“The last thing I wanted to do was miss the cut and have to wait through the weekend to play on Monday. I thought I needed a good Memorial to help my confidence and my checkbook going into the qualifier.”
On Tuesday, Frank Zoracki made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Greensburg to the Columbus suburbs to go over some business issues with Rocco and to spend some time with him. Late in the day, the two of them sat on the stone wall that divides the two levels of the putting green just outside the clubhouse, to relax for a few minutes before Zoracki made the drive home.
“I had a dream about you the other night,” Zoracki told Rocco.
“That’s a little bit scary, isn’t it?” Rocco answered.
Zoracki laughed. “I’d say so. In it I saw you holding a trophy, a big trophy. I think it’s a sign that something good is about to happen. You’re going to start playing well.”
“Your dreams to God’s ears,” Rocco said.
The next day, Cindi flew in to spend the weekend and Monday. On Thursday and Friday, Rocco played solidly, shooting 70– 73, which was one under par and put him in contention, since the scores, in windy weather, were high. The 36-hole lead was held by Kenny Perry and Matthew Goggin at seven under par.
There was rain in the forecast for Saturday afternoon and the conditions were tough from the start. Still, that was no excuse for the way Rocco played the front nine. “I was six over after 10 holes,” he said. “I was awful. I couldn’t hit the ball straight and I couldn’t make a putt. If it hadn’t rained, I might have shot 100.”
But it did rain after he had parred the 11th hole. More important, there was lightning in the storm passing through, and the players were pulled off the golf course. Rocco’s mood was at least as foul as the weather when he and Cindi were taken to the clubhouse on a golf cart after the siren blew, signaling a delay.
“I cannot believe I’m playing like this,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
“Calm down,” she said. “You aren’t that far off. You missed one or two shots. You make a few putts coming in and you’ll be fine.”
“Are you kidding? I’m terrible. I can’t play at all.”
“I’m serious. Get over yourself. You’ve got more important things to worry about than missing a few putts today. Monday is what matters. I think the way you’re playing right now, you’re going to make the Open on Monday.”
Rocco laughed mirthlessly. “The Open? The way I’m playing? I’m losing my mind out here, I’ve made a hundred dollars all year, and you’re talking about me making the Open? You know, right now I don’t even care about the Open.”
“Well, I do,” she said. “And I think you’re going to make it.”
They rode in silence the rest of the way in.
During the delay, Tony Renaud, who runs the annual Skins Game that is played on Thanksgiving weekend, sat down at the table where Rocco and Cindi were waiting out the rain.
“You know, Tony, Rocco could help your event,” Cindi said. “He has just the kind of personality that people enjoy in something like that, especially since you mike the players.”
“Looking back, it was funny that she would bring it up,” Rocco said. “I mean, I hadn’t broken an egg all year. But you could almost see something in his eyes, as if she’d planted a seed. If nothing else, it took my mind off how badly I’d been playing.”
He was in a better mood when the storm passed. “I don’t know if it was something she said or thinking about the Open or just getting a chance to catch my breath,” he said. “All I know is I went out and birdied 12, 13, and 14 and made an eagle at 15. All of a sudden I turn an 80-plus into a 74, which keeps me in the ball game. Life went from total darkness to seeing a light in a couple of hours.”
The 74 allowed him to stay in position to finish well if he had a good round on Sunday. Because all the scoring was high, he had dropped only from a tie for 11th place to a tie for 18th place. Goggin, the leader, was seven shots ahead of him, so he probably wasn’t going to catch him. But a top ten finish was certainly possible.
“When you haven’t been in the top 30 all year, being in 18th place after three rounds, it feels as if you have a five-shot lead on the field,” he said.
On Sunday he started well and played good golf all day. His three-under-par 69 was one of the lowest rounds of the day, and he jumped from a tie for 18th to a tie for 6th when it was over. That was worth $201,000 — far more money than he had made in his previous fifteen events combined — and vaulted him from 178th on the money list to 126th. All of that was nice, but it wasn’t the most important thing that happened during the weekend.
