The Masters, the most prestigious golf tournament in the country, tees off in just three days. If you truly love golf, of course, you will know this. You may not know it, though, if you happen to watch great gobs of sports television or listen to jock radio.

The reason is that Barry Bonds is not playing in the Masters. Bonds is way too busy doping up on steroids as he prepares to break Hank Aaron's career home run record. We all know this, sports lovers or not, from sports TV and jock radio. Or we know it from the great swell of Bonds chatter that gushes forth from them, engulfing all other media, including the evening news.

Most likely, the so-called Bonds scandal is about all we know. Bonds is today's demon of American sports media.

Just three years ago, Martha Burk, the irate feminist and head of the National Council of Women's Organizations, was the demon of American sports media as she led her protest over Augusta's refusal to allow women to join.

Burk brought huge attention to the club, of course, even as she led her protest from a ditch out of sight of the tournament. Burk was the story, not golf. Lordy, who could care about a mere game golf when Martha Burk was protesting from a nearby ditch? 

This is indeed a sad plight. Blame it on the ESPN-ization of sports. These days what's happening off the field gets much more attention. Scandal rules, or the hint of it, no longer the sport.

Complicit, of course, are not just the fans but the sports owners and managers. Augusta refused to stoop, choosing instead to drop the Masters sponsors until Burk went away, but that club is the exception. Normally, the effect of a mike in the face of a league or team official is to incite blabbermouthing of the lowest sort. Few dare dare to stand up for the dignity of their sport when the chance to hold forth is present.

As the baseball season opens, we speculate over whether Bonds will be suspended, reprimanded or exonerated. The man hasn't faced a pitch in months.

The biggest story of the NBA season was the new dress code, not the Detroit Pistons’ terrific record. Terrell Owens’ suspension got more air time than any other sports-related story in 2005.

And as New York Ranger Jaromir Jagr spins one of the best seasons in NHL history, he’s been overshadowed by an off-ice betting scandal involving Wayne Gretzky’s wife and doubts about whether the league can overcome the stigma of last year’s lockout.

Sports has become a pastime of personalities, and ESPN is to blame for much of it. With four networks and countless hours to fill, the network that shapes the nation’s sports agenda often locks onto sensational off-field stories in order to fill that time.

Certainly the rise of sports radio, where former jocks and wannabe-but-never-were jocks blather on, gushing innuendo, has also helped turn sports into a wasteland of gossip and grandstanding.

Recently, in an odd moment of sanity, John Kruk, an ESPN baseball analyst, expressed his hope that Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins would continue his record hitting streak to start the season. Said Kruk: “At least that would give us something to talk about besides steroids.” 

It would be comforting to believe there's a way we could save American sports from itself. We cannot. It's likely too late. The notion that sports heros should somehow serve as role models for American kids has become corrupted into the belief that one must win no matter what it might take, whether great gumption or something dripping from a needle. America's parents have allowed that to happen.

Parents should quit carping about the evils of Little League competitiveness and accept blame for their own failure to give their children better role models. 

We need Martha Burk to show us the way again, ranting from a ditch far from the game to show us how far we have drifted from what sports used to be in America.

Meanwhile, in sports ratings for the week ended March 26, CBS’s regional NCAA men’s basketball final between Florida and Villanova was the top-rated event of the week, averaging a 7.8 household rating, just a shade ahead of LSU’s upset of Duke.

The Division II national championship game, also on CBS, averaged a 1.3 household rating, even with last year’s rating. 

The average for NBC’s Sunday coverage of The Player’s Championship averaged a 2.9, up 32 percent over last year’s 2.2 Sunday average.