Notebook

Perfecting the Knockdown Three-Wood
Tiger's Money Shot

Every player needs a safety shot, one that puts the ball in play off the tee on tight holes, in high winds or when his confidence or coordination is running low. Most of all, he needs a shot that will hold up under pressure. Jack Nicklaus employs what he calls a "heel cut," a shot hit toward the neck of the club that starts left, flies lower and shorter than usual and has a dying curve to the right. It's ugly, yet under certain conditions it produces beautiful results.

Tiger Woods now has a reliable safety shot: the punch three-wood. He hit it extensively in winning the Mercedes Championship at blustery Kapalua, and he used it again last week at Pebble Beach. Woods tees the ball low—or uses no tee—plays it back in his stance, grips down slightly on the club, takes a shorter than normal backswing, hits down on the ball to the point of taking a divot and makes an abrupt, abbreviated follow-through in which the club stops about shoulder high. The result is a shot that flies low and straight, hits the ground running and stops about 250 yards away.

Butch Harmon, Woods's coach, began teaching him the shot last year. "The principle is the same as when the average golfer punches a nine-iron—delofting the club-head and keeping the face square through the ball," says Harmon. "If that player tried it with a longer club, especially a three-wood, he wouldn't have enough club-head speed to keep the ball airborne. But clubhead speed is not Tiger's problem."

In fact, Woods has so much clubhead speed that the shot has been difficult for him to master. "The secret of the shot is to bow the left wrist down at impact and hold off the hit with the arms and hands," explains Harmon. Strengthening his arms to "hold off the hit," or release the clubhead, has been one of the prime motivators in Woods's dedication to weight training. But even after he had built up his forearms last year, Woods still didn't feel he had honed the three-wood punch well enough to put it in play in a major.

Harmon wanted him to use it off the tee at windy and narrow Carnoustie. Woods chose instead to punch with a two-iron, a shot he hits 25 yards shorter than the three-wood, leaving himself longer approaches into the greens. As a result, he made only six birdies in the entire championship on his way to a tie for seventh.

The three-wood shot was instrumental in Woods's victory at the American Express Championship in Spain in November. On the final day, tight and tricky Valderrama was buffeted by swirling winds, and Woods tested his three-wood several times in one of the finest tee-to-green rounds of his life.

Woods isn't the first to use the shot. Harmon learned it from his father, Claude Sr., a shotmaking genius who won the 1948 Masters. Ben Hogan also favored the shot but mostly from the fairway. "Hogan just brushed the turf with irons, but he took a divot with his woods," says Harmon.

What's the worst thing that can go wrong with the shot? "Sometimes I hit it too high, but even then it normally goes straight," says Woods. In short, it's a shot made for majors.