Tiger’s greatest shot that you’ve never heard about

Gary McCord called the shots for CBS Golf for 33 years before his contract wasn’t renewed for this year. His former colleague Peter Kostis was another casualty and he recently threw Patrick Reed under the bus with tales of how he would repeatedly improve his lie.

McCord, in a podcast with Golf.com’s Subpar, revealed his favourite shot ever from covering the game though, bizarrely, it was one that he didn’t actually see in real time.

It came at Firestone’s 18th hole and Tiger Woods was playing with Ernie Els.

McCord can take up the story: “I was working at 16 and was finished for the day so I headed back to the TV compound to give (David) Feherty a lift back to the hotel. I saw Tiger hit his tee shot in the crap down the left with a 3-wood on 18 and Feherty asks if I had seen what had happened on the last hole. I said no, and he says go and get a wedge and a ball.

“So we get in the cart and we go to the left of the 18th hole. It is vegetating, the rough is long and there is nothing but trees in front of you. And there is a swamp that is about three and a half feet long where he put this ball next to, and it’s still shimmering from the heat.

“Ninety degrees to my right is the fairway and 196 yards somewhere on the left was the pin. He says, ‘For $100 he says can you get the ball to the fairway?’

“I get in there and I can’t do it. I couldn’t hit it 30 yards. So I say what’s this about and he tells me that Tiger hit it to 17 feet on the back fringe.

“David says this is how it happened: ‘Jimmy (Nantz) is up in the tower and I tell him that he has to chip it out. He’s got an opening but he’s got nothing. He’s playing with Ernie Els, ranked No. 2 in the world. And Tiger takes this swing that looks like he has fallen out of a tree and this ball comes ripping out and is just sideswiping to the left. Ernie is walking by him and David flips his mic on and you can just hear Ernie saying, ‘What the f*** was that?!’

“And that’s from the second best player in the world. That is the greatest commentary of all time.”

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McCord’s former network has come in for plenty of criticism in recent weeks and he sees it like this.

“I’m now the witness. I’m not part of it. You can kind of react to it from a position I have never had before for a long, long time. It just so happens that my former network is not doing as well as they would like with the broadcast at this point. I have never seen anything quite as negative as I’ve seen coming out of everywhere about what’s going on, so I have a lot of empathy. Those are my friends. I don’t want to see them fail, but they are getting blasted. It’s not a good time.”