Now, it’s our turn. The Tiger Watch is on.

The Players used to be a rather normal PGA Tour event. A bigger purse, a better field, a little more seriousness. Not your Greater Jacksonville Open, for sure, but not the Masters, either. The show came to town, played out its run, and moved on to points west. A nice time was had by all, and most was forgotten along with the hangovers.

Now, no telling. The Tiger Woods saga is about to hit.

You can or can’t blame Tiger. Sure, he started all this hoorah, and it would have been easy to avoid — Commish Tim Finchem just needed to tell Tiger that he didn’t owe him anything, and that he could stay home.

But he didn’t, and here we go.

No one will talk about the security around the man of the moment but let’s look at last week’s event in Charlotte. Three security guards at all times ... on the putting green and range. Putting and practicing, and he needed there toughs! On each fairway, there were a half-dozen guys with things in the ears. On the property: what was described as “every available cop in Mecklenburg County.”

This was at Quail Hollow, an Augusta National-wannabe that has a very controlled environment. The club wants a major championship badly and its Clifford Roberts-wannabe, a guy named Johnny Harris, would see that dream going poof if there was an incident.

Nothing happened, of course, and Quail Hollow can continue its path to, probably, the 2017 PGA Championship, and can continue dreaming of the day when nearby Pinehurst tires of the U.S. Open and might come a few hours west.

Tiger cut Quail’s costs by leaving after 36 holes and now, after another undoubtedly uneasy weekend at home in Orlando, comes to Jacksonville.

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But wait! Before we go on, a few updates:

• The biggest Charlotte loser may have been Tiger’s porn slut, Joslyn James, who booked a weekend show at a Charlotte strip club and didn’t draw much of a crowd.

• Rachel Uchitel, the first name that popped out of Tiger’s datebook, broke silence — she reportedly got $2 million to forget that she ever saw Tiger — and announced plans for a reality TV show titled “Romancing Rachel.”

• A video game is in the works titled “Tiger Woods Affair Grand Tour 2010.”

• A New York Times story on an English soccer player’s philandering said he harbored “Woodsian ambitions,” a phrase that may catch on for eternity.

• James told an entertainment website that she really thought Tiger loved her.

• James’s real name is Veronica Siwik-Daniels.

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And now, back to The Players:

Let us not get this thing too far out of proportion. It has gotten that way, for sure, but that has been no fault of ours. You and me? Just golf fans wanting to see the world’s best players do what they do best (Though in Tiger’s case, there may be a competitor to golf.)

We want to check out this new “fun venue” (their words, not ours) called The Turn and see if brings back the old Island Club atmosphere, which went the way of too much noise, and hope that it edges toward the really old Swingers’ Tent, which went the way of Tom Weiskopf and Doug Sanders for big-time after-golf hell raising.

We want to forget that Henrik Stenson won last year (beating — yippee! — Ian Poulter, John Mallinger and Kevin Na) and root for the star powers to return to the top.

We want to get our beers, sit in the sun and watch from our favorite spots.

We want people to quit bitching about having to pay for parking. Look, the Jacksonville Sharks — the Sharks! — charge you to park. And this ain’t minor league Arena football.

We’re tired of reading about (at last count) Rachel, Jaimee, Kalika, Jamie No. 2, Mindy, Cori, Holly, Joslyn/Victoria, Loredana, Julie, Theresa, Devon and Raychel.

Dammit, we want to see Tiger Woods play golf. We understand that the PGA Tour wants an incident-free tournament and that’s why there also will be some tough-looking guys with things in their ears, but that’s a small price to pay to see what the world’s best does coming off a bad tournament (and a probable worse home weekend.)

Tiger playing golf. That’s all we want. Not asking much, is it?



— Fred Seely is editor of Golf News.