No fairytale as Cink steps out of shadows

STEWART CINK is a fine golfer, a gentleman and a worthy winner of the 138th Open Championship.

But the first major victory for the 36-year-old, 6 ft 4 inch resident of Duluth, Georgia, at Turnberry yesterday was widely regarded as an anti-climax of massive proportions. It wasn’t that he didn’t deserve his long overdue success – Cink returned the best score, 69, of the seven players under par when the final round began – but Tom Watson, just seven weeks short of his 60th birthday, was the man the whole world wanted to win.

And he would have done so for a sixth time and equalled Harry Vardon’s age-old record with a par four at the 18th, a hole playing relatively easily in the prevailing conditions. But his approach from the middle of the fairway trickled over the back of the green and he took three more to get down. Instead of pulling off arguably the greatest golfing story of this or any other generation, Watson was a soft touch in the four-hole play-off for Cink, 23 years his junior.