Cink steps over the line - Brief Article

Golf Digest, Nov, 2000 by Nick Seitz

Stewart Cink knows how it feels to miss the grand prize in the lottery by one number. Twice.

In each of the last two seasons, the rangy Southerner stood 31st on the PGA Tour money list when qualifying for the Tour Championship ended. The top 30 make it into the $5 million late-season gala, with no cut and last place paying $80,000.

Last year the field was reduced to 29 by the death of Payne Stewart, but Cink was not asked to fill the opening and would not have gone had he been. "That field needed a void," he says.

If Cink's failure to qualify was beginning to resemble a jinx, he exploded it this year, winning $1.8 million by Labor Day to assure himself a spot among the elite 30 the first week of No-vember at Atlanta's East Lake Golf Club, where he just happens to have playing privileges.

"I'd been fighting it to the very nail-biting end," he says. "It's nice to be on the right side of the cut. I can spend more time at home--my son's a first-grader. I didn't schedule any differently, just played a little better."

Tiger Woods has skewed (skewered?) our perspective on golfers' career paths, and we tend to undervalue the slower-but-steady improvement of a player like the 27-year-old Cink, whose golfer parents would drop him off at their small Alabama club's practice area when he was too young to go on the course with them, resulting in his almost infallible short game. "I'd hang around the chipping and putting greens pretending I was Nicklaus or Watson or Kite, and when I went on the course at 8, I never missed an up and down from 50 yards in," he says.

The bio goes on to read: notable junior years, three-time All-American at Georgia Tech, Nike Tour Player of the Year in 1996 and then PGA Tour Rookie of the Year the following season, winning in Hartford. He didn't win in '98, but turned in half a dozen top 10s and played better in the major championships.

This year he overtook Ernie Els to win at Hilton Head, birdieing three of the last four holes, and should have won the Colonial before finishing high in the U.S. Open and PGA Championship and playing well at Firestone's World Golf Championship event. "I'm never satisfied, but I have to be pleased with my progress and making the Presidents Cup," he says.

Have his goals been impacted by Tiger's stunning dominance? Cink's answer carries a ring of thoughtful conviction:

"I'm a professional, and I try to finish as high as I can. One place in the scores means the world. If somebody's ahead of you, you're one spot worse, no matter who it is."

Unlike some of his peers, Cink is not motivated by Woods to intensify his physical conditioning. "In college we had to work out, and I don't like it," he says, rather refreshingly. "I go to the fitness trailer sporadically."

At 6-feet-4 and 205 pounds, Cink looks fit but nowhere near ascetic. He wonders about the fanatical recent training regimen of his former Georgia Tech teammate David Duval. "It can't be good to lose all that weight so fast. And the golf swing's awkward anyway."

Atlanta's Tech and East Lake both pride themselves on strong Bobby Jones legacies that Cink relishes reading about. Jones earned an engineering degree at Tech, and learned the game at East Lake, resurrected by the architect Rees Jones into a challenging modern masterpiece.

Cink says, "I play there at least 10 times a year, and always enjoy it. It's beautiful, solid--a lot of mature trees, high rough, some hills, no houses."

So, a home-course advantage?

"Everybody's so good now, I'm not sure there is such a thing. I'm more comfortable sleeping in my own bed and knowing the course. I've seen it in all kinds of conditions. The layout fits my eye."

The ninth hole is Cink's "favorite par 5 ever." At 584 usually downwind yards, it offers options, and the artfully bunkered green is reachable in two after a good tour drive. A lake cove is more scenic than menacing to the pros.

"It's a fantastic place. My membership is free for representing the club." That's not so bad, either.