Stewart Cink just finished practicing.
With the 2025 PGA Tour Champions season starting, the 51-year-old was working on his game ahead of his first full season on the senior circuit, which began last week with the Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai, where Cink placed T8.
The eight-time PGA Tour winner and 2009 British Open champion has played professionally since 1995, seeing golf’s evolution up close from the rise of Tiger Woods to the inception of LIV Golf—and everything in between.
After his tuneup, Cink dished on several topics to Sports Illustrated from Hualalai’s dining area, including his move to the PGA Tour Champions, the state of the professional game, Scottie Scheffler, the TGL and Ryder Cup.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sports Illustrated: Take me through your decision to leave the PGA Tour and play the PGA Tour Champions full-time in 2025.
Stewart Cink: I spoke to a lot of players that preceded me in the same situation where they had status left on the PGA Tour when they turned 50 and pretty much to a man, everybody said the same thing: “You’ll just know, you’ll have a gut feeling that kind of says it’s the right time,” which really irritated the heck out of me, to be honest, because I wanted some concrete information.
And so they just kind of left me to do what they did and just feel it out. And I would say about the end of last summer when I played mostly PGA Tour golf at the age of 50 and turned 51, I kind of felt like I just knew, like it was just time. I know less and less people and I still thoroughly enjoy playing tournament golf and practicing and competing and game-planning the courses and dealing with all the emotional ups and downs and all that. I love doing that, but being out there and feeling somewhat like an outlier just tarnished it a little bit for me and I just decided it was time and I understood what those guys all meant when they said, “you’ll know.”
SI: You won twice in the 2020-21 season at age 47. You also defeated a 59-year-old Tom Watson in a playoff at the 2009 British Open. How did winning that late in your career and seeing an almost 60-year-old nearly win a major up close influence your decision to stay on the PGA Tour longer?
SC: I would say if I hadn’t had those two wins late in my 40s, I would have just switched over (to the PGA Tour Champions) right when I turned 50. But those two wins extended my exemption out a little bit to where I could choose to play either one and because length hasn’t been a factor for me. I’m not too short to play on the regular tour. I can still compete length-wise.
I just decided to keep playing out there because I just like testing myself and playing against the best and so without those two wins in ‘20 and ‘21, I would have switched over immediately, but they’re pretty recent in my mind and knowing what Watson did and a couple other guys over the years have played well in their early to mid-50s. (Phil) Mickelson recently won a major at 50.
These days, we don’t get old as fast as we used to in golf. You can still crank the ball out there pretty far if you work hard at it and mentally you stay sharp. You can still compete well in your 50s, and that’s what I was planning to do. And also, to be fair, I mean, I would be probably dancing around the fact that also I just haven’t had a great couple of years. Not being very high up on the money list or the FedExCup or having a lot of chances to win, that’s also a factor, too.
SI: What are your goals for the 2025 season?
SC: As far as goals, I’m kind of a weird one as far as goals. I’ve never really been a big goals guy. I don’t really know how to explain that, but it drives my wife crazy.
But I’ve been more of a small-picture goals kind of a player than I have a big-picture goals. Sure, I want to win and I want to lead the Schwab Cup list and all that, but I see that as more like rewards from doing the little things that I actually have control over. Wins, I’ve played great in tournaments and not won, and I’ve played not great in tournaments and won.
Winning is so tough that I tend to not really put too much of my goal setting onto things like wins and points and stuff that has so much to do with other players. Instead, I like to focus on small boring things like being ready for each shot, being as prepared as I can be before I go to the first tee of every tournament.
So it’s kind of boring, but those are kind of goals I like.
SI: Next year, Tiger Woods is eligible for the PGA Tour Champions. How would you feel about him joining the senior tour and competing against him again?
SC: I think it would be awesome. I just watched Bernhard Langer and his son competing against Tiger and his son at the PNC (Championship). I played in that too. And so to see Bernhard and his son get a chance to come down the stretch against Tiger Woods, I mean, that’s like a dream.
So that’s one of the great things about the Champions Tour is that it gives you like a second career in a way, where you can kind of redo some of the things that you did in the main heyday part of your career, and if I get a chance to play against Tiger and maybe compete against him and down the stretch again, that would be incredible. That’d be just such a joy and I think it’d be great for the tour, obviously.
SI: You’re leaving the PGA Tour at a contentious time in golf, with ratings reportedly down and the game split between the PGA Tour and LIV. What are your feelings about the health of the sport?
SC: I think the game overall is a little bit too small to be divided up and I would like to see the players from LIV Golf come back and be reunited with players from the PGA Tour. I think that’s what’s best for our fans and for all the players. With that being said, I have no idea how to accomplish that. I just think it would be the best. I don’t think it’s good for us to be divided.
I don’t know about ratings, I don't have much expertise in areas like that. I do think that we have a dominant player, Scottie Scheffler, right now who’s just incredible, who is probably not the guy that people are turning on the TV to watch like they used to with Tiger Woods when he was doing the same thing. That’s just the difference in the personalities of those two guys.
Nothing against Scottie. He’s a friend and I have nothing but the most respect for him, but his personality is just like—he’s like a machine out there, and Tiger had a flair for the dramatic that everybody loves to watch whether he was playing great or playing terrible. And so, he drew the eyeballs.
SI: What’s your opinion on the TGL?
SC: I watched the first episode. I watched about half of it. I think that a lot of people are just curious to see what is this gonna be like, how legit it's gonna be. And they pulled it out pretty well. I thought the technology worked great.
It’s a different type of golf experience and I think it’s kind of a blend of like what a lot of people see at a Topgolf versus on-the-course golf. So it’s kind of a good sort of a happy meeting place in between. I hope it succeeds and I know it's good for the players and it can be popular in a different time slot, on a weekday night compared to—normally people think of golf as being on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. So that’ll be interesting to see. I’ll be paying attention to it. I’m not certain I’ll be tuning in every time.
I’d like to know from some of these players, like, what does it mean to you? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to win the whole thing? I don’t understand all that, so I’d like to have that cleared up a little bit.
SI: Your name has been thrown around as a future U.S. Ryder Cup captain. What would it mean to you to get that nod?
SC: Oh, it would mean everything. Just to get back in that arena, I was there in ‘23 as an assistant captain for the first time and to get back into it just felt so good to represent the U.S. and to be with the guys and just do everything I can do to help them succeed.
I guess I didn’t do enough (in 2023), but it was just so fun to be a part of that and I would love the opportunity to do it again. I think of myself as being—I think I’ll become an operations-focused kind of captain, like nuts and bolts and how are we gonna attack the course and pair up guys today?
SI: What are your thoughts on players being paid to play in the Ryder Cup?
The only opinion I have on that is it seems like a lot less of an issue once they finally said, ‘O.K., let’s just pay the players and let them do what they want with the money.’ Some players are gonna give it all to charity. Some players may not. Thing is, I don’t think it really matters.
When there was uncertainty about what was gonna happen, it was a big story and now they kind of said, ‘All right, let’s let the steam out of the balloon here and the players can do whatever they want with it.’ Just seems like the story is not that big of a deal anymore. I’m sure the European side will probably want it to be a story.
And the players are the heart and soul of the competition and so anybody that knows anything about professional sports doesn’t have to do a whole lot of math to figure out that the players probably are in the right to get paid for something and if they want to keep it, that’s their prerogative.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Q&A: Stewart Cink on His New Tour, Setting Goals and What He Would Ask TGL Players.