Insider: Always a closer, Cook now adding a fast start

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Chris Condon/PGA TOUR

John Cook fired back-to-back 64s to close out a win at the season opener at Hualalai.

John Cook learned the tenets of athletic competition early-on. His father, Jim, was a coach who always emphasized the important things.

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At the top of Jim Cook's list: Finishing like a champion.

"Whether you're up, down, tied, whatever, you just have to finish it out," John Cook said after winning the season-ending Charles Schwab Cup Championship for the second straight year.

"Growing up, no matter what sport I was playing or if I was racing or whatever I was doing, it was, 'You had to finish.' You remember how you finish and you learn from how you finish."

Born in Toledo, Ohio, and raised in southern California, Cook excelled in sports. In high school, he was equally proficient at golf and as a quarterback but there was little doubt his future belonged to golf. Cook proved the wisdom of the decision by winning the U.S. Amateur in 1978, at age 20, to springboard what has been a very successful professional career.

Cook won 11 times on the PGA TOUR and, so far, six tournaments on the Champions Tour, with several others thrown in worldwide.

His Champions Tour career features the Charles Schwab Championship titles but Cook has made it clear he expects the best is still to come. What's held him back on the Champions Tour is a penchant for performing his best only as the season is winding down. That comes naturally. It is, after all, what he was taught many years ago.

Cook's goal now is to flash out of the starting gate, too, and for the first time he's doing that.

Cook won the season-opening Mitsubishi Electric Championship in Hawaii just the way he was taught, with back-to-back 64s to close it out. It was his second straight Champions Tour victory following the Charles Schwab Cup Championship last November.

This week, he'll tee it up at the Allianz Championship on The Old Course at Broken Sound in Boca Raton, where he lost a playoff in 2010 to Bernhard Langer. Cook enters the Allianz Championship with a string of 12 straight rounds in the 60s, tying him with Fred Couples (2010) for the second-best streak in Champions Tour history. In 1999, Hale Irwin set the mark with 13 straight rounds in the 60s.

Cook, born on Oct. 2, has become the Champions Tour's Mr. October. Until the victory last month in Hawaii, each of his five previous victories on the Champions Tour occurred in October and November. He's also had ten top 10s in those two months, 33 rounds in the 60s and is 103-under-par.

Reggie Jackson would be proud of numbers like those.

"I guess when I have a birthday, it means I'm getting a little closer to the end, so I guess it whips me into shape," Cook said.

Truth is, Cook played very well throughout 2010 but victories eluded him. Another Charles Schwab Championship turned what could have been disappointment into another very solid year. Winning does that.

"It's about winning out here," Cook said. "Like my old friend Tiger Woods always says, he just thinks about winning. And that holds true, especially out here."

A good part of that is being aware of what it takes to win, something Cook has studied since his youth.

"You have to understand what's going on down the stretch when your body is racing and the adrenaline is flowing, and you have to understand how to finish, and that's what great champions do," Cook said.

"That's what those Hall-of-Famers do. They were finishers, and it was instilled in me young about finishing and working hard to push yourself."

Cook has a theory on why some tournaments have gotten away from him, especially early in the year. In 2010, he doesn't believe it was so much what he didn't do but what others did accomplish.

"Some finished better than I did," he said. "Bernhard holed a very live bunker shot to beat me in a playoff."

At the inaugural Montreal event, Cook shot 68 with the lead but was beaten by a shot when Larry Mize went low -- 64 -- in the final round.

Yes, there was a glitch or two in there but on the whole Cook left no doubt where his game is and where he belongs on the Champions Tour pecking order. But his stature isn't what's important to him.

"Hey, accolades are great, but results ... I feed off of results and the process in that result," he said. "Just because you're supposed to be good doesn't mean you're going to play good and doesn't mean you have to work less hard, so it's easy to get wrapped up in, hey, knowing you should be really good; you should win all kinds of tournaments; you should be the best out there.

"I don't buy that. I've got to keep working hard and let the process take you to where you should be."

For Cook, the process has eventually won out by the end of the year when, he believes, the pressure is off. That's when he has soared on the Champions Tour.

"I think by the end of the year I feel like I've hit the high points and the low," he said. "Then you just say, 'This is a second chance.' And you just relax more."

The victory in Hawaii should enable Cook to be more relaxed than he's ever been at the start of a Champions Tour season, and what comes next from him should be interesting.

Champions Tour Insider Vartan Kupelian is a freelance contributor for PGATOUR.COM. His views do not necessarily represent the views of the PGA TOUR.