STEWART CINK:  Well, it’s a great time of year to play golf down here and not a great time of year to play golf where I live in the United States.  So it was just ‑‑ I like coming ‑‑ I like playing around the world everywhere.  You can look at my calendar, I’ve played in France on the European Tour this year not that long ago.  So I like to go around and we just wanted to include the PGA Tour Australia on our calendar.

MODERATOR:  Is Australia a desirable place for you to play golf?

STEWART CINK:  It is.  I feel like it’s ‑‑ there’s a knowledgeable golf fan base here that really understands the sport and is passionate about their players from this country.  So I respect that. 

And obviously with the Presidents Cup here last week, golf has major momentum right now.  I think the International Team was just a shade away from having a real wave of momentum.  With a win, it would have been awesome.  But the Presidents Cup is a great event, and to have it in Melbourne every so often is a really nice thing.  The world spotlight in golf shines on the Sandbelt and on this country.

MODERATOR:  What are you hoping to achieve this week, because obviously there’s some really highly skilled players, well known on the international circuit, and then mix that in with a lot of strong domestic players?  What are you hoping to get out of the week?

STEWART CINK:  Well, I would like to leave here with a trophy, that’s the goal.  I’ve played golf a long time and I feel like if you set your sights highest and you really dial it in and try to achieve the best, you’re more likely to maybe get there.  That doesn’t mean you will, but you’re more likely to. 

So it’s been a long time since I had a trophy and since I won, and my wife is caddying for me this week, so that would be extra special to be able to deliver her the customary 10 percent cut that a caddie would receive, and no more.

It’s a great time of year.  Like I said before, it is a good time of year to play golf here because it’s early summer and the golf season is getting kicked off, but the way our schedule is and the way my particular schedule is on the U.S. Tour right now, I’m on a medical extension, so it might be a month before I play a tournament.  So the opportunity to come here and fill the gap with a great event like this really was appealing to me. 

And my wife has never been anywhere Down Under before so we’ve been trying to put this on the calendar for a little while now.  We almost made it last year, but we had to back out at the last second.  So this year we added New Zealand, a little holiday before we came here.

MODERATOR:  Do you think your game is at that level to be the person on Sunday evening holding the trophy aloft?

STEWART CINK:  I do.  I feel like I’m playing as well as I’ve played in my whole career.  And as I get older now, I’m 46, my perspective and my expectations probably are changing a little bit, but I feel like if you break down the way ‑‑ if you break down golf into the categories, you know, the short game and all that, I think that I’m playing better golf now than I’ve played anytime in my career. 

I had some really good long runs where I’ve had really good finishes and a lot of wins on the U.S. Tour.  And so the game of golf is a lot deeper now than it used to be, but I think I have what it takes to compete.  And I’ve had some brushes with really good success over the last couple years at times and I’ve had some down moments, but I think as you age you can still reach the highest ‑‑ you can reach the highest level of form, but you might not be able to stay there as often.  So you have to be able to expect a few little troughs along with the peaks.

Q.  We just had Greg Chalmers in here talking about his sort of enforced layoff, time away to.  (Inaudible.)  Did that re‑energise you and give you extra momentum to carry into this part of your career?

STEWART CINK:  It did.  Actually, my wife going through ‑‑ well, she’s still going through it, she’s not out of the woods, but she’s doing great.  She’s really had a tremendous response and she’s really doing fantastic.  But watching her dig in and fighting with everything she had through the time of her diagnosis and her chemotherapy in 2016, it really caused me to sort of turn the mirror around and look at myself and say, well, if she’s fighting like this, what am I not doing?  I’m not fighting for my life necessarily, but I’ve got something pretty important to me and our family to fight for. 

And it did, it opened my eyes a little bit and I dug around in some corners that maybe I hadn’t dug around in for a few years and it gave me a new sense of intensity and intention when I was out there practising every day and going through all the off‑the‑course things I need to do.  You know, the result was it showed up in better scores and it gave me sort of this new confidence that I think I can compete and I can carry this all the way past my 50th birthday and who knows what happens after that.

Q.  We’ve got young Cameron Champ out here, hits it about 350 yards regularly.  When you see guys like him out on Tour, how do you believe and take the belief that the old guys can still outmanoeuvre these young guys when it comes to 72 holes?

STEWART CINK:  Well, I know there’s a lot of talk about power in the game of golf, and that’s true, power is important.  I think without it, it’s really hard to compete.  But you don’t have to have 350 yards to do that.  That’s an extra feather in your cap and it can be very useful if harnessed in the right way, but you don’t have to be that long to be able to competitive, you just have to be adequate and I’m well more than adequate in driving distance.  That’s never been an area where I had any trouble.  I don’t know if it’s equipment or if it’s just being smart about the way my fitness and my swing mechanics or what, but I haven’t really lost any.  That’s not an issue for me. 

