(FORTUNE Magazine) – With a Tiger in its tank, golf's PGA tour has become the great growth business of pro sports. Its TV package could swell to $1 billion when new four-year network deals are negotiated later this year, and why not? In February the final round of the Buick Invitational out-Nielsened the NBA All-Star game.

Yet those increased dollars have brought fierce conflict to a sport with a well-cultivated image of gentility. Increasingly, the PGA's players are at odds with the PGA's administrators about how to divide a pie now fairly bursting with dough. Whether it's journeymen agitating for expense money, stars grousing about Ryder Cup pay, or Tiger Woods blasting commissioner Tim Finchem for all sorts of perceived slights--as he did in public fashion following last season--that's the common denominator.

Now Woods is in the middle of the latest contretemps between the suits and the talent. It involves a technology called ShotLink that promises to allow golf fans to play virtual tournaments alongside their heroes. In current form, ShotLink combines input from satellites, lasers, and caddies to generate instant data on the length, lie, location, and club selection for each player's shot. The tour had planned to debut the technology during TV coverage of its tournaments this month and subsequently put the data on its Website.

There's just one human problem with this high-tech marvel: The caddies hate it. They see giving club-selection data to a PGA volunteer after each shot as interfering with their real job. In a lively meeting at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in February, some caddies told tour officials where they could put those clubs. Then they picked up a key ally in Woods, who says his choice of clubs is a competitive secret. There's a business agenda too. In a post-blast summit with Finchem last November, Woods discussed the conflict he saw between his own tigerwoods.com and the tour's site, pgatour.com. Says one Tiger-tour observer: "This brings up the Internet again. It's another tactic on his part to be anti-PGA and to flex his muscles."

Score one for Tiger and the caddies. ShotLink will launch this month without the club-selection element. But PGA officials will espouse ShotLink's virtues in meetings with players, including a special tete-a-tete with Tiger at his next scheduled tour event, the Bay Hill Invitational. Tour operations chief Harry Hughes says he's "confident" Woods will embrace ShotLink "when fully briefed."

Clearly, however, the PGA can't impose its will on players to the extent it once did. Its very financial prowess--as seen in a tripling of purses over the past five years, to 2001's $185 million--has created a richer and thus more independent breed of golfer. That's true in spades for the game's elite, whose earnings have skyrocketed as the PGA has instituted more high-stakes, limited-field tourneys like the World Golf Championship series, with $1 million first-place prizes. Create a star system, and guess what: The players act like stars.

Finchem acknowledges that his exploding business and his prickly superstar have made pro golf a whole new game but contends that opportunities far outweigh problems. "There are challenges, but what are the alternatives?" he asks. "I'll take the superstar, no doubt." But the money-driven conflicts threaten one of the PGA's great assets: the strife-free image that has set it apart from other sports. And the conflicts will continue as long as Woods has discontents. "It's not just for me," he told FORTUNE of his grievance airing. "It's for everybody."