Cink, playing in his 20th Masters, struck an 8-iron and then enjoyed watching a magical moment.
AUGUSTA, Ga. – Drinks are on Stewart Cink this evening.
The 48-year-old Cink made an ace at the par-3, 170 yard 16th hole at Augusta National.
Cink, playing in his 20th Masters, struck an 8-iron and then enjoyed watching a magical moment.
He already had started walking to the green after his ball landed some 30 feet right of the hole.
“Come on down,” patrons at the green can be heard pleading.
The ball did just that, catching the slope and as if pulled by a magnet funneling down the hill and into the right side of the cup for an ace.
Cink lifted both arms in the air and hugged his caddie, his son, Reagan. Then father and son slapped both hands. Fellow competitor Harry Higgs came over for a hug too, while the third member of the grouping, Brian Harman, settled for a congratulatory knock of the knuckles.
It was the 24th ace in Masters history at 16, and the sixth career hole-in-one for Cink in his PGA Tour career. That’s tied for the eighth-most aces on Tour since 1983 when hole-by-hole tracking started.
Here are some stories of what golfers do to prep for arguably the toughest set of greens they’ll face all year.
AUGUSTA, Ga. — The week before Tiger Woods played in the Masters for the first time as an amateur in 1995, he practiced for Augusta National’s lightning-fast greens by putting on Stanford’s basketball court.
Ernie Els famously practiced on a billiards table to which Stewart Cink said, “My ceilings aren’t high enough for me to putt on my pool table otherwise I would too.”
Others have settled for the smooth concrete of their garage. Then there’s the possibly apocryphal story of players trying to simulate the speed of the Augusta greens by putting in a bath tub. Something tells us Bryson DeChambeau tried this or something even wackier.
When TPC Sawgrass superintendent Jeff Plotts was asked if the pros that practice there ask him to ratchet up the green speed on the practice green ahead of the Masters, he said, “Get it all the time.”
Here are some of the stories of the rude awakening pros experienced their first time at Augusta National and what they do to prep for arguably the toughest set of greens the pros face all year.
What’s it like to step into the coliseum during the tournament? These pros have some opinions.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The combination of an entertainment-starved crowd happy to be returning to live golf, a picture-perfect afternoon, fantastic weather and a star-studded field made the famous 16th hole at the WM Phoenix Open a site to behold once again.
TPC Scottsdale’s iconic par-3 has become one of the bucket-list events for pro golfers and fans alike.
It only plays about 140 yards but it’s surrounded by an estimated 17,000 fans, many who get louder as the day grows longer.
What’s it like to step into the coliseum during the tournament? These PGA Tour pros have some insight.
The last time we saw Woods play golf on television was at this event back in 2020. Time really is a flat circle.
However, the Woods-duo isn’t the only big-name partnership headed to Florida. Defending champions Justin and his father Mike Thomas will look to triumph again. Bubba Watson will be playing with his father-in-law, while Nelly Korda will be playing with her dad, Petr.
Here’s a look at the 20 partnerships at this year’s PNC Championship, which requires that each team have a major champion. The Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, Orlando, Grande Lakes is the host venue.
The daycare system allows players and their families an opportunity to travel together throughout the year.
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – Amanda Hadley provides arguably the best example of why the PGA Tour’s Daycare program is so beloved. Hadley, the wife of pro Chesson Hadley and mother of three, hasn’t had to potty train either of her first two kids.
“I found out that our oldest, Hughes, had to be potty trained to start pre-school,” said Amanda, a board member of the PGA Tour Wives Association. “I showed up the next morning and they said, ‘We’ll help you. Let’s start tomorrow. Bring a stack of clothes and some big-boy underwear and we’re going to power through this.’ By the end of the week they had him potty trained.”
PGA Tour pros receive an assortment of perks, everything from courtesy cars to gourmet meals at player dining, but they all run a distant second to a daycare system that is provided to the membership 43 weeks a year, allowing players and their families an opportunity to travel together throughout the year.
“This lifestyle takes its toll on marriage and family because of all the travel and being apart,” said Stewart Cink. “It makes it more doable. It doesn’t take away all the stress, but it reduces the load.”
The program was formed in 1998, back when Cink still had hair and his two married sons, Conor (28) and Reagan (24), who now doubles as his caddie, were regulars. At the time, Susan Dittmer, the director of PGA Tour Family Centers, was overseeing daycare for employees of a bank in Jacksonville when the PGA Tour was seeking to create a more consistent experience for families and were so impressed with her facility that it wooed her away.
“I call her the captain of the ship,” Amanda Hadley said.
The infant room at the RSM Classic. (Courtesy Susan Dittmer/PGA Tour)
In her first week on the job, Dittmer was playing house with some of the young kids and declared that it was time to make dinner. She expected them to be seeking dishes and gathering the plastic play food for the meal, but no.
