MIAMI, Fla. – Tiger Woods is the luckiest man to ever hold a golf club. Of course he is.

Well.

If that’s what you are inclined to think, if after watching Woods pile up 64 victories in less than 12 years as a professional golfer you can’t abide by an other explanation except the man is blessed with wildly good fortune, if you are convinced that he grows four-leaf clovers on his windowsill, then you don’t quite grasp the intricacies of golf.

Because what Tiger Woods is doing – the wins he is piling up, the records he is shattering, the icons he is leaving in his wake as he streaks toward unimaginable accomplishments, and the revisionist thinking he is imposing on the accepted concepts of success in this unpredictable game – has absolutely nothing to do with luck.

Nothing.

Woods will tell you, with well-intentioned modesty, that there is a degree of good fortune that factors into his ability with astonishing regularity to come out ahead in golf tournaments contested over 72 holes of stroke play against competition that is considered to be comprised of the very best practitioners of the sport.

It is a compelling argument. It also is useful to him.

It helps refract the spotlight on him. It throws a bone to his competition while obfuscating the talent gap between him and everyone else. It also keeps him motivated, because if he internalizes the underlying sentiment that his success isn’t 100 percent in his control, then he can convince himself that more must be done to achieve that circumstance.

“A lot of things have to go your way, and right now, so far, I’ve had a lot of things go my way,” Woods, 32, said Wednesday as he prepared for the World Golf Championships-CA Championship at Doral Resort and Spa, an event he has won three straight times and six times overall.

Woods isn’t tied with Ben Hogan on the all-time victory list and going for his sixth straight PGA Tour victory – which would give him his third winning streak of at least that length – simply because it just so happens that he has things go his way. No. And he will admit that.

“I know how hard it is. I know how hard I work,” he said.

Still, he won’t quite give up a wee nod of concession to favoritism from the golf gods. It happened again last week, he pointed out, when he rallied from a seven-stroke deficit after 36 holes to win his fifth Arnold Palmer Invitational.

“The only person that really, in truth, understands it is Stevie [Williams, his caddie] because he's there with me,” Woods said. “Even Hank [Haney, his swing instuctor] when he's out at events can't really understand the luck factor that comes about. You hit a shot, you know it's a borderline shot. It could easily bounce one way. All of a sudden it bounces your way and ends up on the green and you make a putt. It looked like you should have lost one or two shots, and you end up picking up a shot. Little things like that happen.

“I hit a couple shots last week that were not good shots, had clear lines into greens and had perfect lies. … You can't win events out here without just having a break here and there,” he added. “Maybe it happens one time the entire week, but I've never played an event that I can ever remember without having one break go my way or to win an event.  But it may be the first hole Thursday, it may be the 72nd hole, you don't know when it's going to come.”

Anyone who plays golf knows that there are both good breaks and bad ones that can influence the result of any shot. Every player gets good breaks and bad ones. Given this, you can only come to one conclusion regarding tournament outcomes with Woods involved, and it is not that he is luckier than anyone else.

Woods gets more good breaks because he hits more good shots than anyone else.

Those good shots put him in a position to take advantage of circumstances as they develop. “A lot of it is also due to hard work, to be able to put myself there and to work on my mechanics and make sure they're sound, so I'm pretty consistent day in and day out,” he said.

Former Major League Baseball owner and innovator Branch Rickey long ago uttered the famous quote, “luck is the residue of design.”

Woods is the most chiseled, evolved and developed manifestation of that cast-iron idiom in his sport if not all sports. Perhaps that means he truly is the luckiest man ever to hold a golf club.

But he deserves to be.