I’ve been covering Tiger Woods ever since my very first golf assignment from Sports Illustrated at the 1996 Texas Open in San Antonio. But it took me a decade–until the 2006 PGA Championship at Medinah–to discover that the best place to shoot him from is inside the gondola of Snoopy One, The MetLife Blimp.

Photographed from the MetLife Blimp Snoopy One, Tiger Woods and Steve Williams walk down the 14th fairway at Medinah CC during the final round of the 2006 PGA Championship.

Peace. Serenity. A whole gondola to yourself, two thousand feet up. No jostling with other photographers. No running to get into position ahead of everybody else. No snarling caddies. No spectators grabbing you, shoving you out of the way, spitting on you or threatening you with bodily harm. No F-bombs dropped on you by the fans, or by the man himself. No drinks being poured on you, umbrellas jabbed in your back. No interns with clip-on ties telling you you can’t shoot from the same exact spot you were in just a threesome before. No cops with pistols, security guards with earpieces, or officious volunteer course marshals with logoed shirts, optimistically-waisted Dockers and an extremely misplaced sense of empowerment. Nope. Just you and the blimp pilot circling the skies over suburban Chicago on a lazy Sunday afternoon, with Tiger and Stevie walking between the shadows in the fourteenth fairway on their way to another major championship.

Yep. It’s enough to make you want to sit back, take a deep breath, and crack open one of those bottles the blimp guys keep suspended in the cargo net above your head. Until you realize that’s not exactly beer in them.