Woods irritated veterans by saying that second place stinks, and by saying he didn’t have his “A” game when he won in Dallas.

But he almost always backed it up.

“I think it was that, 'Let’s see what he can do out here’ attitude,” Tom Lehman said. “I don’t think everybody expected this, but I think everybody expected something great.”

The numbers are astounding beyond the 52 victories, 12 majors and $63 million in earnings.

Woods holds the scoring record to par in all four majors, and he is the only player to win all four professional majors in a row. He went seven years without missing a cut (142 events), and he has won 26 percent of his PGA Tour starts.

“All that is very impressive,” Lehman said. “But the thing that impresses me the most is that he comes to play every round, every day of every tournament every year. There is never an ’off’ switch. The result is what we see now.”

Woods took a few minutes last week to reflect on his first day as a professional, which didn’t go entirely as planned. Nike had a splashy ad campaign — “Hello, world” — that it wanted to launch the day before the Greater Milwaukee Open. Woods didn’t want to wait, so a publicist at IMG called the PGA Tour and dictated a brief statement.

“This is confirm that, as of now, I am a professional golfer.”

Woods said he didn’t want to set foot at Brown Deer Park Golf Club as someone he wasn’t.

“Why delay it?” he said last week. “I didn’t need to try to play the media along. It was a fact. I was turning pro.”

As he sat next to the Bridgestone Invitational trophy — his 11th title in the World Golf Championships — tournament director Tom Strong watched from the side of the room. Strong had been the tournament director in Milwaukee when he offered Woods a sponsor’s exemption for his professional debut.

“We had a room that was about 20-by-40 (feet) for interviews and there were over 300 people there,” Strong said. “We had ’Duck Soup’ coming to play for the pro-am party. We ended up using that stage for Tiger’s press conference.”

Slide show   Week in Sports Pictures Pain on the skating rink, flying high on the hardwood, upsets on the football field, and more. more photos

So began a decade of dominance that is defined by any set of numbers — 52 wins, 12 majors, 142 consecutive cuts, the No. 1 ranking for 406 weeks, official victories in 12 countries.

Thomas Bjorn is the only guy to play all four rounds with Woods and beat him, winning the Dubai Desert Classic in 2001.

He defines Woods’ decade by an aura.

“It’s difficult to put words on the guy. We’ve been saying, ’How good is going to be? Is he going to be better than Jack?’ And we’ve talked about that so many times,” Bjorn said. “But it’s the presence he shows. That’s what gets to the other players. He has such an ability to stand on a tee, and you feel him around you.

“We don’t get scared of him any more. He’s been out here 10 years, and we know the guy very well. But you’re aware of him.”

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