For a select few, the airline of choice is TWA _ Tiger Woods Airlines.

The world's No. 1 player has been flying private for most of his professional career, and most recently flew home from Australia with his mother, three close friends and his office manager. On rare occasions, Woods has flown commercial to Dubai on Emirates Airlines.

But when was the last time he flew in coach class?

"On a really long flight?" Woods replied a few months ago while in Shanghai. "Probably in college."

That took him back to his freshman year at Stanford. He flew to Paris for the World Amateur Team Championship in 1994 when he played alongside Todd Demsey, Allen Doyle and John Harris.

"That was back when they still had smoking sections in the very back of the plane for international flights," Woods said. "I was in the row right in front of the smoking section. I asked the flight attendant if I could lay down on the floor. The rules were a little different back then. Then I asked her if I could get something to drink. She asked me how old I was, and I told her I was 18."

He laughed, choosing not to finish the story.

Woods can be anywhere at the moment, although various reports have put him in Florida and Arizona, on a plane to Sweden and on a boat to the Bahamas, even though his yacht is still docked.

While he has not played since Nov. 15 in Australia, the competition has been as fierce as ever _ not against Phil Mickelson or any other player, rather the paparazzi. Since driving his SUV into a tree outside his Florida home, setting off an explosive and incredible sex scandal that dominated news in December, Woods has yet to be seen.

Some say the first picture of him could bring as much as $100,000. Photographers have staked out his yacht in south Florida and his home near Orlando. One place he probably won't be found _ at the back of a commercial airliner.

The search for Tiger capped off a bizarre month at the end of a year that featured more than just birdies and bogeys. These are some of the tales from the tour:

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Mark Calcavecchia doesn't pay much attention to life outside of golf. Heck, it took him seven times playing Turnberry before he noticed that stone monument atop a hill next to the 12th green that commemorates the lost airmen during two World Wars.

Calcavecchia was at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am when he was told the story about a writer who inquired about Tiger Woods' pro-am group and introduced himself to Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! The writer not only asked Yang what he did for a living, he followed up by asking what he did at Yahoo!

Calcavecchia smiled and looked away.