The Tiger Chasm — the widening netherworld of golf tournaments that don’t attract much attention because Tiger Woods doesn’t play in them — has now swallowed even Tiger’s own tournament, this weekend’s AT&T National at Congressional Country Club in Washington, D.C.

Last year, most of the best PGA Tour players — including Woods, Phil Mickelson, Adam Scott, Vijay Singh, Geoff Ogilvy, and Justin Rose — played in the AT&T National.  With Tiger resting after recent knee surgery, none of those players are competing this year and only two top-10 player in the World Rankings — Steve Stricker and K.J. Choi — are bothering to show up, and only Jim Furyk (13), Trevor Immelman (14), Anthony Kim (20), Aaron Baddeley(22) and Andres Romero (24) among the top 25 are in the field.

To make matters worse, tournament title sponsor AT&T cannot be particularly happy about forking over the big bucks only to have USA Today run the headline above in its article on the tournament. (H/T Geoff Shackelford).

Welcome to the Tiger Chasm.

By the way, this Bloomberg.com article analyzes the probable technique used to repair Woods’ ACL during the surgery. Definitely worth a read.

7/08/08 Update: Thomas Bonk of the LA Times reports that the ratings for the Tiger-less AT&T National confirmed its entry into the Tiger Chasm:

In a word: bad. The overnight ratings for Sunday’s fourth round of the AT&T National on CBS were down 48%, from a 2.9 to a 1.5. The third-round overnight ratings were down 35%, from a 2.0 to a 1.3.