Pumping irons

TODAY IS THE final round of the PGA Championship, and it's likely that Tiger Woods will still be in contention for golf's final major tournament of the year. Should you tune in to CBS's coverage, you'll hear the commentators dissect Woods's putting and discuss the beauty of his swing off the tee. Nothing unusual there. But if Woods's recent appearances are any indication, those same commentators will also be marveling at Woods's physique, saying something to the effect of "It's no wonder he can drive that ball 375 yards. He's so ripped!" Never mind that scores of players have driven the ball farther, Woods's physicality is suddenly that captivating.

This is new for a sport that has never put much emphasis on the body. Golf has never ostensibly been a game of athleticism. No one runs. No one is tackled. If there is sweating, it must be hot. It's been said that golf is what real athletes do to relax. However wrongly, golf in America has always been more associated with leisure-class recreation than with sport per se.

But Woods's rigorous attention to fitness appears to be changing the game, and, incidentally, forcing serious observers and casual fans to ask whether muscularity matters. This, in a sense, leads directly to the debate about exactly what kind of sport golf is. Not one of conventional athleticism. Do you really need abs to win? Can golf survive muscles?

"No golfer needs the kind of muscles you're talking about," says Rick Martino, the PGA of America's helpful and stern director of instruction. "What Woods and other players are doing is improving their fitness to improve their game. Golf is still a skill sport, and fitness is an important factor, but by no means is it the determining factor. You have to be skilled."

Regardless, all this body talk represents a cultural shift in the game. Not only does it separate the sport from its country club reputation, it also reroutes it away from its mystical and spiritual dimensions, which admittedly sometimes verge on mumbo jumbo. There is a list of great authors (John Updike and John McPhee, for instance) who've written with poetic eloquence about golf. After baseball, golf is the sport with the most metaphors for life. It's also the sport that purports to bring man closer to his own soul. Michael Murphy's beloved book "The Kingdom of Shivas Irons" is at the high end of the mystical spectrum. A little further down is the self-help guru Deepak Chopra's "Golf for Enlightenment," about, in part, a young Bostonian who lets his emotions get in the way of his game. Joseph Parent put the mythos even more succinctly with his book titled "Zen Golf."

In this realm, golf is a quest for serenity and inner peace ("You and the ball are one"). Find your game, and find your self. Wisdom used to be the key to success. Now, in the Woods era, you can just go to the gym.

As the players' bodies chip away at the metaphysical power of golf, they are also changing its specifics. Golf is often called a game of length, and since Woods's rise to prominence, the courses have been made longer and more challenging to play. Increased distances require greater drives, putting more pressure on other players to be that much stronger, fitter, and more powerful. The process of devising more rigorous courses has even acquired a nickname: "Tiger-proofing."

Tiger Woods stands about 6-foot-1. When he arrived on the tour in the mid 1990s, his build was unremarkable. Woods recently told Men's Fitness that he had always worked out, but it wasn't until 2000 that he was able to keep muscle on. In the past few years, he and his trainer Keith Kleven have managed to add about 30 pounds of muscle to his frame. During those same years, guys like Vijay Singh have also emphasized fitness, but Woods has always seemed to be the sport's pace setter.

When he turned pro, he brought flashy corporate sponsorship with him. Nike signed him, and almost overnight a stodgy sport had an edge of youth and cool -- some action, too, at least from a marketing standpoint. The so-called Michael Jordan of golf had signed with the company Jordan elevated to the pop-culture stratosphere.

Whatever you thought of golf as a sport, Woods's association with Nike imbued the game with new athletic imagery. The company wasn't just selling gloves and shoes and balls and caps. As a matter of synergy, it was selling a sport to a class of people and a generation of kids who had never taken it seriously. It would never again be just your grandfather's game, which maybe is what has some of the sport's purists and elder statesmen so up in arms.

Of course, talking about power and muscles worries purists for other reasons: it inevitably leads to chatter about performance-enhancing drugs, which might help players recover faster from the grind of practice and play. Last month, on the eve of the British Open, 71-year-old golf great Gary Player said at a news conference that one pro confessed to him that he'd used steroids, adding, cryptically, that "somebody else told me something I also promised I wouldn't tell, that verified others had done it."

Player suggested that at least 10 pro players were doping. "The greatest thing that the R&A, the USGA, and the PGA can do is have tests at random. It's absolutely essential that we do that." Testing is something Woods has come out in favor of. But, like other players on the PGA tour, he says he hasn't seen anything out of the ordinary. There was a joking quote from him in USA Today: "If anything, probably out here, it would be testing positive for maybe being hung over a little bit."

For a preview of how Woods and physicality could further change golf, you need look no further than women's tennis, where Venus and Serena Williams helped transform the sport into a power game that sent poor Martina Hingis, who lived at the top of the ranking for more than 200 weeks, into temporary retirement. The tennis commentator Mary Carillo has a nickname for the women's game since the sisters' arrival 10 years ago: "big-babe tennis." It's an awkward term that downplays the Williamses' court sense, but you see what she's getting at.

Golf being a different sport, it's tough to imagine the physical strength of Tiger Woods putting anybody out of business. But maybe a bulked up Woods will burrow further into some players' heads. Maybe Woods, along with Adam Scott and Camilo Villegas, who are also in extremely good shape, will take a cue from tennis muscle man Rafael Nadal and show up on courses in sleeveless shirts.

Of course, as a famously ornery game, golf also offers a rebuke to the new cult of physicality: flagrantly lumpy players still win. As of this writing, John Daly, proudly one of the least fit men in the history of professional sports, is not far off the lead for the PGA Championship. And in June, playing the US Open at Oakmont, it was the old golf body that won. It was an exciting tournament that came down to Woods and Angel Cabrera. While the commentators remarked almost ceaselessly on Woods's cut, fatless build, the burly Cabrera, an Argentine, engagingly lumbered from hole to hole puffing on cigarettes. If you happened to tune in with no knowledge of Woods's competition, the contrast was comic -- no, comedic. It was the sport facing off from two physical extremes, and the fitter-than-ever guy (not to mention the perfectly fit Jim Furyk, who tied Woods for second) had been outplayed by someone with, at best, an average body.

But as Samuel Bryant, the vice president of the United States Golf Teachers Federation in Port St. Lucie, Fla., put it, "Cabrera might have won that one event, but in the long view if you're comparing him to Woods, Woods has won more tournaments and will continue to. Week in and week out, swing after swing, Woods is perfecting his body to go the distance."

Wesley Morris is a Globe film critic. E-mail wmorris@globe.com