When Tiger Woods announced last Friday that he would not be showing up for the first event of the new PGA Tour season, the Mercedes-Benz Championship starting today at the Kapalua Resort’s Plantation Course on the island of Maui, one could sense the collective tuts, shrugs, and dejected expulsion of breath emanating from Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., not to mention the Orlando studios of the Golf Channel that was no doubt counting on Woods to get its 15-year, $3 billion coverage of the PGA Tour off to a flying start.

This is a big year for the PGA Tour with the launch of the FedEx Cup — its attempt to repackage the game along the lines of NASCAR with a season-long points system culminating in a four-week series of playoffs in August and September. The plan is to maintain viewers’ interest throughout a season that in recent years has peaked and troughed like an Enron executive’s lie-detector test. But with Woods, Phil Mickelson — he hasn’t played there since 2001 — and 10 more players from the world’s top 20 absent from the 34-man field, the year’s opening salvos, and the Cup’s grand entrance, will be rather more subdued than officials would have liked.

The Mercedes-Benz Championship brings the previous year’s winners to Hawaii for an elite event for which Woods has been eligible for every year since 1997. He has skipped it three of the last five years, however, this time because his preparation was cut short following a skiing vacation in Colorado.

“I considered playing in the Mercedes-Benz Championship, the official launch of the new FedEx Cup, but I just haven’t been able to prepare,” Woods said last week on his Web site alongside a story announcing that his wife, Elin, was pregnant with the couple’s first child. “I usually spend at least one week working on my game before a tournament but have been unable to do that this year.”

Woods, of course, will be going for his seventh official victory on the tour when he does begin his season in three weeks’ time at the Buick Invitational in California. There he will attempt to get one step closer to Byron Nelson’s 1945 record of 11 straight victories — a storyline that all but the most committed golf fans are looking forward to — rather than the Mercedes.

This week’s events are not without significance, however. Not only will the winner be the first ever leader of a FedEx Cup race, picking up 4,500 points (see “The FedEx Cup Explained” below), but Stuart Appleby will be going for his fourth straight win at an event that has earned him three new Mercedes automobiles and $3.2 million since 2004. An increasingly accomplished player who has worked his way into the outer fringes of the game’s elite, Appleby will be trying to become the first player to win the same tournament in four successive years since Tiger Woods monopolized the Bay Hill Invitational from 2000 to 2003. The 35-year-old Aussie will obviously be tough to beat at Kapalua but the best player in the field, world no. 2 Jim Furyk, will be looking to dethrone the King of Maui and also put a small dent in Woods’s incredible 11.53 lead at the top of the world rankings. Adam Scott will want to start 2007 the way he ended 2006, and the still fit and hungry Vijay Singh will want to prove those who say his best golf is behind him are speaking prematurely.

If Woods is to be beaten to the FedEx Cup’s $10 million top prize, then Singh could actually be the man most likely to do it, as he has such a strong record at the four playoff events where the number of points available will double.

For the time being, though, all eyes (well, those belonging to stalwart fans or people who just never tire of seeing pictures of Hawaii while it’s cold/raining/snowing outside) are on Maui, where Appleby will be trying to divert headline writers’ attention away from Tiger Woods, at least for a few days.

FedEx Cup Explained

Points are allocated at all 40 events on the PGA Tour calendar — 36 during the regular season and the four playoffs. Twenty-five thousand points will be available at most regular season events with everyone in the top 70 with ties earning points on a sliding scale; 4,500 to the winner, 650 for 10th place, down to 50 for 70th.

At the majors and the Players Championship, 27,500 points will be awarded with 4,950 going to the winner. World Golf Championship events offer 26,250 points, with the winner banking 4,725. Opposite-field events (the Mayakoba Golf Classic opposite the WGC World Matchplay in February, The US Bank Championship opposite the British Open in July, and the Reno-Tahoe Open opposite the WGC Bridgestone Invitational in August) will offer 12,500 points, 2,250 going to the winner.

After the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C., August 13–16, the top 144 players on the points list make it through to the playoffs: the Barclays Classic at Westchester GC in New York, the Deutsche Bank Championship at the TPC of Boston, the BMW Championship (formerly the Cialis Western Open) at Cog Hill near Chicago, and the Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta.

Points will be reset before the playoffs — the player leading the standings will be allocated 100,000, the runner-up 99,000, and the man in 144th position gets 84,700. The small gaps between reset points should prevent a situation in which the regular season’s top points earner finds himself so far ahead of the pack that he needn’t play all the play-off tournaments. Indeed, it is highly likely he, and everyone else with designs on the trophy and that $10 million payout, will need to play in all four. Tournament fields will decrease in size from 144 players at the Barclays to 120 at the Deutsche Bank to 70 at the BMW Championship to 30 at the Tour Championship.

Fifty thousand points will be available at each playoff tournament with 9,000 going to the winner of the first three weeks and 10,300 at the Tour Championship. The player with the most points after the Tour Championship wins the first FedEx Cup and banks the largest bonus in the history of the sport.