Office Space made popular the concept of The O Face.  I'll leave it to you to know, imagine, or otherwise research what that is.  But in 2009, Tiger Woods has suddenly and surprisingly reinvented the face Drew was going to show to the new girl from accounting.

Tiger has just not been clutch this year.  First, it was the letdown on the inward nine at Augusta National.  Closing in on the lead, Woods flubbed 17 and 18 to blow his chance at a fifth Masters.  He tried to convince everyone that he nearly won the thing with a Band-Aid swing, but he and all of us knew that was mere product placement rather than statement of fact.

At the US Open, Woods drew the wrong side of the draw at Bethpage.  Closing in during the Monday finale, he couldn't make a patented Tiger run and come back for the first time in a major championship.

Let's not even talk about Turnberry.  That was just awful.

Then, Tiger had us all convinced - even after a timid Saturday third round - that Hazeltine would triumphantly mark Tiger's completed comeback from knee surgery last year.  And then the combination of YE Yang playing well and Woods fading with the flat stick showed that Woods is indeed vulnerable this year.

Add Liberty National to the list of Woods' failings with the flat stick.  He had a seven or eight footer to tie eventual winner Heath Slocum and couldn't even find the lip of the cup.  Sure, Liberty National's greens may be more off-kilter than some of Dick Cheney's policy views, but we expect Woods to seize those kinds of moments. 

This year, he has let several pass him by, only to be captured by guys you would never anticipate.

Look, Tiger lives up to a self-imposed, impossible standard.  Win or else he has failed.  And with 70 Tour wins, his own standard has become that of the golfing public.  It just seems bizarre that Tiger is faltering with the flat stick when he has been long considered the guy to make a hypothetical 10 footer to save humanity from the crushing blow of this shrimp things from District 9.  Now, I'm kind of concerned about the fate of mankind in that situation.

Maybe the Mayan calendar is right and we are approaching endtimes in 2012.  Perhaps this is a sign.  Tiger Woods not jamming some slimy putt home to drive a crowd into a frenzy has to be in one of Nostradamus' predelictions for the end of the world.  Then again, it is very premature to hold the fate of the world in Woods' hands. 

After all, next season's major venues are very favorable for the world number one: Augusta, Pebble Beach, St. Andrew's, and Whistling Straits.  And Woods has potentially handicapped himself by insisting on playing with equipment in 2009 that is conforming to the 2010 standard.  With how often he visits the rough, he clearly has a handle on the limitations that the new equipment may pose on his peers next year.

So, instead of a Nostradamus Quatrain to predict the endtimes, perhaps we should use this one on ourselves:

Wrongly will they come to put the just one to death,
In public and in the middle extinguished:
So great a pestilence will come to arise in this place,
That the judges will be forced to flee.