The one Tiger Woods shot that defines an unforgettable comeback year

The Tiger Woods golf shot that gets all the love is the famed stinger. It’s always been in his arsenal, but the shot achieved a new level of fame in the social media era. Videos of old stingers were an easy way to rack up the retweets and a good way to look like you were informed. Woods has had a penchant for going to the stinger during his re-emergence to competitive golf this year. With social media tracking his every move and tracer technology to better illustrate the flair of it, the Tiger stinger has never enjoyed a more luxurious lifestyle.

That’s fine. It’s deserved. When you get hit with the stinger on TV or in person, it’s arousing. But don’t let that distract you from all the other brilliance that makes Tiger the greatest shotmaker of all time. His best shots have often been the moonballs dropped on top of the flag from some impossible spot.

After a week of nuking stingers all over a concrete-hard Carnoustie, the shot that will end up defining his British Open was actually one that went miles into the sky. It’s the shot from the fairway pot bunker at the 10th hole. An outrageous play combined with incomprehensible execution to create a work of art that made the cliche of “Tiger’s back” never feel more alive.

I’ve come to go deep on this shot and fully appreciate it in all its brilliance. I want to love it and cradle it and keep it alive forever.

Tiger is in the lead at this moment. He’s working on the greatest comeback story in the history of the game and one of the greatest sports stories of all time. The pot bunkers are the scariest feature of Carnoustie, the Open rota’s toughest course. You go into one, it’s a one-shot penalty. At the 10th, there’s a burn you have to carry in front of the green to add to the disaster waiting to happen. Take your medicine and pop it out cautiously back into the fairway.

Do not try to be a hero and think you can take a full club, a full swing, and get up and over the lip and to the intended destination. Especially do not do this when you’re leading the damn major championship on the back nine. We’ve seen dozens of players, including this week, try to get out with far more cautious plays only to see the ball slam off the riveted face and back to their feet.

Tiger’s ball was on a bit of an upslope, so that narrowly cracked open the sliver in his golf mind that thought he could do this. But still, the hole was 150 yards away. The ball needed to clear that steep bunker face and then taller tufts of fescue rough on top of that face.

Again, he was leading. He could have taken a higher-lofted club, tossed it into the middle of the fairway, and tried to get up-and-down from there. But he was feeling it and went for it all like it was the year 2000.

The violence of the swing was something out of a prior era. This is a Tiger staple. By the numbers we have now, he may not always swing the hardest or fastest, but he always makes it look like no one is close. Some people prefer a smooth motion. Others a mighty hack. Tiger ushered that swing violence into the modern era. This is like watching 40-year-old Vince Carter dunk on some unsuspecting youngster, only he also has a fused-back.

Tiger brought a strut and flair to the modern game that almost every top player that has come up in the last decade tries to mimic. My friends at No Laying Up call it Tour Sauce (perhaps you’ve heard of it). When you’re this good, and even when you suck!, there’s an extra sauce you can add on top of simply hitting golf shots. No one does this better than Tiger, an innovator on this front.

From walking in putts as they roll to twirling the club in your hand as you admire the ball flight to ... that insane recoil on this shot. That recoil is a Tiger trademark. It might be faster than the actual swing. He’s done it for years and it’s a signal that something delectable might be coming up next.

Every great Tiger approach shot is also accompanied by this look into the sky.

Sometimes he’s also shouting at the ball to “be good!” or “go one yard!” Those utterances are also Tiger trademarks we’ve had so much fun with over the years. For me, the best is when there’s nothing but silence. His eyes just darting from ball to flag back to ball. It’s often another sign there’s an imminent explosion of noise coming up around the green.

There is a crowd murmur on every Tiger approach shot that no other player gets, even at major championships. For some reason, that murmur jumped out to me on Tiger’s first hole on Sunday and it stuck with me the rest of the day. The collective sound is a mix of a people shuffling to get on their tippy toes or crane their neck around another fan, a softer hum of people anticipating, and a few circus clowns shouting idiotic cliches of encouragement. It’s stirred together in pot for a distinct in-the-air sound that’s attached to most Tiger approach shots. That humming before the crescendo at the green yields some of the coolest seconds in golf.

NBC had this thing called links tracer this week. It was meant to be a reverse-angle tracer image tracking the bounces and rolling balls prevalent on a links style course, where the ground game is so important. And praise be we had it here, not for that ground game stuff. But to show the trajectory of this thing going to the moon and back. It was hard to fit on the screen

When Tiger’s tee shot found that pot bunker, it was going to be a scramble to save par. Instead of playing safe into the fairway, this shot eliminated the scramble. There are no pictures on a scorecard, but this two-putt par came with so much more that was worth appreciating.

Up until this point, he’d been scrambling successfully to make saves while everyone else on the leaderboard fell behind him. That scrambling would come to a halt, quickly, as he played the next two holes in 3-over. The full context of the day is certainly worth examining. But Tiger holding a back nine lead at a major made it feel like we were thrown into a different time and place. And this shot encapsulated that nostalgia.