versatility
The shot that made Tiger Tiger
If you're a golfer, he needs no introduction. Butch Harmon is the greatest golf teacher of all time, the most outrageously under-appreciated figure yet to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame and Tiger Woods’ coach in his formative and peak years from 1993 to 2004—ages 17 to 28.
“The way I put it,” Butch was telling me the other day in his office outside of Las Vegas, “is Jack Nicklaus was the greatest champion of all time, but Tiger was the greatest player.”
If Tiger didn’t fire Butch, and Butch had been his lifelong coach, like Jack Grout was to Nicklaus, Tiger may very well have held both titles.
That’s not a knock on Hank Haney or Sean Foley or any of the coaches that came after Butch. It’s a statement of fact, and the evidence I’d offer is one shot that Butch taught Tiger because it was the key to everything.
The shot that made Tiger was a knockdown 2-iron you know by another name: The Stinger. The origins of the shot can be traced back to a beryllium copper Ping Eye2 1-iron that he cadged from his father because Earl didn’t have the clubhead speed to “hit it in the air,” said Tiger in a 2018 press conference. Even as a kid, especially as a kid, Tiger had clubhead speed. He was reminiscent of the young Seve Ballesteros, who played hooky from school and hit 3-irons on Somo Beach, near his hometown of Pedreña, Spain. Like Seve, Tiger fell in love with golf and taught himself shotmaking with that club, from chips around the green to driving irons.
“That 1-iron was probably the start of learning how to hit the ball down, plus we had balata balls back then, so learning how to take spin off it was a big thing,” he said. “The longer the ball stays in the air, the longer time it 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 favored 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 observers was the 1948 Masters champion Claude Harmon, who taught stingers 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 followed with tour players hanging back into a “reverse-C” finish, delivering a square clubface at impact and hitting 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 Trevino, 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 trajectory 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 exist 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 Supersonic Stinger.” You can look it up.
The following week after the magazine 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 Augusta National’s “Amen Corner” or even Sandy Tatum calling Cypress Point “the Sistine Chapel of Golf,” but I do own this small patch of epistemological origin. As Tiger himself wrote in 2020, “I didn’t come up with the name ‘stinger.’ This very magazine gets the credit.” The term drew from the whizzing sound of the shot when Tiger was demonstrating it for that first instruction 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 down the line and 20 inches off the ground. Tiger said, “Lower.” Szurlej dropped the camera to 14 inches. Tiger said, “Lower.” The tripod was then dropped with the lens just a couple of inches 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 clubhead 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 arsenal. I remember him bringing it out at Kapalua in the Mercedes Tournament of Champions in 2000. (Tiger had won four in a row at the end of 1999, then beat Ernie Els to open maybe the greatest 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 farther 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 releasing 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 Woodland 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 U.S. 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 recently, 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 upshoots. Back in the late ’90s, I used a 2-iron almost exclusively to play this shot. Then the design of 3-woods improved, 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 sometimes 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 meeting 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.