I don’t see driving distance as being something that I’m wowed by by the young players.  I’m more wowed by the seasoned nature of their ability to just play great golf when they first come out on Tour and no one knows their name.  It used to be, there was a two or three year, you know, getting your feet wet period out on the PGA TOUR before you even were considered to be ready for success and that doesn’t exist anymore.  The players come out now having played college and junior golf against the best players more often, amateur golf, and they’re seasoned and ready to go.  So when they hit the Tour, as evidenced by Matthew Wolff, Collin Morikawa and Viktor Hovland this year, they tore it up right away. 

That didn’t use to happen 15, 20 years ago and it’s happening now and it’s going to keep on happening more.  Whereas I used to sit down at the lunch table with guys like Curtis Strange and Peter Jacobsen and Lee Janzen and pick their brain to figure out what they’re doing that I’m not doing, now I sit down at the table with guys like Matthew Wolff and try to pick their brain and figure out what they’re doing that I’m not doing.  It’s just the roles are reversed because the game has changed a little bit and I’m not ‑‑ I have to do what I can to try to figure out why they’re having success immediately right now and I’m not.

Q.  You mentioned your international experience and willingness to travel.  The PGA TOUR’s moved into Japan and Korea, and given the Presidents Cup and the success we saw, do you see a day that the PGA TOUR will host an event down here?

STEWART CINK:  Well, that’s big business and I’m not privy to that information anymore.  I served a term on the policy board where I was privy to that, but right now I’m just a rank and file member of the Tour, so I don’t know if that’s in the plans or not. 

I certainly wouldn’t put it past having an event here.  The Presidents Cup’s been successful every time it’s been here and one of the most common and most dependable statistics you can look at when deciding like where to put your next events is success in past events in that area. 

You know, the Sandbelt golf is legendary around the world, it’s not just known here, so I would say it would be more than just reasonable but exciting to see a tournament come here.

Q.  Stuart, power and distance is a big topic in professional golf.  From your side of things, would you like to see it brought back a little bit or does the advancements in technology actually give players of your age more of a chance to compete against guys who hit it a little bit further but not crazy distance further?

STEWART CINK:  No, I’ve never really been in favour of pulling anything back and the reason is because I think the health of the game of golf in general is a bigger deal than whether a guy like Cameron Champ can hit it 350 yards.  To me, that’s exciting.  I like watching him hit balls.  So to take that away, to me, would not really be focused on what we need in golf.

Golf is not a big enough industry to just succeed on its own if we keep throttling it back, so I don’t think rolling back the ball or anything would be good.  I think people like to watch guys hit it far, and gals, too, hit it far and it’s fun for all of us.  It’s fun for my dad to be able to hit it a little further. 

If we change the rules and let’s say we play by a different set of rules out here, I just don’t think that makes sense.  I think one of the best things about golf is that players that don’t play in tournaments and don’t play on TV, they can use the same exact equipment as like a Dustin Johnson and it actually gives them a perspective on like how good that guy is at driving a golf ball.  When they see him hit those drives like he does, or Cameron Champ or even Stewart Cink, I mean, they can see, like wow, that is amazing that they can do that with that club and that ball, the same one I can use and I can’t do it. 

You know, I can’t stand at the 3‑point line with a contested guy in my face and hit a shot at the buzzer.  I might be able to one out of 50 times, but in the NBA, they do it with regularity.  The ball’s the same size, the rim’s the same height and the same circumference, but I recognize that that takes amazing talent and work to be able to do that.

Q.  And talking about playing around the world, this week, European Tour event, if you were to win and get status in Europe, is that a real option for you next year given you’re coming back from your medical extension?

STEWART CINK:  It’s absolutely an option.  I haven’t filled out the paperwork yet, but I do plan to initiate the affiliate thing.  I’m just learning about all that.

But yeah, I like playing around the world and I’ve enjoyed playing in the European Tour events, the odd one here and there where I’ll turn up and I’ll get a few slanted looks from players, like what are you doing here?  That’s fine, I like that. 

But my wife and I love traveling and we’re at a stage where our kids are all in university or beyond, out of the house and it’s just the two of us.  She comes everywhere I go and it’s fun for us to see other places besides the regular stops on the U.S. Tour that I’ve seen now for 23 years.

Q.  Stuart, just following on that, it’s been 10 years since you won your British Open.  Just in terms of driving distance from then until now, is it pretty much exactly the same?

STEWART CINK:  My own?  My own is probably within three or four yards of being the same as it was then, yeah. 

