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THE TOUR CHAMPIONSHIP PRESENTED BY COCA-COLASeptember 11, 2007Stewart CinkATLANTA, GEORGIA JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Stewart Cink, for joining us here in the media center at the TOUR Championship. Great play last week, moved you from 32nd to the 24th in the FedExCup playoffs. I know you always want to get in the TOUR Championship, but it's even nicer when it's only 45 minutes from your home. STEWART CINK: Yes, that's true. It's always a big goal, and to be on the outside looking in with one tournament left is never a really great feeling. But then to go in there and play well and do what I had to do to get in and have a couple of really nice rounds there, too, it is exciting to have a finish like that. Q. Can you talk about the format of the FedExCup where we get to the last tournament where only three guys didn't play the whole series? STEWART CINK: Well, the points are what they are, and if you're going to take a tournament off and still have a chance to win, then you'd just better darn well play really well in the tournaments you do choose to play in. You can't argue with a guy that takes a week off and then plays great to put himself in position to win. I guess like Tiger is leading right now, right? Is it a flawless system? I don't know. I think it would be a flaw to make Tiger Woods play four straight tournaments, myself. The points are the way they are, and it's going to be an exciting finish this week, I believe. Q. Does this have the kind of Super Bowl feeling that you thought it would have? STEWART CINK: The TOUR Championship has always had a feeling of prestige, and it's an honor to be in the field. Whether it's a culmination of the season-long buildup, I think it is, because I think people have been looking to see who's going to be playing for this $10 million. So for the players, you know, it's Tuesday. It's hard to get real excited right now about it because you try to gear back this time of the week. We gear up a little bit once we get later on in the week, but for now it's sort of like let's sit back here and get ready for the tournament. As far as being amped up right now about it, let's wait until the end. Q. Would you recommend any changes to the FedExCup system? STEWART CINK: Yeah, there's a lot of changes that are coming down the line. I don't know what they're going to be. A lot of things that players have come up with for ways to improve it, we're kind of blocked by contractual obligations, such as, let's go back to three tournaments. Then what are you going to do, just drop one of those tournaments out and say we know you contracted to be a FedExCup tournament, but now you're not going to be in there? We've got contracts that are big deals to both the PGA TOUR and our television partners and the title sponsors themselves. To juggle that stuff around is not just like calling up someone on the phone and saying, okay, let's do this and that, okay, talk to you later. We do have a lot of possibilities of changing things in the points distribution, any kind of policy that we write internally, the board and the officials for the TOUR. We have all kinds of leeway to change that. That's where the changes are going to come. I don't know what they're going to be. Honestly I haven't really thought that much about it. But I think there's going to be some. Q. The greens, presumably you've had a chance to see them, better or worse than you had feared? Are you relieved, or where are you on that scale? STEWART CINK: I have not seen the greens. Yeah, sorry. I did play here about a month ago, and they were -- it was right during the peak of the hot spell that we had that lasted pretty much the whole of August, the whole month of August, and they were pretty much on life support at that time. I mean, they were thin, there were areas on the greens that were big patches of dead grass. They were obviously trying to resuscitate the growth. They had green fans in. Cal Roth from the PGA TOUR was here the day before I was here because of basically emergency. He was like in the Situation Room (laughter). As was the plan before the unreasonable heat wave that we had, they closed the golf course, they got traffic off the greens, and every course gets better when people don't play it, so the greens got a little chance to heal. They alternated the mowing patterns, and I think it's all been pretty much documented what they did. Sounds like a little bit cooler temperatures at night and a little less -- upper 80s and lower 90s instead of 102 every day have gotten the greens a little bit healthier. They're going to be soft and not that fast, but they'll be okay. Q. They're not going to be perfect so there could be some room for complaining, but in this situation should guys just bite their lip and take the company line for the image of the tournament, not let this be an issue? STEWART CINK: I don't think you have to bite your lip and not take the company line because I think most players in the field understand that heat and humidity and bentgrass don't go together. It's not like anyone is at fault here. If someone dumped chemicals on the green and they did a wrong mixture and suddenly ended up with bad streaks on the greens from that, we've seen that. I remember playing a tournament ten years ago somewhere down in Florida where when they overseeded they mixed in a wrong fertilizer and they burned up their own greens, and we still played. There's a reason to complain. Someone went off the deep end, somebody made a mistake. Here there's no mistake. You go to any course around here with bentgrass greens, you're going to see it, thin grass, almost no root structure, thin greens. You make a ball mark that are almost twice the size of the ball when you hit into the greens. We used to be -- in November when the grass had lots of time to heal up and get nice and healthy again and the roots would get really solid, that