Plenty To Stew About
As Stewart Cink stumbles, a rejuvenated Sean O'Hair rediscovers his winning ways at the PODS Championship
Cink's reversal of form Sunday included a lefty swing at 14 en route to a bogey.
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So, you think losing 8 and 7 to the best player in the world hurts? Take a number. Get in line. The thumping in the desert was nothing compared to the thrashing Stewart Cink gave himself at the PODS Championship. If the first one left a mark, this one is going to require stitches.
After 54 holes on the Copperhead Course at Innisbrook Resort and GC, two days of which were as brutally difficult as the PGA Tour has seen all season and where no player was as resolute as the 34-year-old Cink, the man with Tiger Woods' paw prints still on his back, took a two-shot lead into the final round convinced this tournament belonged to him -- only to find out it really was the property of Sean O'Hair all along. It was the worst of times for one man, the best of times for the other.
It certainly didn't look that way starting out Sunday afternoon. Just exactly as Woods has done so many times, Cink immediately birdied the first two holes to increase his lead. If the WGC-Accenture Match Play had taught him anything, it was how to get up and stay up, right? Woods gets ahead and goes into lockdown. Cink went into meltdown. But momentum doesn't change like a thunderclap. More often it is a squeaky three-footer delivering a somber message of doom.
Cink's first miss was a careless three-putt from 15 feet just on the fringe on the third. He bogeyed the eighth when he couldn't get up and down from left of the green to give back all his early gains. Then at the 11th and 13th, Cink missed a pair of crucial six-footers, the first for birdie, the second for par. The best long-putter in golf had become, by his own account, tentative.
When momentum leaves the party, disaster is the designated driver. At the 14th Cink drove it left against a tree, turned an 8-iron upside-down and tried to slap the ball up the fairway left-handed. It appeared to catch a root, jump in the air, hit a tree in front of him and advance only a few yards. From there he made another bogey while O'Hair was ahead fashioning a comfortable cushion. A 3-wood off the tee straight into the hazard on the 16th finished Cink off for good with a dispiriting double bogey and a three-over 74.
"I'm hanging my head because I didn't win," Cink said. "I definitely thought this was my tournament."
O'Hair was, of course, the beneficiary of Cink's miscues, but he was aided by the fact no other player in the last three threesomes equaled or bettered par, either. O'Hair, on the clock because of his slow play, was the only one who stepped up with a two-under 69, even if it was at an excruciatingly weary pace.
After three undistinguished outings early in the year and then a missed cut in the Northern Trust Open, O'Hair went home to suburban Philadelphia to regroup. The 25-year-old with the baby-faced grin, the disposition to go along with it and the heart-wrenching history of a sour relationship with his father, was at a loss.
"I'm working harder than I've ever worked in my life," he says he wondered to himself. "I just feel like I'm so far away from playing good golf. What's going on? I didn't really have a game plan. I called my coach. I looked at film. I looked at my videos from '05. What was I doing different?"
His father-in-law, Steve Lucas, joined O'Hair in Palm Beach Gardens at the Honda Classic where O'Hair missed another cut. Lucas, with an assist from Dr. Bob Rotella, helped keep O'Hair believing in what could be. His old videos from '05 reminded him of what had been -- a skinny kid who wasn't afraid to fail. His coach, Steve Dahlby, noticed O'Hair was coming a little over the top, and they worked to fix what is. And, after his man's two bogeys on the front nine in a howling gale Saturday, caddie Paul Tesori, who carried Vijay Singh's bag for five years, got O'Hair to imagine what will be and call his own shots.
"We were two over, and he was hitting it kind of crooked, and we went to the 10th hole, and he said, 'Come on, start asking me what I'm going to do,' " said Tesori. "When he went to that thought, he really struck it beautifully the last 27 holes."
No place more beautifully than on the 15th Sunday when he hit a back-footed 7-iron 32 feet from the hole and then knew the putt was in when it was halfway there. From that point on, O'Hair just tried, "not to throw up on myself." Even with a bogey at the last, he was two shots clear of the field with a four-under 280 total.
