U.S. SENIOR OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP

June 26, 2025

Stewart Cink

The Broadmoor (East Course)

Quick Quotes

THE MODERATOR: Stewart Cink, 2-under 6. Stewart, your first round at a Senior Open. How did it compare to expectations?

STEWART CINK: It was about what I expected after playing the practice round. The course is excellent. It's really a really good course and fun to play. You have your hands full out there, especially mentally.

It's typical USGA setup. The rough is thick and the greens are very, very demanding. So it's quite a puzzle.

Q. What did you take away from today in terms of what needs to happen to attack this course the right way?

STEWART CINK: I don't think attack is really the right word here because -- now it's hard to say what the greens are going to do. If it doesn't rain and stays sunny, the greens could really firm up a lot, and then maybe we could attack some.

The ball is spinning a lot out there. You hit good drivers out there, and Harrington hits it a long way. I hit it relatively pretty far. You get good drivers and you've got short iron shots and you spin off the green. So it's really hard to attack those shots when you have to take extra club and just bunt those things up the hill.

That's one of the unique challenges of this course with the slope; the whole thing is on a big slant. The greens when they have moisture in them, it's hard to predict what it does when it lands and make sure it's not spinning backwards at all.

Q. Stewart, I don't know what your take on this is, but at a normal course, if you hit the first 17 greens, would you think you'd be better than 3-under? You did hit the first 17 greens.

STEWART CINK: I didn't realize that.

Q. I didn't know if you were counting.

STEWART CINK: No, I didn't realize that. It's a difficult putting course, so not only is it hard to hit the ball at the right distance with the altitude and the ups and downs and the spins and all that, but you leave yourself a lot of 20-, 25-foot putts that have a lot of break and don't always do what they look like they're going to do.

You have to trust your mountain and valley effect. It's not the kind of course where you string together four birdie putts in a row where you're just like hoop, hoop, hoop, hoop.

So, yeah, I'm not surprised that I was only 3-under par after hitting that many greens. I had some putts out there that were 20-footers that had eight, nine feet of break, and you're just not going to make that many of those.

I made some of the ones that I gave myself really good opportunities to, and I missed a couple of those too. All in all, I was fairly pleased with the way I played today. I felt like it was not spectacular. It was a good opening day to kind of like get my feet wet.