This headline was on ESPN.com: "Tiger Shoots 74 at Players.'' The subject was Tiger Woods, tied for 100th, and not either of the co-leaders, Ian Poulter or Martin Laird? Why, of course.

We're not selling results in journalism, and ESPN, for better or worse, is journalism in the 21st Century. We're selling celebrity.

As if we didn't always.

That adage "There's No ‘i' in team''? Technically correct. But there is an "i'' in popularity and involvement and recognition. Also in television. And most of all in interest, which throughout history never can be discounted.

The world paid attention - another word with an "i" - to Mozart and Beethoven, if not necessarily to music, to Picasso and Monet, if not necessarily to art. People who wouldn't know an aria from a coda bought scalper's tickets to the opera only because Pavarotti was on the marquee.

It is all about names, and it always has been. The execs at ESPN don't make many mistakes. So if it isn't about Tiger - we are a long way from Rory or Rickie taking over from Woods - it's about LeBron.

Or Kobe. Or Danica. Or Carmelo. Or three competitors who for now probably still require a last name for clear identification: Andrew Luck, Albert Pujols and Tim Tebow.

What that headline about Woods shooting 74, nine shots behind the guys tied for first, told us was what the starmakers in Hollywood in the early part of the 20th Century showed us: "It ain't what, it's who."

What Tiger showed the networks was that after the fall, after the revelations, after the missed cuts, after the swing changes, he's still No. 1.

Not in the rankings. Not in the money standings. In the ability to get people to watch golf on television. He does well, ratings soar, as at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, as at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. He does poorly or doesn't enter, ratings sink.

It was the late Jim Murray who summed it up beautifully one morning in 1980 after NBC-TV had this wild-hare idea to show an NFL game - it was Jets-Dolphins - without announcers.

"You see, Hollywood knew people didn't go to the theater to see fine acting,'' Murray wrote. "People went to see stars, because they read about them in the newspapers, fan magazines, gossip columns. They talked about them on the air and video. You identified with them.

"Same thing with sports. Suddenly you were at bat in the World Series. Suddenly you were the quarterback in the Super Bowl. ... One hundred million people would argue all winter whether he should have passed, run, place-kicked, handed off, kept or whatever. They were conditioned to it by the media. ... Television didn't understand it like the movie moguls did. They thought the play was the thing ..."

Not any longer. Television now has a great understanding. This is the entertainment business, not an attempt to educate.

Thirty-two years later, we get Danica Patrick to a fare-thee-well, even though she's 59th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings and never has won a race.

Thirty-two-years later, we get hourly doses of Tebow, who spoke Thursday after a New York Jets spring workout.

Thirty-two years later, we get what Woods failed to accomplish the first round of The Players Championship rather than what Poulter and Laird did accomplish.

It isn't Tiger's fault. Well, in a way it is. Just as it is the PGA Tour's fault.

Tiger so dominated his sport, so changed his sport, bringing in a new audience, bringing record TV contracts from the networks, that other than to the purists, the golf aficionados, he was a majority of one.

You mean there are 155 men besides Tiger playing? Really?

All right, through the seasons there were acknowledgments of Phil Mickelson and some references to Vijay Singh and Davis Love III. And the Golf Channel, aiming at individuals who actually followed the game as religiously as others followed the Green Bay Packers, would offer details about a Zach Johnson.

But ESPN always has focused on the stars. LeBron James gets more air time than David Letterman, speaking of a star. Josh Hamilton's game of four home runs and a double didn't go unmentioned, certainly, but it's still the network featuring the rich and very famous. And the Yankees, Patriots and Jets.

Hollywood in the 1940s knew how to fill the movie theaters. ESPN in the 2000s knows how to fill the screen and its website.

Tiger will be their man until his presence doesn't resonate, until fans stop watching and reading and until columnists stop ruminating about ESPN's headlines. Very smart, those execs.