four in a row at the end of 1999, then beat Ernie Els to open maybe the great- est season ever played in the modern era.) Tiger could carry the stinger 220 yards in the air and run it another 40- 50 yards. He could hit it further than his 3-wood. It allowed him to position the ball, never getting it up in the air.” Butch says he told Tiger to “stay higher with his right side, tee it low, turn through with the right hip and shoulder, and trap the ball. Hit down with a bowed left wrist instead of a re- leasing motion and fold the left elbow, like you’re trying to hit a punch shot under a tree. Now a lot of guys hit it. Tiger made it popular, but Gary Wood- land is the best today.” While it’s hard to argue which Tiger victory is most significant – winning his first Masters by 12 strokes in 1997, the 2000 US Open at Pebble Beach by 15 strokes or his dramatic comeback in the 2019 Masters – I would make the case from a technical standpoint that his greatest achievement was the 2006 Open at Hoylake, where, as Tiger put it, “I hit one driver all week, I used The Stinger countless times and won by two shots.” Writing for Golf Digest more re- cently, Tiger adds this advice: “Don’t rush the swing. Rushing restricts the backswing, and you come down too steep, the ball spins too much and up- shoots. Back in the late ’90s, I used a 2-iron almost exclusively to play this shot. Then the design of 3-woods im- proved, and I could flight it down with that club. Because I don’t hit a 2-iron or 3-wood as far as I used to, I now some- times hit The Stinger with a driver to pick up some extra yards.” Throughout his career, it was the shot he could count on. Back in the late 1970s at a Golf Digest panel meet- ing of top teachers, I remember Cary Middlecoff saying, “Having a good coach like Jack Grout is fine, but there isn’t a teacher in this room who could have kept Jack Nicklaus from winning 15 major championships.” I think Doc Middlecoff might have said the same about Tiger, but I’ll add that Tiger would have won more if he stuck with Butch, and he’d have won fewer if he didn’t have The Stinger.
2020, “I didn’t come up with the name ‘stinger.’ This very magazine gets the credit.” The term drew from the whiz- zing sound of the shot when Tiger was demonstrating it for that first instruc- tion article, photographed by Stephen Szurlej. Fearing the shot would take his head off, Szurlej retreated and set up his camera with a remote shutter on a tripod that Tiger aimed over, 30 feet (9 metres) down the line and 20 inch- es (51cm) off the ground. Tiger said, “Lower.” Szurlej dropped the camera to 36cm. Tiger said, “Lower.” The tripod was then dropped with the lens just 5cm off dead flat. “This could be close,” said Tiger. Witnesses recall the first shot missed the camera by an inch. “I taught and showed him the shot,” says Butch today. “He had the club- head speed and trajectory control to pull it off like no one before him. When he wanted to lay up off the tee, it became the greatest club in his arse- nal. I remember him bringing it out at Kapalua in the Mercedes Tournament of Champions in 2000. (Tiger had won MY GAME: TIGER WOODS In this 12-part video series, each of 10 minutes duration, you can watch Tiger's candid, straight-to-camera- commentary and detailed on-course demonstrations.
has to go crooked, so get that thing on the ground.” In the evolution of the tour swing, The Stinger represents a return to the principles of Ben Hogan’s action developed by staying more on top of a high-spinning balata ball in Texas winds. Hogan favoured control with a shut clubface, trapping the ball and taking spin off the shot. Hogan was said to “cover the ball.” One of his contemporaries and close observ- ers was the 1948 Masters champion Claude Harmon, who taught sting- ers to his sons. Butch’s brother Craig remembers their dad coaching them to hit a “push-slice” with a 2- or 3-iron; he wanted you to think “hit and stop.” A long period of swing evolution fol- lowed with tour players hanging back into a “reverse-C” finish, delivering a square clubface at impact and hit- ting the ball much higher than Hogan ever did – powerfully demonstrated by players like Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller and Tom Watson. There were always exceptions by imaginative players such as Lee Tre- vino, Doug Sanders and Paul Azinger, who had more of a sawed-off, low-and- around finish. Tiger exhibited a work ethic greater than all those players, and mindful of Hogan. He was able to combine the strength and trajec- tory of Nicklaus when he wanted it with the creativity of Trevino. As the ball evolved from “spinny” balata to the modern solid core, Tiger built his versatility on the back of The Stinger. A word about that word “stinger.” Where did it come from? It didn’t ex- ist before I wrote it on the cover of the April 2000 edition of Golf Digest for a Tiger-bylined article inside headlined somewhat breathlessly as “Tiger’s Su- personic Stinger.” You can look it up. The following week after the maga- zine was on newsstands, Tiger, Butch and the rest of the world adopted the terminology as if it had always existed. I can’t claim the inspired poetry of a Herbert Warren Wind naming Augus- ta National’s “Amen Corner” or even Sandy Tatum calling Cypress Point “the Sistine Chapel of Golf,” but I do own this small patch of epistemologi- cal origin. As Tiger himself wrote in
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EPISODE 1 My Practice EPISODE 2 My Driving EPISODE 3 My Iron Game EPISODE 4 My Short Game EPISODE 5 My Putting EPISODE 6 My Fitness EPISODE 7 My Equipment EPISODE 8 My Mental Game EPISODE 9 My Escapes EPISODE 10 My Masters Victory EPISODE 11 My Early Years EPISODE 12 Behind the Scenes
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