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Hold on a second, I think you go overboard. You're right that if not for Tiger the PGA would have low ratings and be even more boring, but you're way off base on the popularity of senior's and women's golf. Those two sports barely get blips on the ratings radar screen. The only thing that does worse than LPGA events on non-cable TV is women's basketball.

Now, track back to pre-Tiger. Senior tour was getting solidly better ratings than the main PGA in the mid-90s. With good reason if your gonna watch a golf game on TV which would you rather watch: Greg Norman choke again, or ChiChi doing that sword thing after a putt. And the LPGA was moving up (while the other PGA was plummeting, crossover point was coming). Remember there wasn't even a WNBA back then. Now in the Tiger world LPGA is back in the toilet and the senior tour is losing popularity. But that's not how things were in the couple years before Tiger showed up.