The future belongs to the Bashers ... with conditions 

	Bubba Watson is pointing the way to the Tour's future -- and it's not always a straight line. Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

PALM DESERT, Calif. -- My enduring image from last week's Sony Open wasn't Michelle Wie's smile, nor her frown, nor David Toms holding a trophy. It was an image on a computer screen.

Amongst the mess on my press room desk on Sunday night, in multi-colored pixels, was a glimpse of the PGA Tour's future -- or, some would claim, of the Apocalypse.

On the display of one of the Tour's ShotLink terminals was a diagram of the 18th hole of Waialae Country Club, overdrawn with a couple of red lines. The hole is basic enough: a 530-yard, par-five that doglegs hard left (almost 45 degrees) about 280 yards up the fairway. From about 270 to 300 yards are six bunkers, three on either side of the elbow.

The lines blew my mind. They depicted how one Bubba Watson, a native Floridian, PGA Tour rookie and scourge to course designers everywhere, had played the hole during Sunday's fourth round.

Judging by the graphics, Bubba, playing in the next-to-last group, took his tee ball directly over the heads of anyone who happened to be standing just left of the middle tees. (Not forward tees. Middle tees.) From there, the shot more or less followed the cart path, sailing over some trees and heading way, way left of the left-hand bunkers in the crick of the dogleg. At its maximum, it was about 80 yards left of the middle of the fairway.

Then the ball started coming back toward the fairway -- or rather, the fairway started coming back toward it. The ball finally made landfall almost 100 yards beyond the fairway's turn, a full 366 yards from its white peg launching pad.

From where the ball rested, Watson had 142 yards left. Little wedge, I'd think.

That was not, I'd also think, what Seth Raynor had in mind when he drew up the hole some who-knows-how-many years ago. I know, I could look it up, but what's the point? At this very moment some feckless contemporary architect is drawing up a hole just like it. It's not like anyone's learning any lessons here.

Bubba, also the author of a 398-yard pop at last week's Sony, was the tournament darling to some. To me, however, he was the introduction to what will be one of this season's most compelling subplots. I'll call it the Bashers vs. the Artists. Subtitle: In which the ever-growing ranks of PGA Tour dogleg-cutting, tree-flying, dimpled-ball bombardiers finally and forever vanquish the ever-shrinking number of short-hitting, fairway-dwelling, shot-shaping sissies.