Augusta, Ga. ? Tiger Woods didn’t have to hit a single shot for the show to begin at this year’s Masters.

As Woods played his final practice round Wednesday at soggy Augusta National, attention shifted from his bid for an unprecedented third straight green jacket to a cramped room that was filled with them.

More than 60 men, all wearing the most coveted symbol in golf, flanked chairman Hootie Johnson in a stubborn defense of the club’s all-male membership.

“If I drop dead this second, our position will not change on this issue,” the 72-year-old Johnson said. “It’s not my issue alone.”

Still, it’s an issue that already has made this a Masters unlike any other.

Sure, the azaleas and dogwoods are bursting with colors. Arnold Palmer still strolls the fairways, carried along by a legion of fans. And Woods, as always, is the heavy favorite.

But beyond the gates of Augusta National lurks a foreign sensation — controversy.

About a half-mile down the street from Magnolia Lane, local officials have set aside a 5.1-acre grassy lot for demonstrations — and not just for Martha Burk and her National Council of Women’s Organizations, who have pressured the club for the last nine months to add its first female member.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition plan to protest with Burk.

They will be joined by two groups protesting Burk, another protesting Jackson, a one-man faction of the Ku Klux Klan supporting Augusta National and a man who calls his group “People Against Ridiculous Protests.”

Johnson seemed oblivious to it all.

Anyone who thought Augusta National might cave in to pressure and allow a woman to wear a green jacket was met — again — by utter defiance during a 22-minute news conference.

“There may well come a time when we include women as members of our club, and that remains true,” he said. “However, I want to emphasize that we have no timetable, and our membership is very comfortable with our present status.”

Johnson cut loose his four sponsors to keep them out of the fray, leading to the first commercial-free broadcast of a sporting event on network television. He said the Masters could survive “indefinitely” without TV money.