No sooner had Tiger Woods jetted out of Melbourne on Sunday night than Australian Open organisers in Sydney announced they had secured veteran American Fred Couples as their 11th-hour replacement for Greg Norman in the national championship starting on December 3.

The 50-year-old Couples, whose hair is now not so much flecked with grey as overgrown by it, replacing the 54-year-old Norman, who has a bung shoulder. Well, whoopsie-do and break out the champagne.

Now, Couples will join compatriot, and perennial circus freak show, John Daly as the star turns in our national title at La Perouse. This, remember, was an event once referred to as the ‘fifth major'. When Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player regularly played and won the tournament. When Nicklaus, the game's greatest player, even won one year at Royal Hobart  Golf Club.

That is the esteem our national title was once held. The great players came from far and wide to compete in a tournament whose rich history went back to 1904 - making it significantly older than, say, the US Masters.

But those halcyon days only remind us how far we've fallen. And, as we saw Tiger's jet trail off over the Pacific and into the distance, Australian golf was confronted by its future - and it was not a pretty sight.

Sure, securing Tiger's signature for the Australian Masters was a major success - for the spectators, the state government, tournament sponsors, Channel Nine, the newspapers and, most of all, International Management Group.

For it was IMG who reaped the greatest windfall of all - pocketing the massive fee made available by Victorian Major Events. That went straight into the group's bottom line, because all the overheads associated with staging the tournament, including Woods' $3.3million appearance fee, had already been paid for by the sell-out crowds, corporate packages and Crown casino ‘gala' dinner.

So no-one did better out of the Tiger Show at Kingston Heath than the Cleveland-based behemoth, who made an absolute killing.

But that's to lose sight of the real issue which is: where to from here? Not just for the Australian Open, but the Masters as well. Both sets of tournament officials will be desperately thinking of strategies to parlay the success of the past week, and astonishing levels of interest in the game, into future gains. But it will be devilishly difficult.

IMG has committed to Victorian Major Events to producing three of the world's top 25 players in each of the next two Masters. That is a big ask. Apart from Woods, they managed just one - Geoff Ogilvy - this year.

And if the best we can do in the Open - again, apart from the 14th-ranked Ogilvy - is Couples, Daly and local talent such as Michael Sim, then we're along way short of top-25 material.

So, welcome to our bleak, post-Tiger world, which is threatening to be our very own Apocalypse Now.

But the next 12 months will tell us whether the Australian Masters extravaganza has been nothing more than a blip on the graph, a brief sign of life on Australian golf's cardiogram, or whether it has been the transfusion that leads to the game's long-term health.