“They were looking for a phone so they could call room service,” she said. “That was my first introduction to this was going to be a little bit different.”
Chesson Hadley with wife Amanda and son Hughes after winning the PGA Tour’s 2014 Puerto Rico Open.
Back in those early days, before cell phones became prevalent, parents were given a pager and told to call the office if they got a 911 message. Kids are eligible to attend “Golf School,” as it’s commonly called, beginning at six weeks of age up to 12 years. The busiest time period is the summer when kids are out of school and an influx of families travel together. Each tournament provides empty rooms and more than 6,500 pounds of portable cribs, toys and the like are shipped from one tournament to the next and the crates unloaded to provide a constant and consistent environment week – same toys, same instructors, same friends. (Lots of them develop lifelong friendships due to their families unique lifestyle.)
“I don’t even think about my kids when I’m on the golf course because I know they’re happy,” said Webb Simpson, father of five children with wife Dowd.
Following the sun in pursuit of birdies affords a wealth of cultural activities ranging from getting muddy in the taro fields of Hawaii, holding their own Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans, visiting zoos in San Diego and Ft. Worth, Texas, and, of course, the older kids adore going to Universal Studios theme park during the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
The Tour’s daycare was closed for nearly a year due to COVID-19, but reopened in March at the Arnold Palmer Invitational following CDC protocols, including staff wearing masks. The familiar soundtrack of “Baby Shark” played in one of four rooms, based on ages, that housed 60 kids during the RSM Classic last week.
Susan Dittmer, a road warrior for 24 years as director of the PGA Tour’s Family Centers, retired after the RSM Classic and looks forward to sleeping in her own bed, hiking in Ireland and celebrating all the special occasions she’s missed while being with her road family. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)
Dittmer chuckled that most of the players she started with 24 years ago have graduated to PGA Tour Champions and their kids are old enough to have their own kids. She has seen everyone from Tiger Woods to Phil Mickelson to Rory McIlroy in a very different light. “It’s kind of fun from my point of view,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what they just shot at the course, when they come by afterwards they all light up and they’ll sit on the floor, play with the kids and they’re just dad.”
She hasn’t forgotten the time they were at the zoo in Fort Worth and Mickelson tagged along with his kids and he called Dittmer over and he said, “I just want you to know how much we appreciate you and that our kids get to go to golf school.”
Simpson, who is second only to Aaron Baddeley (six kids) for the largest family on Tour, typically invites his kids’ teachers over to his house during the Wells Fargo Championship as a small token of his appreciation.
The toddler room at the RSM Classic. (Courtesy Susan Dittmer/PGA Tour)
On Tuesday night, at the annual players-wives wiffle ball game held during the RSM Classic, Dittmer, who is retiring, threw out the ceremonial first pitch and was presented a red hard-covered scrapbook filled with letters from parents and kids from the past 24 years. Amanda Hadley helped assemble it and noted that all the letters included some version of the same story of being nervous at drop off on the first day – Michelle Riley, wife of Chris, noted that she cried – and how the staff became an extension of their family.
“We were all thrown into this unnatural life as new moms with young families on the road,” Hadley said. “The childcare people helped us figure out how to be a mom.”
Blame Cink’s son Connor for the reason that Cink isn’t back to defend in Napa.
NAPA, Calif. – Stewart Cink’s victory at the 2020 Safeway Open (since renamed as the Fortinet Championship) was one of the feel-good stories of the year.
At age 47, Cink shot a final-round 7-under 65 on Silverado Resort’s North Course to end a 4,074-day winless drought in wine country. He did so with his son Reagan filling in on the bag and that partnership turned out to be so fruitful that the father-son duo not long thereafter made it official as a full-time job. (They later won the RBC Heritage together.)
But blame Cink’s other child, son Connor, who happened to be celebrating his 27th birthday on the day Cink turned back the clock at Silverado a year ago, for the reason that Cink isn’t back to defend.
It turns dear-old dad was double booked with Connor’s wedding scheduled for this Saturday, September 16. As Cink tweeted, the tournament was originally scheduled for a week earlier before being shifted back to its current dates. Cink added, “Can’t wait for many more events in Napa.”
This marks the second year in a row that the defending champion has not played. Cameron Champ, who won in 2019, skipped after making it to the Tour Championship, which ended on a Monday and the new season resumed that Thursday.
So glad for new sponsor @FortinetChamp, but scheduling shifted the event back one week, to same weekend as my son Connor’s wedding. So, I won’t be able to play as “defending champ.” But…can’t wait for many more events in #Napa!
There is one word that rolls off the tongues among those who try to describe Royal St. George’s: quirky.
Two-time British Open winner Ernie Els once likened his trips around the links at Royal St. George’s to playing on another planet.
