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BANK OF AMERICA COLONIAL

May 20, 2004

Stewart Cink

FORT WORTH, TEXAS

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Stewart Cink, great round today 66, 4-under par today, no bogeys, four birdies and 23 putts. Obviously a great day on the greens for you today.

STEWART CINK: It was. A lot of those putts were for pars. I made a lot of par saves in the 4-foot, 6-foot, 7-foot range today. Those are the momentum builders. I was looking at bogeys a few times out there and was able to make the putts.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Talk about your season so far. You had a solid season last year and you won earlier this season at the MCI Heritage and had a couple of other close calls. It seems like you've taken your game to another level. In a year with the Ryder Cup, I'm sure you'd like to play in another Ryder Cup.

STEWART CINK: The Ryder Cup is something I'm looking forward to, and before the win I really wasn't much in the running. I was in the 30s, maybe in the 40s in the rankings there. Now I've got myself in position where another win I could make the team. That's one of my goals. I've played well all year. I've been working really hard the last couple of hard and the work is really paying off now.

Q. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are in your game heading into the Open and what you might need to step up to bring a nice score into Shinnecock and maybe having a chance of walking away with that?

STEWART CINK: I'll just say the same thing everyone else will say, so you won't have to ask anybody else. Shinnecock is one of the hardest driving courses so you really have to be on your driving game there. And you have to be ready to put your ball in play with whatever club you're going to use off the tee. I doubt if it's going to be a course where you're going to hit a lot of drivers. No course is anymore. You have to be ready with your game plan and your confidence and just be prepared to hit the fairways there.

That's what I need to do myself. I'm not -- I didn't drive the ball very well today, so I would like to go and work on that a little bit and hopefully improve. This is a great course to practice driving the ball. This is a difficult driving course, too.

Q. You have a pretty good history here of playing well, and I wondered why that is, first of all. Second of all, do you play the course any differently since you've changed your ball flight and such? How has it changed the way you play this course?

STEWART CINK: I haven't really changed anything that would affect the way I play here. This course is just a course where you have to use a lot of imagination off the tees. You can't stand up there and rip your driver off the tee. You have got a lot of irons -- not a lot, but you have a lot of 3 woods, for sure. And you've got a lot of holes where you need to hit cuts and draws. The course just demands that kind of precision off the tee, not that I was real precise today, but I just enjoy playing a course where you have to have a game plan with every shot, not just rip it and go find it.

Q. The conditions today were pretty conducive for scoring. Have we yet to see the toughest days ahead this weekend for Colonial when the winds pick up?

STEWART CINK: The wind was not really blowing that hard today. It was affecting the ball, but it was predictable. It's tougher when it gets gusty. And I heard it's supposed to blow pretty hard the rest of the week. There are days out here where it can blow really really hard through these big trees and you have no idea what club to hit or which direction to aim. I would expect it to be more difficult as the week goes on.

Q. Earlier in the week some of the guys were saying the rough is not quite as thick as it's been in the past. It sounds like you had some scrambling holes today. How did you find the rough? Was it as tough as it was in the past or were you able to drive through it today?

STEWART CINK: The rough here isn't very deep, because it's early in the season for this type of grass, so it's just beginning to hit its growth spurts. The challenge in the rough here is you can't spin the ball. The greens are already small, and when you're in the rough hitting these flyers, they are so tiny you rarely can fly the ball to the green, you have to bounce it up. It's challenging when you miss a fairway because you have to hit a shot you're not accustomed to hitting.

That's how I found it today, I was able to handle my shots out of the rough pretty well and put it in spots where I could get it up and down for pars.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Let's go over your four birdies. You birdied the first two holes right out of the gate.

STEWART CINK: Hitting the fairway is key on 1 and 2. I was only going in with a 4-iron on the first hole and missed the green in the bunker, but it wasn't a very difficult shot and hit that to within four feet.

2, I was in the fairway only about 60 yards from the flag and hit that to about a foot, a lob-wedge, a good start, especially with 3, 4, and 5, three of the most difficult holes on the Tour coming up. I got through those okay.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Jumping down to 16 and 18.

STEWART CINK: 16 was the easiest pin on the course today, probably, sort of a funnel down in front of the green and I got lucky and funneled it in there about four feet, five feet with an 8-iron.

18, I played it very well, 3-wood into the fairway, 9-iron to maybe 12 feet, and knocked that one in.

Q. You said you made some pretty good par putts. What were some of your more lengthy ones?

STEWART CINK: The one that sticks out was on 14, I hit it well left of the fairway into a tough spot, tried to go through the trees and caught one of the trees and it bounced into the fairway. I was able to get up and down from about 75 yards, and I made about a 15-foot-er for par.

That's not a good example for the way my day was. I wasn't doing that all day, but it was a good momentum saver, considering I was looking at going backwards, instead I came out looking pretty good and I played well the rest of the way.

Q. There's been lots of talk about Colonial either becoming obsolete and not worthy of the quality tournament that comes on here because people are shooting it up, such as they did last year, and some are still contending that it's worthy of a Major. Where in the world would you stand on that?

STEWART CINK: Well, I have to say there's only one person saying it's obsolete. Unfortunately, it just happens to be the one person that everybody listens to when he says something about golf. I don't think this course is obsolete. Yes, they shot low scores here last year, but if you remember the last couple of years we've had storms on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We didn't get the south wind, which is typical here, and we had soft conditions. The players are going to shoot low on every course when it's like that. But this week it's dry and the wind is going to blow a little bit, it looks like, if we avoid the storms. When that happens here and you get the normal weather, 13, 12-under par is always good. It's a tough challenge no matter what. The golf ball is going a long way, we're all hitting the ball far, but you can't just stand up on every tee and just hit for the distance here. And that's what a good course is.

As far as holding a Major, somebody in these organizations that hold Majors seem to think that you have to have 500-yard par 4s and a 7600-yard course to hold one of those tournaments. Southern Hills wasn't overly long, and it withstood the test. Colonial would withstand the test if they had high rough. I think it's a worthy test of any type of event.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Stewart Cink, thank you.

End of FastScripts.

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