I would say that in 2009, you have to go back at look at the statistics if you can find it, but I would say I was probably around the 25th percentile in driving distance and now almost at the exact same distance I’m probably in the 50th percentile.  I might be even a little bit higher than that, I’m not sure. 

It seems like the short hitters have gotten longer and kind of the caboose has caught up with the train a little bit.  The guys that hit it forever, there’s always going to be a Cameron Champ, you have to almost like cancel him out.  But there’s that next set of guys that we all know hit it really far.  There’s Bubba and Dustin and Rory.  I’m going to leave somebody out ‑‑ Brooks ‑‑ those guys hit it really far.  I don’t think they’re hitting it further now than they were in, say, seven, eight years ago.  

A big thing is, and USGA and R&A too, they’re really concerned about distance, but they measure all drives.  There’s technology out there available, if you play on the PGA TOUR you have access to the Shotlink information.  You guys probably know what Shotlink is, it’s tracking where it shows you where all the shots go.  We’ve got like 20 million data points now since 2003.  You can do a lot with 20 million data points.

So you can take a hole, you can take a hole where in the past it might have been a layup hole where you lay it up say to the short or left side of the bunker and it’s a little too far to carry.  You can probably carry it, but it might not be worth the risk.  You take that hole and you look at all the dots where the players lay up and you take a look at all the dots where the players go past the bunker and it’s like .3 strokes better for the guys that go past the bunker.  It doesn’t matter if you hit in the rough or in the fairway, all the shots that go past, you play the hole in lower scores. 

So if you’re armed with that kind of information, you’re going to take driver more often.  Now, that doesn’t mean that technology’s enabled you to hit the driver further.  Well, Shotlink has enabled you to hit your golf ball further, but technology’s not letting you hit the driver further. 

We’re deciding to hit it farther because of statistical information like that.  If I stand on the first tee and I look at all 18 holes, really there’s about anywhere from three to five, six holes a day like that where you have to decide.  If you choose the incorrect way, you’re playing to a par of 73, 74.  If you choose the correct way, you’re playing to a par of 70.  I would rather play to a par of 70 than a 74, so I’m going to choose to drive it further because the stats say I’ve got a better chance of playing the golf hole in less shots if I hit it further. 

See what I’m saying?  We’re deciding to hit it further.  We’re not hitting it further because our driver’s going farther or the ball’s going further.  We’re deciding to go further.  So if you measure all drives, the holes where in 2006 we were hitting a lot of 2‑irons and 3‑woods, now guys are just sending it over everything.  It skews the data.  You look at all that collectively and you go, whoa, we’ve got a problem, the ball’s going further. 

But it’s not going further because the ball is, it’s because the player’s deciding to send it further.

Q.  So is that presented to you that really simple to digest manner or do you have to go and search it out?

STEWART CINK:  No, you have to go and search it out.  And you have to know what you’re looking for and it takes a lot of ‑‑ well, for me it takes a lot of hiring the right people to do that.

No, that’s not completely true.  I know how to find all that information, but it’s really handy.  There are statisticians out there that can be hired that will give you a service that basically prints it out and spoon feeds it right to you.  I don’t use one of those, but there’s a couple guys that do that.  It’s a good business and some pretty high profile players have used a service like that for a long time.

It’s not just driving off the tee, it’s hole locations and where you just don’t want to hit it, like bunkers or maybe there’s a collection area down to the right of the pin.  Statistically, you can find information like guys don’t get it up and down from there, don’t hit it there.  You can arm yourself with information now. 

So if you want to talk about technology changing the game, you have to include that as much as you have to include TrackMan and the kind of video we have, club heads and golf balls.  It all is one big category of technology, it’s not just making the driver hit the ball further.

Q.  Hadn’t really computed that.  That’s interesting.

STEWART CINK:  I believe that the ruling bodies are missing that, they’re missing that.  They are in a situation where they feel like the golf ball and the driver are out of hand, but it’s not just that.  I mean, the golf ball and driver, when you do a lot of your work and get your flight and your launch optimised can go a long way, yeah, but it’s not any different now than it was 10 years ago.  You have a better chance of optimising it now because we have more technology that tells you exact spin rates and landing angles and all that, but a lot of it comes down to just deciding to lay up or whether you’re going to send it.  And if you send it, that goes into the record books as a drive that went further than if you laid up.

Q.  Can you tell us some of the oddest places your British Open trophy has been, things around the house or things like that?

STEWART CINK:  Yeah, the oddest place probably was ended up in a commercial when I was representing Nike golf back in the days before they stopped their operation. 

