(EJ THREEWITT is a seasoned observer of the US PGA Tour scene.)

Although it was just a silly season event on a completely windless, not to say atmosphere-less, course at Sherman Oaks (sounds like the founding partner of a Sterling Cooper arch-rival in Mad Men), the last six holes of today's Chevron World Challenge may have been the best golf viewing of 2010.

Tiger Woods, as you might have heard, managed to lose after taking a four - four! - shot lead into the final day. Who'da thunk it?

His conqueror, Ulsterman Graeme McDowell, was amazingly gutsy (even if I find his glib and chippy mid-Atlantic Northern Ireland stuff - as though he may be the love child of Van Morrison and Jan Stephenson - a bit hard to take). But today his golf did the talking, as it has for most of this year.

Unfortunately for Tiger, his own golf spoke volumes, too.

After pegging Tiger back by the 13th (in truth, playing a bit less poorly than Eldrick, whose putting is suddenly Adam Scott-esque now when under the pump), McDowell held a one-shot lead at the par-three 17th, a downhiller to a basin green.

He hit a poor, but not terrible, shot left that went into knee-high fescue all of 20 feet from the hole on this course that has about as much width as the roads, storm water drains and other bits that seemingly could not be sold to the Californian real estate punters who swallowed the McMansions that ring it. Meanwhile, Tiger was safely on the green, 20 feet from the hole.

Nowhere to go within two club lengths, and not keen to take the steep cart path slalom in reverse back up to the tee, McDowell took a drop, up and over the hill to the left of the green, behind a tree at the back of ninth tee, some 40 yards away - and blind. Composing himself, he hit his chip to 12 feet - a wonderful shot. Tiger lagged (or maybe not - in truth most of hits putts look like lags these days) up close and McDowell then holed for one of the best fours on a par 3 you will ever see.

To the 18th now, all square, and Tiger stings a three-wood, leaving himself 170 yards to the flag. McDowell spanks a driver which leaves him 145 yards away.

From a hanging lie, Tiger fades an iron all over the pin. It finishes three feet away. So badly does he want his first win since losing out to a fire hydrant in November last year, he crouches down like a little girl as he watches the ball in flight and then unleashes all sorts of fist pumps when it lands. The crowd, of course, goes wild.

McDowell tugs his iron 15 feet left but it comes back off the upper tier to where the pin is at the front. He has a 20-foot, left to right putt that is slightly uphill. He eyes it, stalks it and .... holes it. The expression on Stevie Williams' face is almost worth all the agony we've endured watching him over the years do his bleached-toothy rain dances while high-fiving Tiger.

Tiger steps up and holes his to halve in birdie, but not before it gives the right side of the hole much more of a look than it needed to, but, more telling, not before every single person on the course considers the once unthinkable possibility that he might miss it.

Back to the 18th tee. Tiger puts his three-wood five feet from his still warm divot mark. McDowell - I'm using his surname because Graeme doesn't have quite the same ring to it as Tiger - tries a draw over the trees on the right, but it clips branches and settles in the first cut. A bit lucky.

But this time he's a long way back, 200 yards or so. He pings an iron to the same, left-and-safe side of the green as 15 minutes earlier, but this time is probably 25 feet away. Tiger hits a good second to about 15 feet, on a similar line.

McDowell circles his putt, which as well as being longer has a bit more left-to-right break than his earlier one. He steps up and ...... rolls it in again! There is lots of noise, but the screams and gasps have something of the quality of the audio from when Bobby Kennedy got shot.

No surprise (this being 2010 not 2000) what happens next. Tiger's putt is sort of there and thereabouts, but never going in. He is gracious enough through gritted teeth to congratulate his rival and manages even to have a platitudinous word with Roger Maltbie or Dottie Pepper (I forget which) on the way out.

Apart from the fact that his putting is but a patch on days of yore, he's now - to this trained eye - got two very distinct swing planes. There's the one which tries to compensate for his apparent loss of power - due to a lack of confidence in his knee maybe - which is very flat and drops mightily inside. It might go left; it could balloon right. Then there is the almost steeple-like upright 'control' swing, which led to an astonishing, almost complete, skinny from 170 yards, over the green on the 13th that led to a double bogey, and his surrendering of the lead for the last time.

No-one had ever hauled back a four-shot lead on Woods in the final round of a tournament — until McDowell's gallant effort today. No-one had seen Tiger putt quite as unconvincingly in the closing stages of a big tournament - until today. So here, writ large, was what many people had been saying all year: that Tiger had lost his lustre, and his fellow-players - once so cravenly timid in his company - were now no longer scared of him.

This is the reality that awaits Tiger as he prepares for his first full season on tour since 'the troubles' of 13 months ago. It could be a long Christmas break.