Best of the Decade: The Best Golf Shots of the 2010’s

3. Bill Haas, 17th hole, East Lake, 2011 Tour Championship

You can list all the truly memorable shots ever struck out of the water on the fingers of one hand – and probably still have four of those fingers free for other purposes.

But the one nobody can forget brought Bill Haas the Tour Championship back in 2011 at East Lake in Atlanta. Haas certainly won’t forget it; that brief dip earned him more than $11 million.

The shot came on the second hole of Haas’s sudden-death playoff with Hunter Mahan. After both men had parred the first playoff hole, Haas pulled his approach on the 17th left of the green, the ball rolling gently down a slope and settling half-covered on the edge of the nearby pond.

Standing with one foot in the water, Haas played it like a bunker shot, the ball dropping on the green and politely stopping just two feet from the cup for an extraordinary tap-in par. Mahan made a far more conventional par of his own to send the match to what moments before had seemed an unlikely third playoff hole.

There Haas’s tee shot stopped on the fringe of the par 3 green 50 feet from the cup. But he got up and down, and when Mahan took bogey out of a greenside bunker Haas had his title.