“At times it feels like you’re playing on the moon here,” the Big Easy said in 2003. “There’s nothing flat on this golf course.”
Mark Calcavecchia, the Champion Golfer of the Year in 1989, once said the course in Sandwich, England, has a bunch of fairways you can’t hit. Tiger Woods, who has three Claret Jugs among his 15 majors, couldn’t find his first tee shot in the 2003 Open at Royal St. George’s and made a triple bogey; he finished two behind winner Ben Curtis.
And there is one word – hint, it starts with a “Q” – that rolls off the tongues among those who describe the layout by the sea some 100 miles southeast of London and is home to the 149th playing of the British Open.
“I believe St. George’s to be the most quirky of all the layouts,” 2009 Open winner Stewart Cink said. The two-time winner on the PGA Tour this season finished in a tie for 34th in 2003 and in a tie for 30th in 2011 at Royal St. George’s. In those two contests, only five players combined finished the tournament under par.
“And they’re all great courses, all fabulous,” Cink continued. “But St. George’s has the most unexpected bounces, the potential for the weirdest bounces. Especially on the back nine, some holes where the ridges run not quite at a 45-degree angle, but they’re just angled off to one side or the other. You can hit great shots off the tee that end up getting kicked one way or the other.
“You just got to be ready for some of that.”
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Royal St. George’s – which will play to a par of 70 and can be stretched out to 7,189 yards this year – made its debut as an Open venue in 1894 and is hosting the oldest championship in golf for the 15th time; it was the first course outside of Scotland to host the British Open. With full exposure to the sea, Royal St. George’s, as is the case with all true links, is at the mercy of the winds blowing in from the nearby waters, and, let’s not forget, the elements that can fall from above.
From the day it opened 134 years ago, the links on the rugged landscape has been known for its blind shots; severely sloped greens; an assortment of pot bunkers that can ruin any round; and huge sand hills, including a two-story tall bunker to the right of the fairway on the fourth hole called the “Himalayas.”
There’s also a canal – named “Suez” – that crosses the par-5 14th fairway. The hole also has out of bounds running down the entire right side. This is where current world No. 1 Dustin Johnson’s hopes for a Claret Jug vanished in 2011 when he hit his second shot out of bounds in the final round of the Open when he was two shots behind eventual winner Darren Clarke.
Dustin Johnson plays his shot from the eighth tee during a practice round ahead of The 149th Open at Royal St George’s Golf Club on July 14, 2021 in Sandwich, England. (Photo by Christopher Lee/Getty Images)
But it’s the fairways that stand out, the ones full of humps and bumps and crowns that send otherwise brilliant tee shots in multiple directions toward rough, fescue and pot bunkers. However, a wet summer has softened the links and given way to thick, heightened grassland that borders the holes. Bryson DeChambeau referred to some of the areas as hay.
“The course was quite lush, quite green. We maybe weren’t getting the bounces that we’re accustomed to getting here at St. George’s with the bumpy fairways,” 2014 Open champion Rory McIlroy said earlier this week. “Honestly, I think the course plays a little better that way. I think the biggest thing this week is if you do hit it offline, you’ve got some really thick, juicy rough on either side of the fairway, which you just have to avoid.”
The soft conditions make for an interesting predicament. As it stands now, there is little to no chance of precipitation in the forecast the rest of the week. Thus, if the skies are bright and the winds kick up, the course will firm up – and the chances of bizarre bounces in the fairway will increase.
Which means tournament officials might put water on the fairways to keep them on the soft side to try and limit the intensity of the bounces from the fairway.
“I spoke to (R&A chief executive) Martin Slumbers on Monday evening, and he said they’re probably going to water some of the fairways to stop that happening,” Lee Westwood said. “You can’t have really bouncy fairways carrying (the ball) off into rough that’s this high that you’re hacking out of. This course was laid down with the fairways like that and undulating, designed to go into the rough where you’d have a shot, but it would be a flying lie and you’d have to judge that.
“It wasn’t designed to land in the fairways and go into rough where you’re hacking out with lob wedge.”
Jon Rahm and Dustin Johnson make their way towards the sixth hole during a practice round ahead of The 149th Open at Royal St George’s Golf Club on July 14, 2021 in Sandwich, England. (Photo by Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Soft or firm, Johnson said Royal St. George’s will provide an exacting test.
“I do like this golf course. I feel like it’s a tough golf course,” he said. “It’s going to play difficult, especially with the wind direction that it’s supposed to blow for the week. It’s a typical links course; you’ve got to hit golf shots, and you’ve got to hit them where you’re looking or you’re going to have a tough time.”
Cink is one of four players with multiple wins on Tour this season.
Stewart Cink hadn’t won on the PGA Tour for nearly 12 years before he captured the season-opening Safeway Open in September.
