It is futile trying to pick a winner among these thoroughbreds

don’t know what’s better for golf, but from my opinion it’s pretty exciting to beat this many players who have such confidence. Guys are learning, getting stronger.

“Over the next 15, 20 years you will see a group of 10 to 12 guys having a lot of different competitions with each other as they come down the stretch. It’s different from one person being the guy to beat.”

The ever-ebullient Spieth was, as David Cameron famously told Tony Blair, the future once. When, in 2015, he became the first man since Woods to win the Masters and US Open back-to-back, Adam Scott acclaimed him as the next Tiger. Fate, however, can be a cruel mistress. Ever since he deposited two balls in Rae’s Creek to toss away a four-stroke Masters lead at last year, he has toiled to regain his lustre.

The notion that he, Day and Rory Mcilroy would form the most fearsome triumvirate since Cream at the Royal Albert Hall lost currency fast. Dustin Johnson,

The days when Woods pulverised his opponents by force of aura alone have passed

blessed off the tee with the power of a lumberjack, pressed home his own credentials as the game’s supreme force by winning three tournaments in a row, but he fell down the stairs of his rented home in Augusta and has not been the same since.

Golf is awash with the fearlessness of youth. Thomas Pieters, the stand-out performer of Europe’s ill-starred Ryder Cup at Hazeltine with four points out of five, is a stripling at 24.

Tommy Fleetwood, the punkish local lad whose picture is pasted upon every lamppost in Southport, is 26. Brooks Koepka, positively superannuated at 27, is another poster-boy for the next wave, having used his thunderously long hitting to win last month’s US Open at Erin Hills by four shots. Even on the closing holes, as the size of the stakes dawned, he did not blink.

Koepka served a tough apprenticeship, schlepping out to the farthest reaches of the European Challenge Tour and sleeping in the back of a car in Kazakhstan. Aptly for one whose closest friend on tour is the emotional flat-liner Johnson, Koepka, who could reduce most holes at Birkdale to drives and wedges thanks to biceps like Popeye’s, appears above any semblance of nerves. He predicted with some certainty here that there were plenty more where he came from.

“No one in contention at Erin Hills – Rickie, Justin [Thomas], Hideki [Matsuyama] – had won a major, but I think everyone in this room knows they are going to win one,” he said. “It’s only a question of when, not if. Even at the college level, you see some who are going to win majors. You just know it.”

The calibre of the competition hardly daunts them, either. Of the gang of seven who have joined the major club since August 2015, six have had a previous champion as runner-up.

This is one of golf ’s greatest egalitarian stretches, which, come the end of the season, could match the record of nine consecutive first-time victories, starting with Graeme Mcdowell’s at the US Open in 2010 and ending with Webb Simpson’s at the Olympic Club two years later.

So many of the fresh breed of champions grew up with aspirations of emulating Woods, to the point where none of them can accomplish his level of outright supremacy.

From 1998 to 2003, Woods did not miss a single cut on the PGA Tour, a run of 142 tournaments. It remains one of the most astounding benchmarks in sport, let alone golf, considering that the previous record belonged to Byron Nelson, with 113.

There is not a player in this generation who can hold a candle to such consistency. Mcilroy, once breathlessly hyped as a talent capable of winning 20 majors, has missed four cuts just in the past six weeks.

Woods’s otherworldly gift was not that he simply put together his annus mirabilis in 2000, with four straight majors to create the ‘Tiger Slam’, but that he sustained the same level for several more years.

Spieth, who conceded ruefully that he would always be held to the standard of 2015, could only marvel at the feat. “Experiencing a year like that, it’s just takes a lot out of you,” he reflected. “It’s very hard to do. You need a lot of things to go right at the right times.”

The era of Woods was one of benevolent tyranny, where thousands would follow him for his pre-dawn Open practice rounds in anticipation of the crushing he would soon mete out.

Now, in his sorrowful absence, a major championship week derives its thrill from its sheer uncertainty, from the churning mix of players jostling to be next in line.