Safeway Open Recap: Let That Cink In

The Safeway Open was hit with a double whammy: Not only did it fall between the TOUR Championship and U.S. Open on the revised PGA Tour calendar, but it concluded on the same day as the NFL season began.

Faced with watching one of the weakest fields in years or Tom Brady vs. Drew Brees, well, only the most diehard of golf fans opted for the golf.

And they were treated to quite a finish, and quite a feel-good story.

Stewart Cink, 47 years old, winless for more than a decade and with his son serving as his caddie, held off Harry Higgs by two strokes to capture the 2020-21 season-opening tournament at Silverado Country Club in Napa Valley.

Cink had not won since edging 59-year-old Tom Watson in a playoff at the 2009 Open Championship at Turnberry. His son, Reagan, was not yet a teenager at the time. But the now-23-year-old was on the bag for his father's seventh career PGA Tour title.

It was a long dry spell for Cink, in part because in 2016 he took time off to care for his wife, Lisa, who is now in her fifth year of remission from breast cancer. She was in Napa to share in the special family moment. Cink himself had a scare with cancer, requiring a procedure on his nose in 2018.

Cink effectively gets a three-year exemption for winning – the rest of this season and then the official two-year exemption that will take him through the 2022-23 season. That will cover all his remaining time before he becomes eligible for the Champions Tour.

Some of the top pursuers whom Cink fended off are even younger than his son. Doc Redman, who tied for third, and Sahith Theegala (T14) are 22, while Akshay Bhatia (T9) is only 18. They finished in the top 10, as did Sam Burns, 24, and Kristoffer Ventura, 25, who aren't much older than Reagan Cink. Higgs is 28.
 
Cink shot 65-65 on the weekend to zoom up the leaderboard, and he also soared from 319th in the world rankings to 151st. He's not in this week's U.S. Open, but he'll be in next year's Masters and PGA Championship, among other big events.

For all that, the biggest gift for Cink was having his son by his side. He said Reagan is a casual golfer but knows the ins and outs of the sport at professional level. He shared one moment from Saturday's round to illustrate that, as conveyed by the Napa Valley Register:

"It was on the sixth hole and I had about a 20-foot putt and I read it from behind the hole and I read it behind the ball and I was pretty much resolute on my read," Cink said, "and I said, 'Reagan, I've got this going a little bit left, maybe just outside the hole.' He goes, 'Whoa, I had it going right.'

"So we had to start over, and in the end he convinced me by looking at our little map and some other factors right around the hole that he was right. I played his read and it couldn't have gone more in the middle of the hole. So I was proud of him right there not because he read the putt right, but because he had the guts to stand in there and say, 'Dad, you're wrong about this. I'm right. Trust me.'

"That was a big moment for him, I think."

That was a big-time decision, and it may very well have won his dad his seventh PGA Tour event.

MONDAY BACKSPIN

Safeway Open
A word about the field. As mentioned, the hurdles facing Johnny Miller and other tournament organizers were high. The field was one of the Tour's worst in years with a strength-of-field rating of 111, as determined by the Official World Golf Ranking. There have been only eight weaker fields -- not including alternate events -- since the implementation of the wraparound schedule in 2013. Two of them took place only last fall: the Sanderson Farms Championship (106) and the Houston Open (72). The weakest field in the wraparound era remains the 2014 Mayakoba Classic (68). 

Harry Higgs
Higgs is coming off a brilliant rookie season, one that saw him become one of the four finalists for the PGA Tour Rookie of the Year Award, along with Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland and Maverick McNealy. Scheffler will win, but that shouldn't detract from what Higgs accomplished. He had seven top-25s and two top-10s and made it to the BMW Championship. Sunday's runner-up moved him inside the top 100 OWGR for the first time, at 97th.

Doc Redman
Redman lit it up early on Sunday to the tune of a 10-under 62, soaring 40 spots up the leaderboard to tie for third with older guys Chez Reavie, Kevin Streelman and Brian Stuard. Like Higgs, Redman also had seven top-25s last season, including a tie for third at the Wyndham Championship just a few weeks back. Redman is on a roll and is now up to a career-best 82nd in the OWGR.

Akshay Bhatia
The California teenager made his first PGA Tour cut and then some, tying for ninth. And he did it with a birdie on the 72nd hole. Bhatia had had missed his first seven cuts, all via sponsor invites. With the new season, he's got a fresh load of invites, but he won't need one in two weeks – the top-10 gets him into the field in the Dominican Republic, a full-points event. Bhatia had made one Korn Ferry cut last year and then just last week he tied for 13th in a co-sponsored Mackenzie Tour/Latinoamerica Tour event. So, some definite bright spots for the 18-year-old.

Sahith Theegala
The 22-year-old former NCAA Player of the Year from Pepperdine also had his best Tour result, but a costly bogey on the last bumped him out of the top 10 to T14. He had missed his first three cuts on Tour before tying for 41st at the alternate-field Barracuda Championship, which had been his most recent start.

Joohyung Kim
Continuing with the kids...the teenager from South Korea tied for 67th. He started to take off last year on the Asian Development Tour at age 17. He won twice there, then on the regular Asian Tour, then on the Korean Tour and suddenly found himself soaring up the world rankings. Kim ventured out of Asia for the first time for the PGA Championship last month and missed the cut. He's not in the field for the U.S. Open -- at least not this year.
 
Jordan Spieth
I'm not sure why we're even writing about him anymore, but Spieth ranked 106th in SG: Off-the-Tee. He was ranked 22nd in driving distance and 129th in accuracy. This isn't necessarily his biggest problem, because he has numerous problems, but why he is trying to hit the ball that far is perplexing. At his best, he generally ranked in the 70s or 80s on Tour in distance, never cracking the top 50. In his three best years, 2015-2017, he ranked 78-51-75 in distance. It seems he should take a little -- or a lot -- off the gas and get the ball in the fairway. Because what he's doing now isn't working.

Sergio Garcia
Garcia missed the playoffs, so getting in some reps before the U.S. Open was a good idea. Whether he wanted two reps or four, who knows, but he got only two with a missed cut. Garcia led the field in SG: Off-the-Tee while also ranking 153rd out of 156 in SG: Putting – and he sank 15- and 17-footers on his last two holes to avoid finishing dead last. Still, he lost more than five strokes putting. Even at age 40, Garcia still is so good off the tee (ranked third last season) and tee to green (fourth) that he could make the cut and then some at Winged Foot this week. That's not to say he will. Still, if only could putt merely bad instead of horrid, he'd be good enough to contend often throughout the season.

Tommy Fleetwood
He was among just three players in the Portugal Masters field heading to New York for the U.S. Open. He had a nice tune-up, with a tie for third in a tournament won by South African George Coetzee. Fleetwood did not return to the PGA Tour until late in the restart, didn't fare well and missed the playoffs. This was his first worldwide top-25 since another third-place finish at The Honda Classic back in February.

Will Zalatoris
The top player on the Korn Ferry Tour this past season finished runner-up in the Evans Scholars Invitational, won by Curtis Thompson -- Lexi Thompson's older brother -- over the weekend. Zalatoris is now ranked 119th in the OWGR, higher than many PGA Tour regulars. He will be in the U.S. Open, and it will be interesting to see how he does moving way up in class. Three other Korn Ferry Tour golfers -- Paul Barjon, Greyson Sigg and Stephan Jaeger -- finished top-10 in the same event and will also be at Winged Foot.