Tiger Woods enters the tee box Thursday at the PGA Championship with two questions biting at his heels:

A) Can I win?

B) If A) is false, am I turning into Phil Mickelson?

Now, to be fair (and you know how we hate that), Woods is probably not asking B). In fact, it likely has never entered his mind to entertain the notion that he might be the best active player never to have won 10 majors.

But hey, if he can be accused of being in a slump, he can certainly be accused of turning left-handed.

In fact, Woods has handled all the talk of his alleged slump quite brilliantly -- with a withering look that causes most golf typists to scrape the enamel off their teeth with a chisel. This look is so powerful that it causes the people who claimed in the first place that he was the greatest player in planetary history that anyone who says he is in a slump is a congenital idiot.

Truth is, by the ridiculous standards set for him by his most ardent admirers, he is in a slump. By the standards by which professional golfers actually live, he is not even close. And he doesn't get to decide.

What he does get to decide is how he's hittin' 'em, and with what. Much was made of his switch back to Titleist drivers from Nikes, an attention to brand identification usually found on the NASCAR circuit, but the only thing that really matters is that he doesn't put any Reebok clubs in his bag. That, Nike would have a problem with.

The rest of it, all this reputation hoo-hah, that's on us. And if we decide in our whack-job wisdom that the possibility of him going 0-for-the-majors in 2003 is a serious failure ... well, he'll get over it.

We won't, of course, but that's what we do. We declare him better than Nicklaus after he clears out the Masters, then better than God when he crushes the U.S. Open, and now that he has either plateaued or hit a brief valley (you decide, because we don't care), we can call it a slump, proof of lousy equipment, or stroke-shaving. We can call it anything we want, because we're the ones who got all this started.

That he never argued with us in the good old days, well, he has to take that.

You see, Woods' best year ever, and we all know when that was, was also the best year ever, and we say that while being fully cognizant of Byron Nelson's best year ever. In that time, many profoundly silly things were said on his behalf, starting with "He's already the best ever.'' This was plainly wrong, and the only test you needed to apply to prove it so was to imagine a scenario in which he retired immediately thereafter. He wouldn't have been the best then, just the brightest, fastest comet in the sky.

But he didn't retire. He kept playing, and discovered a number of things that he probably already knew, but hoped, weren't true in his case.

A) The human body does occasionally get weary.

B) Nobody hits it like that forever. Nobody.

C) Attention spans are just shorter than they used to be.

So, for purposes of easy identification, Tiger Woods is in a slump, according to people who came to golf late in the game and think the PGA Tour is just like Major League Baseball, or the NBA. To them, it's all brand recognition without nuance. You got your Yankees, you got your Lakers, and nobody else is worth watching.

Golf isn't like that, except of course for The Best Year Ever.

So Woods is in slump if you can misunderstand the game, and the present state of the PGA Tour. For all his skills, Woods has only become the man to beat, not the unbeatable man.

And he hasn't changed the game, but he has changed the way casual fans think about it. The casual fans know Woods, and that's all they know. Thus, they can make sweeping generalizations about his game, and the state of the game, based on the faulty assumptions that come from believing that the Yankees are the only baseball team, and the Lakers the only basketball team.

It's short-attention-span golf, and it may be superficially satisfying, but it isn't an accurate assessment of the game, the Tour, or even Woods' place in it.

But what the hell. If he can be Better Than Nicklaus, he can be a slump, and if he can be in a slump, then he can be Phil Mickelson. That's the beauty of a well-aimed snap judgment -- it can be anything we want it to be. We're the ones with the labelmaker.

He just has to go out and give us something to label. Now that doesn't seem like such a bad deal for him, now does it?

Right, Phil ... er, Tiger?

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com