By MIKE LOPRESTI
Gannett News Service

So Vijay Singh is now No. 1 in golf. Just like USC is No. 1 in football, and "Hero" is No. 1 at the box office and McDonald's is No. 1 in cheeseburgers.

The last three are easy to measure.

As for golf ... well ... Vijay Singh is on top of the world, passing Tiger Woods with the magic number of 12.72. Whatever that means. Golfers are normally judged by strokes, and have you ever seen 0.72 of a putt?

It's the Official World Golf Ranking, a posh sounding methodology that counts finishes in tournaments over the past two years, and adds in factors such as strength of the fields. We have here the description of the guidelines from the PGA Tour guide, and be forewarned, they make the BCS system read like "Fun with Dick and Jane."

Such as ... "Any applicable two-year time period is divided into eight 13-week segments. Ranking points in each player's record will be reduced in value by one-eighth at the conclusion of each segment, thereby cutting the sudden and sometimes dramatic impact of the reduction of one-half that previously occurred at the one and two-year anniversaries of events in which players earn points."

Get your headphones at the desk for English translation.

Bottom line: Singh has won six times this season, including the PGA. Woods has won once, and finished in the top 16 of only one major.

So who needed a computer to crunch numbers and tell us the better golfer at the moment?

Singh finally convinced the computer over the weekend that he had unseated Woods by winning the Deutsche Bank Championship. Which, by the way, was in Massachusetts, not Munich.

"It was a golf tournament to me," Singh said in his press conference when it was over. "It wasn't about the ranking."

In any case, no computer is needed to understand that Singh's ascension is something of a remarkable plot twist.

While the United States and Europe contend for the Ryder Cup and golf supremacy next week, the game's top player is from Fiji. And he is the only man who, under "special interests" in his PGA biography, lists snooker and cricket.

He is also no spring chicken. Singh is 41 and seems to be just hitting stride, a gritty golfaholic not quite cut from the same cosmetic mold as most of the stars in the game.

Woods' reign at No. 1 lasted 264 weeks. He has been golf's idea of the Beatles. This will add zest to the persistent speculation. Is he in a slump or not? Has he slipped or not?

Golf has been, and always will be, about winning tournaments. Not rankings. Still, time will tell if being No. 2 on a computer sheet lights a fire under Woods.

It is still Tiger's world. He gets the ratings, the crowds, the headlines, and the attention.

Singh gets the ranking. And more to the point lately, a lot of victory paychecks.

On Monday, he raised no "we're No. 1" finger. Instead, he delivered a thesis on Coping with Tiger 101.

"He's a very intimidating player. He hits shots that most people can't hit," Singh said. "But it depends on how you play. If you're playing against Tiger and you're not playing well and he's playing great, you look like a fool. But ... if I'm playing my best I can beat anybody, and that's the way I think."

"I have never been one who is intimidated by Tiger. But then again ... he hits shots that you think, wow, that's the way all of us should play."

So Singh is 12.72, Woods 12.27, Ernie Els 10.99. What does it mean? If it stays that way, Els won't make the Orange Bowl.