I love this Michael Jordan guy, but he ain't no Tiger Woods.

There is something about an athlete in his prime. There is something, for a fan, about being able to say he saw an athlete at the very peak of things. You think back to Jordan's two three-ring incarnations with the Chicago Bulls, and you realize -- as so many people realized even at the time -- that you were watching one of sports' greatest performers in the very most significant moments of his professional life.

Which is to say: Tiger Woods, right now.

So if the question today is about room at the top, let me suggest that it is a single chair. Jordan back in a basketball uniform will be the curiosity, perhaps the goodwill ambassador, the sort of rolling, season-long parade down Main. He'll be mostly good for the NBA and for sports, because he'll be mostly good in action, because Jordan couldn't live with himself any other way.

But when people find themselves in desperate need of a blow-me-away sports experience, when they wake up in 2002 wanting to walk in the land of an athletic giant, they will be searching for Woods with their remotes and their mouses and their ticket-buying power. They'll want to see Woods, because Woods is the Michael Jordan of golf, even on a day when the real article is in uniform and available for their perusal.

What can you say? Nobody's bigger than Tiger.

You'll occasionally hear the comment that it's a shame Jordan and Woods couldn't have been fully, globally dominant at the same time, but the truth is that there had to be a Jordan before there could be a Woods. When you see Tiger today, you see the confluence of superior athletic talent, apparent personal accessibility, worthy role-modeling and the most savvy and far-reaching marketing and promotional jock campaign in history.

And that was Michael Jordan in the day, of course. It was Jordan who crossed into most of those territories first. It was Jordan who came of age as a superstar in the same moment as so many other crucial factors. Mike was in place for the transformation of Nike into a global endorsement phenomenon. His growing skill at manipulating his public image opened the door to an astonishing line of companies, projects, charities, multimedia opportunities -- the man simply exploded into the national, and international, consciousness.

Tiger Woods would have been a brilliant golfer no matter what, but the rest, absent Jordan as a forebear, gets a little murky. Many people still can't believe the effect that Woods' popularity has had on golf in general, because golf was for so long considered to be only on the fringe of the major, massive sports in America.

If Tiger had come first, if the sport of excellence had been golf rather than basketball, would he have been able to so revolutionize the mass-marketing strategies of sports?

Hard to say. What we know without doubt is that Jordan indeed did all that. Jordan wasn't the first great athlete in modern history, and he wasn't the first with endorsement power, wasn't the first with a great smile, wasn't the first to use success in sports as a path to success in business -- but he was the first to do all of this on a scale that dwarfed anything ever seen in his chosen field. He was the first to make it so big.

It didn't diminish his excellence. If anything, Jordan rose to the challenge of his own building mythology, used it almost as fuel. He got better, and then better still.

Which is to say: Tiger Woods, right now.

All you need to know about Woods' elite status in sports is that one of the biggest stories of the year was the fact he didn't win a major golf championship after The Masters in April. Handy rule of thumb: When you reach the point at which your perceived failures actually generate more ink and international consternation than your routinely comprehensive successes, you have achieved some sort of bizarre standing in your field.

That was Jordan at one point, of course, with his championships and then his first retirement and then his return and then the new set of trophies. That was Jordan at the point where anything less than runaway-train success was to be judged as inadequate.

That, also, was then. This is now: Jordan playing basketball for the Washington Wizards, the same man but a different athlete, playing at a different spot on the timeline. People will enjoy watching him and will hope for the best, which is not at all the same as saying that they will come to the event absolutely sure of his dominance or that they will leave bitterly disappointed if he does not rule from start to finish.

No, the person for whom the sports world reserves that judgment is Tiger Woods, because he is the transcendent athlete in his prime. He is the Michael Jordan of sports today. Not even Jordan will alter that.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.