by Robert Lusetich

Win a major and it's a good year, fail to win one and it's not.

But after arriving Wednesday afternoon at Firestone for this week's Bridgestone Invitational, Woods introduced shades of gray to those old absolutes.

If he doesn't win next week's PGA Championship at Hazeltine in Minnesota — the last chance at a major this year — Woods won't write off his comeback year. After all, it comes with an asterisk — his return from knee reconstruction surgery.

The 33-year-old with 14 majors — four behind Jack Nicklaus' record — has been shut out of one of the sport's glittering prizes only three times in his professional career — while rebuilding his swing in 1998 under Butch Harmon and then during a second rebuild with Hank Haney in 2003 and '04.

"This year I think just being able to come back and play and be successful again has been a tremendous step in the right direction," Woods said when asked if his old win-a-major-or-else litmus test still applied.

"If you would have asked me at the beginning of the year, before I even played, whether I'd have four wins by now, I couldn't see it, because walking 18 holes was going to be a task.

"Looking back on it now, playing the Match Play (in Tucson in February), where I was physically then and where I'm at now is just night and day. It was hard to kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel.

"To win, and not only win but be as consistent as I've been the entire year coming back, that's one of the things I'm probably most proud of."

Woods also said he wouldn't press too much at Hazeltine — he was certainly guilty of that at the year's first three majors — because, he said, majors reward patience, not desperation.

"The thing is you just have to go out there and play," he said. "The major championships are set up so that you can't ... be very aggressive and go out there and try to make birdies on every hole like you can at most Tour events. You have to plod your way along and get them when you can."

If Woods didn't build enough confidence after last week's victory at Warwick Hills, he gets to prepare for the year's final major by playing a course he's dominated like no other.

Woods has six wins in nine trips to the Bridgestone Invitational, the best winning percentage of his career on any course, including his beloved Torrey Pines in Southern California, where he's won seven times in 12 starts.

"I've always loved coming here," he said of Firestone's famed South layout. "And obviously playing against such a great field like this right before a major championship certainly helps."

Woods left Michigan on Sunday night for his home in Orlando and spent two days working on the range at Isleworth in search of a cure for the right-side misses which have plagued him. He sounded like a man who'd found something.

"It was nice to get some work in and get back to how I was playing (last) Friday," he said of the swing he had at Warwick Hills when he shot 63. "Basically I went back to some of that stuff."

Woods has for years been fighting the instinct to drop his head during the swing — the cause of most of his problems — and has had varying success at finding mechanisms to, at the least, restrict that drop.

He reiterated something he'd said in Grand Blanc on Sunday, that what had given him the most confidence in winning the final Buick Open was that even when his long game wasn't good, he found a way to score.

"I didn't hit all the fairways but if you go back and analyze how I played, I missed it in the correct spots every time," he said.

"And that's something I didn't do prior to that. I was missing them all in bad spots, short-siding it or missing it so I had a bad angle into the green. When you do that, scores pile up. You make doubles, you make bogeys, you get on runs when you make bogeys and you can't give yourself an opportunity to get it back."

He admitted that Turnberry, where he missed the cut at a major for only the second time as a professional, was the worst example of missing in places where he had no chance to save par.

"I had the opportunity to miss the ball in the right spots and I didn't. Compounding that with the wind just made it look even worse," he said.

Woods is facing a stretch where he could play seven of the next 10 weeks. He said he prepared his schedule earlier in the year in anticipation of what he termed "a lot of golf" late in the year.

"I played very sparingly to get myself into this position physically so I didn't have any setbacks, so physically I could handle playing this much," he said.

"After what I went through last year and then the rehab coming back, yeah, you could play a lot prior to the Masters, prior to the Open, whatever it is, (but) I didn't want to be physically unable to compete at a high level for all these events coming up."

Meanwhile, British Open champion Stewart Cink weighed into the debate about whether Woods' success can be attributed to a lack of competition from competitors or whether he's simply the greatest golfer in history.

"I personally believe that Tiger is the best that's ever played," Cink said Wednesday. "The reason that no one has been good enough to challenge him in many majors is because no one has ever been as good as he is."