Cink was making his sixth start on the PGA Tour Champions and before the tournament started, shared recollections of playing La Paloma many years ago.
“It’s been a long time since I was in Tucson. I played in a lot of the [PGA Tour] match plays that were here up at Dove Mountain and I played a tournament at this course when I was about 16 or 17 years old. A long, long time ago, like another life it feels like,” he said Thursday. “But it’s always been a good town and, like I said, desert golf is just a fun way to play.”
And it was fun again. Until it wasn’t.
Cink opened his week with a bogey-free 9-under 62 on Friday. He followed that up with a 2-under 69 Saturday, then made birdie on three of his first five holes Sunday to take a four-shot lead.
But then he started back-pedaling, and after a bogey on No. 10 he was tied for the lead at 12 under with Durant. He would go 6 over on a 10-hole stretch, bottoming out with a triple-bogey 7 on the par-4 13th hole.
Cink said it was the bogey on seventh hole that started the slide.
“Go back to the seventh hole and I can pinpoint, one of the things I pride myself on is never hitting a shot when I’m not ready to go. If I feel any doubts or, you know, something’s not comfortable, then I’m disciplined,” he said a few minutes after signing his scorecard. “On the seventh hole I felt the wind change when I was over the ball and I had just hit it and I didn’t stop, even though I kind of had some doubt. I don’t know why I let that blind side me. I hit a poor shot, ended up making bogey there. It’s not the end of the world, but that kind of blindsided me and I just wasn’t myself the rest of the day. It was kind of a gut punch out there.”
After a bogey on No. 10, he birdied the par-5 11th and parred the 12th. Course corrected? It was not. Two holes later, with a wedge in his hand, he sailed one right, his ball going into a wash then ran down the length of the hole. After stabbing at the ball with his third, he was plugged up against the wall of the wash, had to take a drop before two-putting for a triple.
“That was obviously like a dagger, a big score. I compounded my error there,” he said. “I’ve got some new things going in my golf swing and it was just sort of like a one-two punch, the daggers and then like the difficulty trusting the new stuff and it just, you know, it’s part of golf and it sucks.”
Cink went from a four-shot lead with 13 to go to a 2-over 73 and a tie for seventh.