He hadn’t won the RBC Heritage in 17 years before he added to his wins in 2000 and 2004 by donning the red tartan jacket in April.
Well, he hasn’t won the Travelers Championship since 2008, when he won the tournament for a second time; his first PGA Tour win came in the 1997 event.
Could he end another double-digit span between wins this year at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut?
Wouldn’t be out of the question considering his resurgent season in which he’s one of four players, the others being Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Cantlay and Jason Kokrak, to win multiple times.
And it won’t have anything to do with some weird time travel machine. No, his renaissance at age 48 that has taken him from 151st in the world ranking to 45th can be attributed to slightly better health, gaining distance and having his youngest son, Reagan, on the bag, and his wife, Lisa, walking every step of his journey back to the winner’s circle for the seventh and eighth time.
Stewart Cink and his son, Reagan, practice ahead of the 2021 Travelers Championship. (Photo: David Dusek-Golfweek)
“People ask me, ‘What are your favorite places to go on the Tour? I always say Hartford and Harbour Town (home to the RBC Heritage). They say, of course, you have multiple wins at those places,” Cink said Tuesday. “But that’s not really the reason. I think the reason I have multiple wins at those events is I enjoy being in those places so much.
“It feels like a homey place to me right around this area and there is such great fans and support here. I’ve gotten to know the people from Travelers, and so I would love to have another win here. It would be awesome. Of course, any win on the PGA Tour means so much these days. But to repeat yourself and win at venues where you’ve won before is even more special because you get to relive some of those old memories with relationships you’ve been building.”
One of his favorite places in the Hartford area is TPC River Highlands.
“It’s a course that has a lot of variety. You don’t have to be super long, but length definitely helps on some holes. You don’t have to be super accurate because the fairways are pretty generous. Then again, there is also water and some pretty thick rough. The course in not know for rough, but there is thick rough out there,” Cink said. “So, it helps to be long, to be straight, and to be smart. If you play good, quality golf here, any style of play can be successful. Reminds me a lot of Harbour Town actually. The courses themselves are not alike at all, but the way they don’t really favor any specific style of play I think is one similarity between here and Harbour Town, and may be the reason I’ve got multiple wins at both of those.”
Cink has been hit and miss this year. After winning the Safeway Open, he had just one top-10 in 13 starts. After winning the RBC Heritage, his best finish in four starts is a tie for 30th in the PGA Championship. He’s coming off a tie for 57th in last week’s U.S. Open across the country at Torrey Pines in San Diego.
But Cink is having a blast traveling the country with his family. He was a bit sluggish on Tuesday as he recovered from the U.S. Open and continued to acclimate to the three-hour time difference.
But come Thursday’s first round, Cink is confident he’ll be refreshed, can call on good memories at TPC River Highlands and will get a charge out of seeing his caddy.
“Two wins with him this season has just been, to say it’s like the cherry on the top doesn’t do it justice,” Cink said. “Having him caddie has been like operationally excellent because he’s very good and could caddie for anybody in the world right now, but just the relationship we have, it’s allowed me to be totally myself on the golf course.
“Having Reagan is like a mini me out there. We make decisions almost the same way. When we don’t agree, we always can find a place of common ground. I’ve had a great year really for a 48-year-old, and Reagan has been a big part of that.”
Stewart Cink polished off his eighth PGA Tour title at the RBC Heritage to win the event for the third time and take home a cool $1,278,000.
Stewart Cink opened with a pair of 63s to set the 36-hole scoring record and then held steady over the weekend to win for the eighth time on the PGA Tour, and second time this season, at the RBC Heritage.
It was his third win at Harbour Town Golf Links, the first two coming in 2000 and 2004.
Harold Varner III finished tied for second, the best finish of his PGA Tour career. Emiliano Grillo also tied for second.
Maverick McNealy (67), Matt Fitzpatrick (68) and Corey Conners (68) finished at 13 under. It was the fourth top 10 in the last six starts for Conners. Collin Morikawa struggled in the final group paired with Cink. After a first-hole birdie, Morikawa made three bogeys to fall back and shot 72 to finish in a tie for seventh with Chris Kirk (67) at 12 under.
A complete list of the golf equipment Stewart Cink used to win the PGA Tour’s RBC Heritage:
DRIVER:Ping G425 Max (10.5 degrees adjusted to 10), with Graphite Design XC6X shaft
FAIRWAY WOODS:Ping G425 Max (15.5 degrees adjusted to 15), with Project X HZRDUS Smoke Green 70X shaft, G410 (20.5 degrees adjusted to 19.75), with Accra FX 2.0 360 M5 shaft
IRONS:Ping i210 (4-PW), with True Temper Dynamic Gold Tour Issue X100 shafts
