WE NEED sport to be unpredictable. That is the point of it. But from time to time we also need to witness the inevitability of undisputed greatness. And when Tiger Woods walked off the 18th green at Augusta National on Saturday night with a nine stroke lead on the scoreboard and the rapturous noise of a packed gallery singing in his ears, it seemed clear that he was staking his claim to the kind of greatness that rewrites the rulebook and redefines the dimensions of a sport.

The tens of thousands who accompanied him through the four days of the 1997 US Masters crushed around the tees and greens, even lining the fairways five and six deep, watched his progress with stupefaction and glee, blessing their good fortune for providing them with a ticket to history in the making.

At 21, Woods was on the brink of becoming the youngest man to win the Masters, taking the record from Severiano Ballesteros, who was 23 when he won his first championship in 1980. This was his first "major" tournament as a professional, and he seemed on course to fulfil the wildest expectations of those who have watched his career since he first held a golf club at the age of three, and the many lavish predictions made for his future, both in sport and the wider world.

"This seems to be the next generation," said Tom Kite, competing in his 24th Masters. "He seems to have leapfrogged the rest of the field." But Woods' arrival does not really signal a changing of the guard. For a start, there are no other 21 year olds of similar quality on the horizon. And the intrinsic properties of his game - his length and accuracy off the tee the strategic cunning of his irons the silky touch with which he putts - are such that he appears to have shifted the entire game up a gear.

Some observers warn that Woods will not always find the going so easy, that on other days at other courses he will not be presented with conditions so clearly encouraging for him to take advantage of his unequalled power. And it is true that no one can play as Woods did this week every day of the year. But under as fierce an examination as any sportsman can have experienced, the young man performed with a calmness, a clarity of purpose and a technical precision that would have seemed almost inhuman had he not come into the interview room each evening and demonstrated his intelligence, modesty and charm.

Colin Montgomerie, the third of the four men privileged to share the course with Woods during the tournament, provided a series of responses that turned out to be typical of the way his fellow professionals reacted to Woods historic feat. When the Scot reached the spot where his drive had landed off the first tee on Saturday afternoon, he saw that he had outdriven Tiger Woods by a clear 10 yards. He turned to the gallery and grinned. "Get a picture of this," he ordered. He knew what was coming, and that he was powerless to prevent it.

Four hours later Montgomerie was in the interview room, explaining why it was not premature to assume that Woods was on his way to victory in his first major tournament as a professional. "We're all human beings here," he said, "and there's no human possibility that Tiger Woods is going to lose this tournament. No way."

Montgomerie was told that Tom Kite had sat in that seat a little while earlier and counselled reporters against giving Woods the victory before he had played the final round, remembering Greg Norman's collapse against Nick Faldo on the last day in 1996. "This is different," Montgomerie said. "This is very different. Faldo's not lying second, for a start. And Greg Norman is not Tiger Woods." His tone went further than his words. What he meant was that no one is Tiger Woods.

Poor Montgomerie. Four times a leader in the European Order of Merit but never the winner of a major in his 10 year pro career, when he finally got himself into a good position at Augusta it was to discover that this would be Woods year.

But at least Woods was good company. This was not a factor on Thursday, when his partner was Nick Faldo, who prefers to play the game in a bubble of his own thoughts. And Woods, too, was needing to look inside himself. After shooting a wayward 40 on the front nine holes, he knew that another round and a half like that would put him on the Friday night jet back home.

If any single stroke shaped this championship, it was his first round shot off the 10th tee. Needing to settle himself down, he left his driver in the bag and selected a conservative two iron. As the ball hummed down the hill into a perfect position, he was on his way to a score of 30 on the back nine, picking up a momentum that he sustained through the second and third rounds, when his opponents fell before him.

On Friday he and Paul Azinger played together the way every game should be played. On the 13th fairway Azinger drew the crowd's attention to the fact that he had outdriven Woods by a handful of yards. "The only trouble," he added, "is that I took a driver and he hit a three wood." Woods returned the compliment on the tee at the short 16th, when he turned to applaud his opponent's shot to within a couple of feet of the pin. As they walked up the 17th fairway together, they had an animated conversation about posture. Later Azinger was to describe him as "the first player to win the Masters who doesn't shave".

Jack Nicklaus, whose swift rise to pre eminence in the early Sixties is the most popular reference point for the emergence of Woods, recognised the quality and remembered how it felt to be playing a wedge to the green when his competitors were needing long irons. "I was sort of laughing and snickering and saying, `Boy, this is a tough golf course, huh?'" In 1965, when he shot a record 271 for the tournament, his third round 64 was "like walking down Main Street. It was nothing. And Tiger has the ability to do that. That's why this young man is so special. If he's playing well, the golf course becomes nothing."

Most tellingly, Nicklaus reminded his listeners of the words with which the late, Bobby Jones, the tournament's cofounder, had welcomed his own arrival on the scene. "Mr Nicklaus," Jones had said in wonder, "is playing a game with which I am not familiar."

"It's a shame Bob Jones isn't here," Nicklaus said on Saturday. "He could have saved the superlatives for this young man. Because he's certainly playing a game we're not familiar with."

In a week when America is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut in the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers, thereby becoming the first black man to play major league baseball, Woods dominated a tournament in which no black appeared until 1975, when Lee Elder broke through a barrier that had existed since the inauguration of the Masters in 1934.

Charlie Sifford, who failed in his battles to persuade the club to invite him to compete during the Sixties, issued a statement this week in which he welcomed Woods' success. "It would be my dream come true for him to win on Sunday," he said. "I tried so hard to get the opportunity to play there. I am not angry about it. The people at Augusta had their rules and I can respect that. I stood up for what was right and I am not ashamed of it.

Woods was asked what he thought they would be feeling as they watched him. "I think they'll probably be going through several emotions," he said.

Even today at Augusta National, most of the black faces are serving lunch to the green blazered members in the clubhouse or emptying the litter bins along the fairways. Perhaps this weekend's events will help hasten the slow process of practical, rather than theoretical, equalisation of opportunity.

"In my estimation," Woods said on the eve of the final round, anticipating the effect of his victory, "it's going to open a lot of doors, a lot of opportunities, and draw a lot of people into golf who never thought of playing the game. I think it's going to do a lot for the game as far as minority golf is concerned."