Where's the Tiger? Phil Mickelson can go it alone as the new season begins Photo: EPA

Over the next four days in San Diego the world’s second best golfer, gracing the stirringly-named Farmers Insurance Open with his presence, is likely to field questions almost exclusively about one gaping absence.

The deadline for committing to the US Tour start at Torrey Pines came and went without a word from Tiger Woods, who has won there seven times. That is all to the good for Mickelson, who can make his season’s debut unencumbered by the shadow of his nemesis, while being feted at every turn by crowds who go weak-kneed at his easy grin.

But after two months in which every jumped-up journeyman has postured as an expert in crisis management or sex addiction, will Mickelson be able to help himself? Memories of the slights from Woods, who icily ignored him during the final round of last year’s Masters, or from Woods’s caddie and sidekick, Steve “I can’t stand the -----” Williams, are seared upon his psyche.

Assuredly, Woods’s industrial-level philandering offers easy ammunition. Mere anticipation of the possible Mickelson broadsides has America’s press pack slavering. It was almost seven years ago when, with golf’s defining antipathy still in its infancy, 'Lefty’ accused his rival of having “inferior equipment”. He was talking about golf clubs.

Popular images of Woods and Mickelson have never been so polarised. In one corner lurks Woods, unshaven and swaddled in a towel, skulking among the outbuildings of a Mississippi rehab centre, while in the other stands Mickelson, beaming as if he has just stepped out of a toothpaste advert and bolstered by the respect earned from his public for supporting his wife and mother through breast cancer.

The last time the rivals stood together was in Shanghai, at the HSBC Champions event in November, when Mickelson faced down a Sunday charge from Woods and prevailed. Now that Mickelson is ensconced as the tour’s main draw, he can cement the ascendancy. He can resort to some shameless vote-winning tactics, too, if he likes.

American golfers have shown often enough at Ryder Cups that they do not shrink from using their families as publicity props — do not expect Amy Mickelson to be far from the 18th green in the very plausible event of victory this weekend.

More probable, though, is that Mickelson will handle any mention of Woods with silk rather than spite, delivering well-crafted words of sympathy and thus reminding his legions of fans why they like him so much more than the other guy. And where these two are concerned, it is inescapably a question of who you like: to embrace Mickelson is to admire club-twirling audacity verging on recklessness, while to side with Woods is to respect an awesome talent tempered by a sometimes extraordinary lack of grace.

The received wisdom is that Mickelson can seize upon this interregnum in the sport to usurp. Automatically he becomes the world’s de facto No 1, but such is the flair of his play that the qualification should not apply for long.

Woods would be loath to accept that. It is not easy to forget how his face creased in disgust when Mickelson, his Ryder Cup partner one miserable Michigan day in 2004, duck-hooked a drive nearly into the next state. They have never been paired in matchplay competition since, indeed have rarely even talked.

The PGA Tour money men are looking to Mickelson in the hope that he can enliven a calendar rendered frighteningly arid by the loss of Woods. They will look in vain. The bottom line at Torrey Pines has been enough to make them cry into their clubhouse cocktails: ticket sales down, hospitality tents fewer, and a title sponsor that came at a cut-price rate.

It used to be said of Joe Frazier that nobody cared about him until Muhammad Ali came along. A similar uncomfortable truth hovers over Mickelson. This amiable 39 year-old has a fervent following in the United States but he has never, unlike Woods, gone global. He is undeniably important to golf but he will never, unlike Woods, be the underpinning of the entire industry.