I was with Lucas Glover, one of my best friends, and he won the U.S. Open and then I won the British Open, the next major.  So me and one of my best friends won back‑to‑back majors and it was pretty awesome, and we were both with Nike at the time. 

So we came to do a little filming for a little commercial for Nike and when I got there, I had done a corporate outing that had requested me to bring the jug, so I brought it, showed it off.  You know, good fun. 

So I showed up at the Nike thing and I had the jug in the case.  Didn’t tell anybody.  When they gave the rundown on here’s what we’re doing with this spot, they said, “We’re going to have the U.S. Open trophy here, we’re going to have the British Open trophy here, we have mock‑ups, and you and Lucas are” blah, blah, blah.

So I said, “Well, guys, we’re not using a mock‑up, I’ve got the real one here with me, let’s use it.”

They’re like, “Do you think so?”  So we used it. 

And Lucas’s was a mock‑up, but mine was the real one.  I think the idea was I came in to get coffee out of the coffee dispenser and it was empty and they showed Lucas drinking it out of the jug and I was like, “Lucas took the last cup.”

Yeah, that was the oddest thing where it ended up, and I got a little bit reprimanded for that by the way. 

Other than that, there really wasn’t a lot of real adventure that the Claret Jug went on when it was in my possession.  I loaned it out a little bit.  I’m very fortunate in Atlanta, Georgia, where I live, that I’ve got some honorary memberships at some clubs and all my honorary memberships got to keep the jug for one month, no questions asked.  Sometimes it just sat in the case for a month and sometimes they had the member‑guest, and you can imagine what happened.  I shared it and let other people around kind of take it and have a good time with it, but no issues.  It was fun to have it, for sure.  It was a really neat memory to be able to share that with people.

Q.  Any dents that you provided?

STEWART CINK:  No, no dents at all.

Q.  What about your kids, did they do anything with it, drink orange juice out of it or anything?

STEWART CINK:  It really doesn’t get a lot of action now.  The replica is really great to have because it’s a reminder, but it’s also the replica. 

The one funny thing about the replica that I probably shouldn’t tell you guys because you’re members of the public media, but Turnberry’s misspelled on my replica.

Q.  How did they spell it?

STEWART CINK:  T‑U‑R‑N‑B‑E‑R‑Y.  And everyone likes to say, “Oh, my gosh, you should have them change it,” but I don’t want them to change it because it’s an oddity.  It’s the one off thing and I just like the story and there’s no chance I’m going to change.

Q.  It will probably be worth even more money.

STEWART CINK:  I hope so, I hope so.  But I like the fact that it’s misspelled, it gives it a little different kind of character.  You know, like baseball cards are more valuable if they’re printed in reverse or something.

Q.  I noticed on your bio you’re a mad barbecue man.  Is there any threat that you’re going to search out some Aussie ribs over here?

STEWART CINK:  Well, as much as I’m on this side of the scale, my wife is on the other side of the scale on the barbecue spectrum, so we meet in the middle and that means we don’t really seek out barbecue when we’re on the road together.  She’ll let me go out and if I hear of a place, and I’m open to suggestions, then I will seek it out, but I really don’t know that much about Aussie barbecue. 

I do know that I saw in the Virgin Australia magazine, who I flew over here, that Traeger, which is a big pellet smoker, really nice grill that’s in Salt Lake City, Utah, had a full page ad, so they must think there’s a market in Australia for that.

Q.  Stewart, I just wondered if you have any special thoughts about 2009 at Turnberry.  I guess some people thought you might have shot Bambi that week, but do you have any thoughts about any particular moment maybe in the playoff or anything about the win?  And congratulations on your win, by the way.

STEWART CINK:  As it relates to Tom, there’s really no particular moment that I have that’s a memory other than throughout the whole thing he was just perfectly gracious, just like you would expect any, you know, highly regarded champion to be.  He couldn’t have been any nicer, and he was just as respectful of me as the winner as I would have been of him as the winner. 

You know, I felt like when Tom finished the regulation, making bogey on that hole, that I just had an opportunity because I felt like his energy just took a little step down, and it’s so important to have the energy in that situation. 

I felt like I had it because I finished strong with a birdie on the 72nd, so I felt super confident.  I felt like there was no way I was going to lose that. 

I played really well in the playoff.  I probably played better in the playoff than I played at any point during the entire week.  I played great, didn’t really miss a shot. 

So, but the memories, it’s been 10 years, but I remember it like it was yesterday.  I still have plenty of little spots here and there, like tapping in or the first shot in the playoff, watching Tom hit his driver and being like whoa, he is not going away.  So the memories, even though they’re 10 years old, they’re still very fresh.

MODERATOR:  Thank you.