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By Melanie Hauser
PGATOUR.com Correspondent

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- The answer to your first question is he's fine.

The flinching. The grimacing. The tread-gently-on-that-one-knee walk you saw Sunday down the stretch at the Wachovia Championship? Nothing really.

Just nagging soreness. Just the fact that he's, well, 31.

Tiger Woods is looking for his second PLAYERS win. (WireImage)

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The world's best players spent Tuesday at THE PLAYERS Stadium Course getting in some practice before THE PLAYERS Championship begins on Thursday. PGATOUR.com's T.J. Auclair was there with them  • Complete story,  click here • Photo Gallery,  click here

Tiger smiled. "Getting older, bro.''

And dare we say getting better?

No, he didn't win the Masters. Get over that. Stuff happens. Weeks don't go the way we expect or the way he wants.

But he did win at Wachovia. Not in a runaway, but it was a win.

So look at the bottom line. Coming into THE PLAYERS Championship Tiger Woods has won 9 of his last 13 events.

That's why we put him on another level. That's why he's back to being an untouchable No. 1 with a bullet.

That's why the gap between him and No. 2 Jim Furyk (440.70) is greater than the gap between Furyk and Scott Henderson, who's 1000th in the world (409.36)

It's a detail lost on him. He doesn't pay attention to those kind of talk-show, throw-up-the-graphics-and-boggle-our-minds numbers. With him the number is wins. Period.

All of which brings us to this week where, unbelievably, he's only won once. In 2001. The year after he came down the stretch with Hal Sutton, whose "Be the right club today" shot at the 72nd hole was just that. Beat Tiger by a shot.

But that loss to Sutton was then. This is now. Ten majors, fortysomething wins and only six years later.

It's still the best field of the year; the non-major tournament the players most want to win. But it's at a new time. On a renovated course. With Augusta in his rear-view mirror instead of two weeks away and the U.S. Open down the road.

"I think it had, as you said, its own niche, but I think that this can only help it because we always had that huge gap between The Masters and the U.S. Open, and now THE PLAYERS is a wonderful fit to bridge the gap between The Masters and the U.S. Open,'' Tiger said. "This is, as we all look at the field each and every year, probably the best field if not the second best, depending on the PGA field, what they have that year.''

And no, his focus hasn't changed.

"Same,'' he said. "I come here to win.''

If there is a course where Tiger isn't at home, we'd be amazed. This one -- the Pete Dye course vilified by the players when the tournament first moved here in 1982 -- is fit for No. 1. And even Henderson. If he were here.

"Anyone can win here,'' he said. "That's the beauty of this golf course is that when you get with all the angles, and Pete likes to funnel things down, we're all playing from about the same spot. There really is no advantage to taking out driver and bombing it down there because of obviously the trouble but also how everything pitches in.''

They did add a new Sub Aire drainage system, about 200 yards of length, a mile worth of bulkhead, bermuda fairways and new, faster putting surface. Tiger got his first look at it Tuesday when he played a practice round with Craig Perks.

"It looks very different,'' he said. "It's faster, it's drier. The fairways are obviously Bermuda now and so are the greens. So it is playing totally different.

And yes, it's better. "We don't have the balls picking up mud like we used to,'' Tiger said. "These are not the greens you want to have mud on your ball firing into the greens.''

But there is one thing Tiger still shakes his head about -- the 17th hole. Not the hole itself, mind you, but the placement of it.

"I just think it's a wonderful hole, but I don't agree with it being the 17th or 71st hole of a championship because I just think that it is a little gimmicky in that sense,'' he said. "I think it's a great eighth hole or another part of the golf course.''

And he's not a fan of the peninsula green at the 17th at Wachovia.

"A lot of guys weren't too happy with that, either. If they asked (designer Tom) Fazio and all of our opinions on it, and everyone basically said, "Start over.' ''

Ah, the life of the top player in the world. He plays 18 and then weighs in on everything from playing with Perks, who he played with two rounds with last week, to the grind on his irons to the younger generation. So listen in:

On why, going into the U.S. Open, there won't be a major winner under the age of 30: "Well, it's not easy to win. Look at the fields, how much deeper they are now. And because the fields are so much deeper, it's harder for a player to gain the experience at a younger age and it's even harder for a younger player to get out here on TOUR. Once you get out on TOUR, how many times are you going to be in contention on Sunday afternoons? You're going to fail, but when is the next time you're going to get back there? You know, that's the nature of how our TOUR has evolved. It's become that much more difficult to get yourself back in there so you can learn."

On which twentysomethings catch his eye: "Well, there's probably a collection of guys. You know, Adam (Scott), Sergio (Garcia), Luke (Donald), Trevor (Immelman), Charlie Howell, these guys all have the ability to do some pretty substantial things in the game of golf, just a matter of getting that experience and building on it from there."

On Oakmont, site of the U.S. Open: "The greens are nothing like I've ever seen before. They're totally different than Augusta. They're all pitched. There aren't too many holes in which you have the ability to see the fairway and the green on the same hole. It's usually one or the other. You have a blind tee shot or a blind second shot. So there's a lot of experience that goes into learning that golf course. And then the greens, once you get to the greens, boy, that's the challenge right there, trying to putt these things with the right speed because you're coming over so many different mounds and angles and pitch on the greens that it's going to be one great test."

On Bubba Watson's power and length off the tee: "Look how tall he is. He's got long arms. Anybody that has long arms has the ability to create more leverage and more arc. He just naturally has more speed. He can generate speed, and that's just a gift. You either have speed or you don't. You can't ask how can I run as fast as Carl Lewis; either you have it or you don't."

On what change he would make to the 36-hole cut system: "Flat 60 (players). It's about pace of play, and in the summertime with thunderstorms, and then TV coverage wants to finish at 7:00 o'clock all the time now, so it becomes more interesting."

On playing into your 40s: "Usually you start going downhill physically. I'm not 100 percent sure, but after your peak years, you start losing one percent of your body functions per year... Certain athletes are able to prolong that, but you still have a dropoff. If you're ten years out from your prime, you're 90 percent as you used to be."

But back to the topic at hand. Whether he's 100 percent or 95 or 90 or whatever, Tiger's still the best player in the world. A guy on a roll. A guy with just three top-10s here in his first 10 PLAYERS. That's still 33.3 percent, but he's lagging behind Tom Watson and Nick Price with nine top-10s and Davis Love, who has six top-10s in 20 tries and Jack Nicklaus, who has four top-10s (including three wins) in 17 tries.

More numbers. Numbers we can throw out. Numbers we can try to compare.

But we keep going back to the one number Tiger has in his head. Wins.

He's had three of them this year on TOUR. One second. One T-9. Six events. And he finished out last year with six wins and a second place in his last seven events.

Wins.

He's coming off one and looking for a second one here. Nicklaus, after all, has three of these and that's the one number here Tiger pays attention to; the one he wants not just to match, but to one day, to beat.