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Does Rory McIlroy Need the Tiger Woods’ Stinger Shot?

By Kathlene Bissell

FORT WORTH, TEXAS - JUNE 14: Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland plays a shot after taking a drop on the first hole during the final round of the Charles Schwab Challenge on June 14, 2020 at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
FORT WORTH, TEXAS - JUNE 14: Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland plays a shot after taking a drop on the first hole during the final round of the Charles Schwab Challenge on June 14, 2020 at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images) /
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As I was driving  hither and yon on Monday, I heard a couple of hosts on PGA Tour Radio wondering how Rory McIlroy posted a 41 on the front nine on Sunday.

With that score for the first nine holes in the final round at the Charles Schwab Challenge, McIlroy basically shot himself out of the tournament. The PGA Tour radio talk guys both seemed baffled.

I didn’t understand why. Hey, fellas.  McIlroy hits a high ball, and when it’s windy, it’s going to be hard for him to control the ball with that kind of trajectory. Especially if he doesn’t have a wind-cheating shot.  If he had one, presumably he would have used it.

McIlroy dropped 23 spots between Saturday night and Sunday night. From T9 to 32nd.  His driving accuracy and  dropped significantly on the weekend, from 78 percent and 64 percent on Thursday and Friday to 42 percent and 57 percent on Saturday and Sunday.  His greens in regulation also suffered, from 83 percent Thursday and Friday to  77 percent Saturday and 44 percent Sunday.

“The wind was up today,” McIlroy said after finishing his Sunday round. “You didn’t have to be that much off for it to sort of show.”

It’s not just McIlroy

It’s hard for anybody to control a high-flying shot in windy conditions. That’s the reason guys in Texas and Oklahoma learn to hit what they call quail high.  It’s windy there, as well as in many places in the Midwest.

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Quails, in case you’ve never seen one, are no more than a foot tall, if that.  Most of the time, they run across the ground instead of flying, thus the description. Now, in reality, nobody is going to hit a shot that’s goes only a foot off the ground except a trick shot artist.  And it’s definitely not going to go 300 yards unless it’s from a bazooka.

What the pros really mean with the quail-high term is a ball that goes what they call “under the wind,” and even that’s not an accurate description.

On a windy day, what good players try to do is to hit a shot with a trajectory that is below the top of the trees so that the wind blowing above the trees doesn’t hit their golf balls and knock them into unintended consequences territory. They are using the tree canopy as a wind block. So, it’s not under the wind.  It’s under the top of the trees.

Another way to describe the quail-high or under the wind shot is what Tiger Woods calls his stinger.  Think about his shot for a minute.  It’s a low, boring trajectory.  That’s exactly the kind of shot that works on a windy day.  I’m not good enough to describe, technically, what Woods does with his stinger.  You’ve seen it. You know what it looks like.  That’s the goal.

In addition, by using the tree canopy as a wind block and then firing off a stinger, like Tiger, golfers can minimize wind damage. Keeping the golf ball below the treetops gives it a  better chance to stay on track and land where the golfer wants it to go.

Now, according to Wikipedia, the average height of a tree is just under 90 feet. We’re not talking sequoias or redwoods or Douglas firs.  We’re talking your average maple or oak or in the case of Colonial CC, cottonwood.  So, the trajectory for a wind shot, 99 percent of the time, has to be under 90 feet.

For most average handicap players, hitting a ball that’s less than 90 feet high is no problem.  Most of us would love to hit a golf ball that went 90 feet in the air and floated out there into the fairway forever.  We wouldn’t even care where it went, at least at first.  After about 200 of them, then maybe we would, if the balls were getting blown off-line.

While, for most us, hitting below the top of the tree canopy isn’t a problem because we can’t hit it that high, for Rory McIlroy, who can hit over the trees at will, the wind was a problem, at least at Colonial CC.  That’s why he might have benefited from a nice, solid stinger.

If you need some wind tips, see these ideas from Kevin Kisner in a past Golf Digest:  https://www.golfdigest.com/story/kevin-kisner-combat-any-wind-condition-with-these-tee-shots

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