The PGA Tour is at Bay Hill this week, The Players Championship next week and Augusta in four weeks, which would make this Tiger Time. Last year he won all three events and he's now going for his third straight at Bay Hill, which is right in his own backyard.

A year ago at this time there was a lot of talk about Woods being in a slump because he hadn’t won in eight starts. He hasn’t won in eight starts now, but after the way he put an end to the slump talk last year, no one’s using the "S" word these days.

"The people who wrote that don’t understand golf," Woods said after his pro-am round Tuesday. "It was aggravating because I had to answer the question all the time. I don’t think five wins a year [his average over the last four seasons] is a slump."

Not so aggravating was buddy Charles Barkley’s smack in Sports Illustrated about Augusta National’s supposed "racist" anti-Tiger motivation in changing the course.

"That’s just Charles being Charles," said Woods, who likes the Masters’ new length and demands on driving accuracy. "99.9% of the time you don’t know what he’s going to say."

Woods, who went to Stanford for three years and still goes to Cardinal games when he can, knows this much: "If we can get past the [Western Kentucky] Hilltoppers, I think we get Kansas in the second round. We’ve got some work to do."

T.R. Reinman is a contributor to ESPN The Magazine.