What they said: Stewart Cink

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As part of Tuesday's announcement by PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem concerning the TOUR's renewed commitment to charitable efforts, veteran pro Stewart Cink discussed the involvement from the charity organization's perspective:

Stewart Cink

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Stewart Cink on his charities

I can give you a true before and after picture of what the charitable giving on the PGA TOUR is all about.

When I was a college student I played at Georgia Tech in the early the '90s we used to use East Lake as one of our home courses. It was close to campus, an old club in town as a lot of them are in the big cities these days. No one ever played there. It was cheap. It was in bad condition. It was dangerous. Just getting to the golf course was a challenge, literally. You had to defend yourself at times, and there were players on numerous occasions that were held up through the fence and robbed at gunpoint, but we still played there because we could.

Then around 1995 or 1996 Tom Cousins, who is a big Atlanta property developer, took over East Lake, bought it, bought all the surrounding property, redid it with the goal of a community revitalization. And he formed the East Lake Community Foundation.

About that time the golf staff there, the operations staff, really wanted to attach themselves to a young, professional golfer to sort of help them get the word out and communicate about the what the East Lake Foundation was doing with the East Lake Golf Club being the hub of the activity. Luckily at the point in my career that I was, I was a young golf professional that lived in Atlanta so they contacted me and we began a relationship and they gave me a free membership at this brand new wonderful East Lake Golf Club that we see today and the only thing I had to give them in return was to spend a little bit of time with the kids.

The kids were young, inner city, anywhere from kindergarten on up to maybe the oldest were early teens, who would after school have nowhere to go because most of them didn't have parents. They didn't have homes, they just would wander, and East Lake Community Foundation took them under their wing, and in a First Tee style effort that began a little bit before the First Tee, they used the values of the game of golf to help them develop character traits, learn respect, all the great things that this wonderful game has given all of us.

I've seen these kids go from little kindergarteners who didn't know the first thing about a golf club, a golf course or anything, now I've seen kids get golf scholarships to college, the same kids. I've seen kids become competitive and compete all the kids around Atlanta which is as you can imagine a pretty strong depth of talent.

It's been great for me to be able to see the progression from kindergarteners -- you never know, these kids, they can get lost in the kind of world they're living in. To see them go from where they were to where they are now, one of the guys that used to run the program and was part of the program early on is now the golf coach at Michigan State. It's just a wonderful direct impact that East Lake Community Foundation has had on the lives of these young kids. A lot of them aren't young anymore, these are young adults now.

Obviously the Tour Championship presented by Coca-Cola has been a huge part of funneling charities money into these programs. It's always growing. They built a charter school there. It's just wonderful. They have a nine-hole golf course that's in as good a condition as the golf course across the street that's a little more famous that we all know of. It's warmed my heart to see these young kids develop and they learn to respect their elders and they learn to respect the game of golf.

I think it all goes back a step even before that to what the game of golf itself taught us as kids, and I'm talking about Zach and David, even Tim as a youngster playing golf. The game of golf just teaches you values and it teaches you character that other sports just seem to not quite communicate that. I think we're all the beneficiaries of the great gift that golf has given us. And as a member of the PGA TOUR I agree with Zach, it is an honor and a privilege to be associated with -- not only be able to play a great game for a living but also to do what the game does in the communities out there. And this initiative that the TOUR is starting I think is dead on.

It's wonderful that we're going to start communicating, not only that we have a drive to a billion dollars and we're going to reach another billion pretty soon, but all the players individually that have their own events that work with the kids at East Lake, that help with the floods that help with the David Toms Foundation and play in his event, these guys all play at my charitable event, too. We wouldn't be able to give the kind of money that we do to kids that need grief counseling and can't afford it without Zach Johnson and David Toms playing. We can't afford to pay them the kind of money that a company can pay them on a Monday. I can give them two jars of pickles and they'd go away happy. That's the kind of guys that these are. It's not just the ones up here at the table, it's everybody out there hitting balls at the range, too. I'm happy to be part of it and proud, and thanks for the time.