As I meandered and plootered around the city centre the other day, with all the shuffling, aimless, brain-dead momentum of a zombie in a cheap B-movie, your correspondent was slightly taken aback when an apparently trendy, with-it, hip-and-happening young dude approached me and politely asked, “do you have the time please?”

In this whiz-bang era of gadgets, gizmos, thingymebobs and whit-do-you-call-thems, I assumed that most folk had digital clocks and internet search engines implanted into their retinas for 24-hour, online convenience. The idea, therefore, of someone enquiring as to the time of day felt as archaic as a fellow beckoning me hither and saying, “can you hold my horse poor knave while I roll up the portcullis?”

It was all a bit of a step back in time. Which is probably something Tiger Woods is wishing he could do. Alas, nobody has invented such a contraption yet and we all remain potential fodder for the tentacles of the ageing process and its associated ravages as we slowly become entangled in its withering embrace. After yet another setback in a long list of depressingly familiar setbacks - the latest, wincing withdrawal came at last week’s Dubai Desert Classic - we can only wonder where Tiger goes from here?

At the moment, he seems to be on a road to nowhere. “He looks like the oldest 41-year-old man in the history of the game,” shrieked one hysterical US television pundit with a sweeping statement of quite jowl-shuddering proportions. Woods has never attracted calm reason, after all.

Watching him through fingers over the eyes continues to be a sorry spectacle. It’s a bit like reflecting on a thrusting, hip-shoogling Elvis in his majesty and then seeing the bloated, ailing King mumbling through a series of wonky Vegas ballads in a jumpsuit. In a golfing sense, the parallels with the sad decline of the late, great Seve Ballesteros are stark. Plagued by a perennially bad back, the swash-buckling Spaniard endured a wretched erosion of his physical powers which, in turn, cruelly affected his ability and led to a sombre succession of excruciatingly inept displays.

We’ve not seen the best of Tiger Woods for a long time but we’ve certainly glimpsed the worst of him. Once again everyone is now asking “have we seen the last of him?” There’s certainly not a lot of positive stuff to cling to is there? For an intensely driven champion, with the ferocious, defiant single mindedness that comes with being a born winner, Woods must be finding this reduced reality in the game almost impossible to tolerate while the continued stripping away of all that made him powerful will be equally as difficult to accept. But Woods goes on and on, lurching from one false dawn to the next while the physical and mental torment continues.

At what point does he call it a day? And can he actually bring himself to call it a day? When you’ve been the best and it’s all you’ve ever known, it can be hard to let it go. Not that I’m speaking from experience, of course. Intrigued, fascinated golf fans – and the media too - can’t let it go either. Where the Woods circus goes, the masses follow. There were record crowds in Dubai as the roll-up, roll-up Tiger effect showed no sign of fizzling out even though these increasingly calamitous cameo appearances continue to provoke more ghoulish curiosity than golfing awe and wonderment.

Despite the age-defying cavortings of, say, Mick Jagger or Roger Daltrey, the show can’t go on for ever. Even those mighty old princes of darkness, Black Sabbath, finally called it a day at the weekend. Woods’s woes have been so macabre recently, the band’s bat-chomping frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, could have croaked out a demonic lyric about him. After all, Woods was No 666 in the world last week. After 50 years, the bold Ozzy declared that Sabbath had finally “run its course.” Not for the first time, the golfing world is left wondering if Tiger’s race is run too?

AND ANOTHER THING

From falling stars to a rising son of Japan. Hideki Matsuyama’s successful defence of the Waste Management Phoenix Open title continued the kind of purposeful and profitable streak that Woods used to conjure in his pomp. Five wins, two seconds and a fifth in his last 10 events has made him the hottest player on the planet. It’s 40 years now since Chako Higuchi became Japan’s first, and as yet only, major winner when she won the LPGA Championship in 1977. Having finished seventh and fifth in his last two outings at the Masters, perhaps another year ending in lucky number seven will provide a historic major moment for Matsuyama.