Team Cink's 'cheeky' motivation has them contending at Quail Hollow

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Stewart Cink, who shot a five-birdie, no-bogey 66 Friday to reach 5 under par at the Wells Fargo Championship – three behind early second-round leaders Tyrrell Hatton, Nate Lashley and Wyndham Clark – has an unusual arrangement with his caddie.

If he makes a particularly great shot, his caddie, who happens to be his wife, Lisa, will give him a kiss. And even if he makes a pretty darn good shot, then … well, erm, we’ll let him explain.

Stewart: “She’ll make a deal with me if I get a super-long putt inside three feet, she says I get a peck on the cheek. And if I make a long one it’s grabbing my butt cheek.” (Laughs)

Lisa: “You really just told him that.”

Stewart: “Either way the cheeks get action.”

Lisa: “I can’t believe you just told him that. That’s lovely. We have no secrets.”

Stewart: “That’ll be my goal this weekend, is to get one very public …”

Lisa: “Oh, good.”

Welcome to the latest edition of Stewart Cink and the Family Caddie Corps. For the last two seasons Cink walked the fairways with his youngest son, Reagan, with whom he captured the Safeway Open (now Fortinet Championship) in 2020 and RBC Heritage in ’21.

But at the end of last season, Reagan, an industrial engineer, left for a job helping to coordinate pilot training at Delta Airlines. (Stewart has the airline’s logo on his shirt, starting this week.) The departure of Reagan left Stewart, who will turn 50 later this month, without a caddie, and for a while he went with veteran Scott Sajtinac. They split amicably, though, and he hired Lisa for the recent RBC Heritage, the first time she’d caddied on TOUR in seven or eight years.

Although Stewart missed the cut at Hilton Head, the husband-wife team was not deterred.

“Strangely I think we get along much better when we’re doing this,” Lisa said. “I think it makes me more understanding, more patient because I’m seeing what he deals with. And it feels like we’re kind of doing it together. I feel like we jell more.”

Added Stewart: “Having her on the bag is kind of a relaxing, fun thing. She’s really good from an encouragement standpoint, and good at reminding me where to be emotionally and mentally. Intangibles like how to be decisive and not get tangled up in the planning and just execute.”

Lisa estimates she has caddied for Stewart 10 or 12 times. PING sent a new lightweight carry bag, so she has been availed of a lighter load here while also sporting a nifty PING cap.

Asked what exactly has been going well at Quail, where he has four top-10 finishes in 15 starts, Stewart cited feeling fresh after a two-week break. He and Lisa went out to Las Vegas with friends to celebrate her recent 50th birthday, then went hiking in Zion National Park.

They got a good group here, too, playing with J.J. Spaun (67, 7 under) and 2023 U.S. Ryder Cup Captain Zach Johnson (75, 7 over), with whom the Cinks have become close after years of playing on TOUR and even vacationing together.

Naturally, Johnson had a few quips at the ready.

“The only thing I remember Zach saying is he had a couple jokes he wanted to tell me that he couldn’t tell because Lisa was there,” Stewart said. “He said something like, ‘Why do we have to have a girl caddie in the group?’ [Laughs] ‘I’ve got some good jokes to tell!’”

The remark was in jest. Stewart and Lisa Cink and Zach and Kim Johnson know each other so well that Lisa had to remind herself that this was serious business and no time for social hour.

“At the end I told Zach, ‘I tried not to talk to you too much,’” she said. “We’re close, and I didn’t want it to be distracting. He said, ‘Yeah, you didn’t initiate one conversation with me!’”

Stewart turns 50 later this month, and his first PGA TOUR Champions start could come at the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship if he doesn’t get into the Charles Schwab Challenge the same week. Both events are in Texas, the first in Frisco and the second in Fort Worth.

“After we land, we’ll just figure out which courtesy car to pick up,” he said.

It’s anyone’s guess who might be on his bag that week. For the AT&T Byron Nelson next week he will have his longtime coach, Mike Lipnick, on the bag. For the time being, though, it’s Lisa.

“I like her caddying,” Stewart said. “I’ve been doing this six hundred and something tournaments and most of the time she’s been outside the ropes. To have her with me is kind of like having another teammate, so it feels different from having a regular caddie. I don’t want to say anything bad about the regular caddies because they all do such a great job, but to have Reagan caddie or Lisa caddie, it’s just something fun. I think we get along better.

“She’s got the kind of personality to step in and carry that thing and just really be encouraging out there,” he added. “Our relationship is built for teamwork out here. It’s a blessing for sure.”