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By Jim Litke, AP Sports Columnist

NEW YORK (AP) -- Even fatherhood is going to change Tiger Woods only so much.

So stop reading, Phil Mickelson, and you, too, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh and Retief Goosen and do something more productive with your time, like practice. You won't find much farther down the page to be encouraged about, anyway.

Bookies in Vegas are already laying 2-to-1 odds that his kid will be beating yours 20 years from now, whether it's on a course or a court, inside a diamond or a boardroom.

Those changes, though, will be more interesting to the rest of us, if only because they'll make Woods that little bit easier to relate to. Not just because he'll be advertising minivans soon instead of luxe sedans, or because he'll rush to the first tee some days with milk stains smeared across one shoulder of his impeccably tailored polo.

Like lots of other people, a baby at home will translate into more distractions, more demands on his time and tugging at his heartstrings. And there's little reason to think Woods plans to stop at one. In December, 2004, soon after marrying former model and nanny Elin Nordegren, he was asked about starting a family.

"It will be a life change, there's no doubt about that," Woods replied. "For me it will be bigger than it will for Elin, just because she's had siblings. I've never had siblings before. I've been an only child, so for me to grow up with someone else, it will be different, because I've never had that. "When we have, obviously, hopefully, more than one, then it will be really difficult, because I've never dealt with that," he added. "I've only dealt with just myself."

Yet, consider this: Of all Tiger's considerable gifts and acquired skills, the most otherworldly is his ability to focus the second he slips a few golf tees in his pocket. And that is not about to change, ever.

The first clue Woods could wrap himself in an impenetrable cocoon came on the final Sunday of the 1997 Masters, when he walked out the backdoor of Augusta's clubhouse staring at the first tee and didn't even blink, let alone nod, in the direction of a petite woman in a fire-engine red dress who screamed "Go Tiger!" in his ear. And she was his mom, Kultida.

The latest clue came at the end of last summer's British Open. Anybody who watched the tears literally pour out of Woods after he tapped in the winning putt had to marvel at how he carried himself the previous four hours.

Woods never displayed so much as a flicker of emotion when Chris DiMarco closed to within one shot with five holes left, nor when he responded with three straight birdies to beat DiMarco back, a stretch of golf Woods knew would have thrilled the father he'd buried not quite three months earlier. Somehow, Tiger kept both the gathering sadness and satisfaction at arm's length until the task was completed.

That was another thing that Earl Woods would have loved. He spent 20 years in the military, did two tours of Vietnam, trained with the Green Berets and waged psychological warfare on young Tiger nearly every time the two ventured out on the golf course. Earl jangled coins during his son's backswing or rolled golf balls across his line just as Tiger was about to putt. And those were some of the gentler tactics.

"I wanted to make sure," Earl once said about the unorthodox golf lessons, "that he'd never run into anybody who was tougher mentally than he was."

So it will be interesting, too, to see how Tiger raises his own cub. Does he or she play golf?

"I'll certainly introduce it to him," Woods said during that same 2004 interview. "Hopefully it will take."

How well it takes remains to be seen. There's a long history of sons following their fathers into the game but only Young Tom Morris, who won four majors between 1868 and 1872, was an unqualified success. Julius Boros, Dave Stockton and Al Geiberger are among those whose sons won a PGA Tour event, The sons of greats Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller, on the other hand, couldn't hold onto their tour cards long enough to make a name for themselves.

The more immediate concern, though, is how impending fatherhood will affect Woods' schedule. And the guide there, as in so much else of Tiger's career, is to look at how Nicklaus balanced competing demands.

The first of Jack's five kids was born a few months after he joined the tour in 1961. That means he won despite flying back and forth from tournaments to watch their games, that he kept winning after losing the most important influence in his life, his father, Charley, in 1970, and won some more while trying to grow the Golden Bear brand into a golf course design and equipment empire.

Woods got married and won two majors the following year. He lost his father, and after missing the cut at the U.S. Open, won two majors and six tournaments in a row. Woods hasn't revealed a due date, but a good guess is sometime between the U.S. and British Opens. He just might celebrate by winning both.

When Amy Mickelson was expecting the couple's first child around the same time in 1999, Phil showed up at Pinehurst for the U.S. Open wearing a beeper. Even though he had yet to win his first major, Mickelson swore he'd fly the several thousand miles back to Scottsdale, Ariz., the second it went off, even if he was leading by five strokes at the time.

Now all Mickelson has to do is loan the beeper to Tiger, then wait for the right moment.

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.