together last year and the galvanising effect of the Ryder Cup experience, etc. He sounds like Tom Ripley swooning over Dickie Greenleaf. One waits for the murderous intent to develop in a golf tournament.

Friendship with Tiger is a common theme on the Tour. Everybody loves/fears Tiger. There is the guilt of being white, of course. Not being friends with Woods is the sort of solecism at which sponsors shiver. An enmity with Tiger might draw into your gallery the sort of ugly souls who might prefer hoods to baseball hats. You thought it was ugly when Fat Jack began stalking Arnie Palmer? Wait till you see what happens when somebody injects a little animosity into the relationship with Woods. Woods is untouchable right now. So Duval speaks chirpily of his developing friendship with Woods. "Tiger knows I think he is a heck of a player.". . . "I would say he is one of the better friends I have.". . . "It's just getting stronger really, the relationship."

It is an odd phenomenon, subjugation by friendship. One that doesn't sit easily with Duval's established image as the unflappably focused king of cool, the guy who didn't care.

Does Duval believe in his heart that he is number one? That he can be number one again? Jack Nicklaus once asked that about Nick Faldo. Is Faldo number one now, Jack was asked? "Well, does he believe he's the best?" came the reply. When players speak so reverentially of Woods and begin working out obsessively to be more like Woods, perhaps they lose more than they gain.

"I don't know if it's like that anymore," says Duval. "Tiger has been so dominant you have to maintain a level of realism about where you stand. I believe I am approaching a level where I can play to my best. I believe I can win at that level. That's all.

"I mean, this is golf. You look at the things that happen. Sometimes you win a tournament where you think perhaps somebody else should have taken it. It was like that when I won the Bob Hope. Other times you come home and think you did enough to win but somebody blew past you.

"Getting into shape physically, say, isn't just a response to Tiger and how he hits the ball. I think if you look, I have changed my schedule a little this year. Last year I thought I went a little flatter as the season went on. I played a hell of a lot of golf early in the year. This year I hope I'll feel better and fresher later in the year. And it's part of being a professional athlete." When he speaks he looks you flat in the eye like a man making a good confession. Sometimes, with the bad wraparound shades and the thin hostile lip and the sun being unkind to his skin, he looks defiantly dorky out there, the golfing mayor of Dorktown. But in person there is something engaging about his quiet intelligence and his struggle to figure out a way to be visible again.

"I have the game for Augusta and I have the hunger for Augusta," he says when you ask him about the distraction of playing at home in Ponte Vedra so soon before the Masters. If he isn't asked about Woods at every turn he is harried about his prospects.

"That's all I can do. I like being here and it's easier since I won at home last year. To not be here would be to make too big a deal of it. When you look at your career and the sort of game you bring to it, well, for me winning the Masters is one of the goals I have set. Somebody asked me the other day if I would be surprised if in 10 years I hadn't won a Masters. I would be surprised. And disappointed."

Jacksonville - out along the Atlantic shore through the party strip at Jax Beach to Ponte Vedra Beach and the velvet greens of the gated community that lives there - this is David Duval's home surf and turf.

He has a surprisingly lingering affection for this place. Everyone on the Tour comes from some place, but this corner of 24/7 partying and late opening strip malls has a special claim on him.

When the Ryder Cup pay-for-play controversy died down with Duval's blood still smeared all over the pages of the papers, he donated one half of his $200,000 to Jacksonville to build soccer fields for kids, the other half went to Georgia Tech.

One December just a couple of years ago he was sitting at home in Florida watching a telethon toy drive for needy kids on a local station and donations were poor. He rang and without looking for mention told the toy people to come to his house in the morning and he would write a cheque for the shortfall.

He heads to Augusta National next week, to the cauldron where charity is for mugs. He'll have his game face back on by then, and although Americans love nothing so much as an overdog they might spare a few cheers for the only player who can turn this golfing decade into a rivalry instead of a procession.

"If I didn't think, deep down, that I could win," he says, "I don't think I'd go. To not be competitive, to truly believe that - well, that wouldn't be interesting to me."

And you nod and button your lips before they utter the words, "But what about Tiger?"