The New York Times ran an editorial calling on Tiger Woods to stay home in April and skip the Masters, noting that a “tournament without Mr. Woods would send a powerful message that discrimination isn’t good for the golfing business.”

Selena Roberts, a sportswriter for The New York Times, set the stage for the editorial five days earlier last month with a stinging column directed toward Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson: “Listen, you old coot,” Roberts wrote. “You cannot win this fight.”

In the weeks that have followed The New York Times’ unusual editorial, Roberts’ blast and several other stories on the same issue, we’ve now learned two more New York Times’ sportswriters, Harvey Araton and Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson, had columns killed because they disagreed with the editorial page opinion of the newspaper.

Here at the Los Angeles Times, of course, it’s pretty obvious the newspaper agrees with everything I have written for the past three years because it has never stopped me from scribbling a single word.

We do have several editors here, however, who used to work for The New York Times, and while that certainly makes them a little odd, they seem to be fitting in all right. In fact our managing editor used to work for The New York Times, and I can tell you from personal experience he was nice enough once to say hello to me.

Let’s be honest, though, you’ve got to worry about people who come from a newspaper with the credo: “All the news that’s fit to print so long as it agrees with our editorial position.”

Fortunately there remains an air of independence here between the editorial page and sports.

You probably don’t even know this, or remember, but the Los Angeles Times, like The New York Times, weighed in on the Augusta flap on the Editorial Pages weeks ago, even working in a hackneyed reference to a “sand trap” in the first paragraph.

I agreed with every word of the editorial because there was no mention of Tiger Woods, and really no compelling point to the editorial, which is all this brouhaha about getting a rich woman into a private Georgia club really deserves.

Tiger Woods is only a golfer, and I don’t really care what he has to say beyond getting me 10 yards longer off the tee and farther away from Dwyre. Tiger is a nice young man, very intelligent, quite witty, and I find watching him on a Sunday afternoon with a five-stroke lead trying to make it 10 over the other dullards on the golf tour about as much viewing fun as I can have.

For some reason, though, The New York Times would like to make him more than that, christening him a crusader. And how odd is that ” the newspaper then doing an abrupt about-face and shutting up its own writers, who are paid and trained to be the crusaders?

How long before Mr. Woods is being asked to fix the problems in Iraq?

For the record, The Associated Press reported Wednesday that The New York Times is saying now the sports columns were not killed because they disagreed with the newspaper’s editorial page, but because they failed to meet newsroom standards.

Just an off day, the newspaper would like you to believe, for the Pulitzer Prize winner.