resulted in firmer, faster greens. But September is not enough time to recover. Q. Does it frustrate you when some players make critical comments about the FedExCup playoffs events during the playoffs, when perhaps some of those same players could have made an effort to find out about it in advance. STEWART CINK: It does bother me. It bothers me, and the reason is because we don't know how this thing is going to be yet. It's new, it's just been created in the last 18 months. There's no way to know how good a product it can be until we just kind of sit back and let it be a product without tainting it, with negative stories that are not necessary. Q. Following up on that, there's been some complaining, not only about that but about other aspects of the FedExCup recently. Do you think that TOUR players as a whole need to kind of take a conscious effort not to turn off fans with all the complaining? STEWART CINK: I think that's exactly what they need to do. It's only going to be as successful as the fans perceive we think it is, if that makes sense. If we embrace it, if we act like it's great -- and I'm not talking about company line here, I'm saying if we really do embrace it, and if it means something to us, then the fans are going to think so, and they're going to follow it and it's going to be big. But if we complain about it and we say too many tournaments in a row or whatever, deferred payment, you know, there's a lot of different issues that players have brought up, then the fans are going to be turned off and it's not going to be a very good television show. To me you have to be a part of the team here and say, okay, let's say what we've got. This is the future of golf. It's not just one and out; it's going to be here for a little while, so let's see how good we can make it instead of driving it into the ground. Q. You understand why the average person might have to think whether they want to pay $40 or $80 to watch a round of golf for a deferred payment that might have been prevalent but occasional? STEWART CINK: I don't understand. Q. There's been an occasional comment that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow came as a lump sum, and you understand why the average Joe or Mary or whoever would be a little -- like looking at the lottery winner having a deferred payment. STEWART CINK: To complain about that kind of money going into your possession, whether it's deferred or going into your bank account right now, I don't know how good that sounds. I don't think it sounds very good to complain about that. These tournaments aren't new tournaments, right? We've played here before, we've played at Cog Hill before, we've played at Westchester, we've played at TPC of Boston. All we did was rearrange the schedule. It's not like they said we're going to add four tournaments to the schedule and these are the tournaments you have to play for FedExCup money. They took those tournaments out of the schedule and put them at the end. It's a shuffling of the cards. Yeah, to complain about the purse money, the style that it's being distributed, I don't think it sounds very good to the public at all. I think it turns people off. Q. Are there places to tweak the FedExCup for next year? STEWART CINK: Are there plans? Yeah, there's always -- there's no closed communication at all. You can always call whoever you want to call and talk. You know, I'm on the board. Below the board there's four of us, and below the four of us there's 16 players on the Player Advisory Council that are always open for this kind of thing. Everybody that works for the TOUR, including Joan and all the media staff, are always open to comments, and I'm sure if someone handed Joan a comment or talked to her and said I want you to get this to the right person, Joan would get it to the right person. I've heard people talk about they feel like they're a little bit excluded or not being consulted about some of these issues, and the fact is that we have player meetings that a lot of people don't come to. That's where we discuss this. It's an open forum. It's, what, two hours at the most out of your time. So we've got plenty of those coming up. Nothing is planned right now. There is a board meeting in November, but that was planned before this. There will be plenty of times to discuss it at open forum. As far as a private conversation, it can be had any time of day, 24 hours a day Tim is going to answer his phone and he's going to call you back fast. Q. What would your recommendations be? STEWART CINK: I don't know. I haven't had a chance to sit down and think about it much, and I don't know the ins and outs of the contract situations that we have to get things done. Maybe there will be some sponsors that are willing to tweak their agreement a little bit if we need to add a tournament or if we need to take one out. Who knows, there's a lot of possibilities, and for me to say what I think should happen will -- I wouldn't want to do that because I just haven't put enough thought into it. Q. One of the concerns this year was the pressed schedule with guys having to play at least seven times in nine weeks. Next year it's seven times in eight weeks because of the Ryder Cup. Have you started a discussion now about what to do for next year because that's nothing but a strain, especially on the American guys who have to head right over on Monday to Ireland? STEWART CINK: Well, it's in Kentucky next year. But I know one thing, if I'm on the Ryder Cup next year, then it's going to be really difficult for me to play in every single tournament. The Ryder Cup means a lot, the FedExCup means a lot, all these tournaments mean a lot, but it means so much to me that I want to be fresh for as much as possible. I seriously doubt that everybody on the Ryder Cup is going to play in all the tournaments. JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Stewart. End of FastScripts |
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