So, here we are: It’s playoff time on the PGA Tour. At last, we get to find out what all the fuss over this FedEx Cup thing is about, and why there’s a 12-story, three-dimensional billboard of a golf hole, mounted by FedEx to advertise the trophy, on Greenwich Street. Over the course of four playoff tournaments in the next four weeks, the world will learn if commissioner Tim Finchem’s plan for a more exciting finish to the season has worked, or if it was a lame attempt at retaining sports fans’ interest in golf past the PGA Championship – a challenge that, for several years, fall events like the 84 Lumber and Funai Classics frequently failed to meet.

For the past eight months, viewers have been fed a steady diet of FedEx this and FedEx that. The press has failed to respond as the Tour would have hoped, with most observers denouncing the new-look schedule and the points system used for determining who would make it to the playoffs as little more than cheap marketing tricks that may have netted the Tour $40 million — but which excited neither the players nor the television audience.

Had the idea caught on, much more would have been made of Shigeki Maruyama, Anders Hansen, and Jeff Overton’s rise from no-man’s-land into the top 144 of the points table (the top 144 get to tee it up at the Barclays tournament starting today at Westchester Country Club, 20 miles north of Manhattan) following good performances at the Wyndham Championship last week. Golf fans might have recognized this as a new era in golf without the Tour and the Golf Channel telling them it was ad nauseum.

And Tiger Woods would be at Westchester.

That the best player in the world decided to skip this first playoff event to rest after his exhausting win at Southern Hills two weeks ago proves — if indeed proof were needed — that he cares about the FedEx Cup about as much as he does the price of bread. For months, he spoke of his intention to play in all four playoff tournaments, and a commercial in which he whistled “Eye of the Tiger” was meant to convince us he really was up for it. The fact that he isn’t is hugely disappointing, not to say embarrassing, not only for Barclays, who moved into golf sponsorship largely because of Woods’s early commitment, but also the Tour which banked on Woods showing up on TV screens across the country for a whole month, resulting in a spike in ratings.

Woods’s people have, of course, calculated he can still win the FedEx Cup despite his non-appearance. After topping the regular season table with five wins, including a major, Woods goes into the playoffs as the top seed with 100,000 points. Vijay Singh, in second, is now just 1,000 behind, despite trailing by 11,445 before the points were reset. Jeff Gove, who fell six places after missing the cut at the Wyndham, secured the 144th spot and will start the playoffs with 84,500 points.

With 9,000 points going to the winner of the first three events, and 10,300 for the winner of the Tour Championship that ends on September 16th, the likelihood is there will be much movement up and down the list and, with the number of players remaining in the hunt getting cut each week — from 144, to 120, to 70, to 30 — there is, to be fair, much to be excited about. Woods’s absence is certainly a kick in the teeth. But the field for the Barclays includes 73 of the world’s top 100, and 18 of the top 20 (Paul Casey being the other absentee). And Woods’s not being here gives the players close behind him the chance to establish a decent lead going into next week’s Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston which should make that event and the following two triply exciting.

This week’s venue, Westchester’s Walter Travis-designed West course (opened in 1922) is the 11th on this year’s PGA Tour to measure less than 7,000 yards. Though relatively short, its par of 71 is always tough to match given the size of its greens, width of its fairways, and length of its rough.

No one in the field has fared as well here as Singh who, in fourteen starts, has 12 top-25 finishes and three wins, the most recent of which came last year, when he beat Adam Scott by two with a four-round total of 274, 10 under par. Other multiple winners at Westchester present this week are Ernie Els, who won what was then the Buick Classic in 1996 and 1997, and Sergio Garcia who won in 2001 and again in 2004 when he beat Rory Sabbatini and Padraig Harrington in a playoff.

During the first two rounds, Singh will be paired with Jim Furyk and Phil Mickelson, third and fourth on the points list respectively. Mickelson would normally be somewhere exotic with his wife and kids by now, utterly oblivious to what was going on in the game. This year, though, he wants to solidify the changes he has been making with Butch Harmon, especially now that his injured left wrist is all but healed.

If he, Singh, Garcia, a resurgent Els, or perhaps the Open Champion Harrington could win this week, it would do a lot to arouse public interest going into Boston next week. If Woods could then do the Tour a big favor by winning at least one of the three remaining tournaments and going on to become the first ever FedEx champion, the FedEx Cup could yet be seen as a success — and golf writers from here to Seattle will have some explaining to do. Whatever happens before the season is done, though, the success of this particular FedEx project is not going to happen overnight.

tonydear71@comcast.net