“For the first time all year, I felt good about my game for more than just a day. The 69 was great, but being able to hang in Saturday and make those putts on the back nine was just as important. It was the first time all year I had taken a bad round and made it better rather than taking a bad round and making it worse. That was very important in terms of my mind-set going into Monday.”
Regardless of his mind-set, Rocco knew without doubt that Monday was going to be a very long day.
EACH YEAR SEVERAL THOUSAND GOLFERS pay $100 to enter the U.S. Open. Anyone who is a registered professional or an amateur with a handicap index of 1.4 or lower can enter. In 2008, a total of 8,390 players entered the Open. The oldest entrant was seventy-nine, the youngest was twelve. A few of them — seventy-two — were exempt into the championship itself. Several hundred more — including Rocco — were exempt from the first round of local qualifying. The rest had to advance through local qualifying to the sectionals. In all, there were 450 players competing in the sectionals for the remaining 84 spots.
Two of the sectional qualifiers are designated as “tour qualifiers.” These are sites near a tour stop — one is held on the Monday after a tournament has just been held (in this case the Memorial); the other is held on Tuesday just prior to the next tournament (which was in Memphis). Because there are more spots available at the tour qualifiers, they attract the most players and, naturally, the toughest fields.
In the case of Columbus, a total of 140 players were entered, vying for 23 spots in the Open field. Among those entered were players like Fred Couples, Davis Love III, Chad Campbell (who would go on to make the Ryder Cup team), Jesper Parnevik, and Kenny Perry, who withdrew after winning the day before at the Memorial. The players were split up onto two golf courses, playing 18 holes on one course in the morning, breaking briefly for lunch, and then switching courses for the afternoon. The lunch break was usually no more than thirty minutes because it was assumed there would be a playoff for the final spots at the end of the day and the hope was to finish before dark.
Early in the day it didn’t look as if Rocco was going to have to worry about a playoff or making hotel reservations for San Diego.
“First nine holes I hit eight greens and I was two over par,” he said. “I couldn’t make anything. I was giving away shots and I was getting more and more frustrated by the hole.”
Cindi was frustrated too — with Rocco. She thought he was talking himself out of playing well, that he was getting so down on himself every time he missed a putt that he was making it impossible to get something going.
“After nine holes, she was so angry with me she was ready to leave,” he said. “I remember her saying, ‘I’m going to leave you alone for a while; we’re not good for one another right now.’ I didn’t believe her, but she took off. Instead of walking with me, she ran up ahead.”
There are no ropes at qualifiers and almost no spectators. Cindi had been walking in the fairway with Rocco and Matt during the first nine holes.
“I got it up and down for par at the 10th and then I caught up with her on the 11th tee and I said, ‘I don’t like this. Would you please walk with me?’ She said okay, and I birdied 11. After that, things went a lot better.”
He managed to get through the first 18 holes on the tougher of the two layouts, Ohio State’s Scarlet course, with a one-over-par 72, which put him back in t
he pack but still in contention. He was calmer in the afternoon, grinding his way around, playing a bogeyless round at Brookside Golf and Country Club. Even so, he knew coming down the stretch that he was right around the qualifying number. “Everyone was saying 140 was the number, so I figured it would take 139 to play off,” he said. “Any time you hear a number in those things, you have to figure it’s going to be one or two shots lower than that. You don’t figure that, you’re in trouble.”
He birdied the 17th hole to get to four under par for the afternoon and for the day (the golf courses were par 71–72) and tried valiantly to birdie 18, figuring that would give him a safety net. But his birdie putt from twenty feet swerved low, and he signed for 139.
Then he waited.
“That may be the toughest thing about qualifiers — the waiting,” he said. “You finish and then you stand there around the scoreboard and you see guys come in. Anyone smiling, you know that’s bad news for you. You see guys you know and ask them how they did, and they say, ‘Eight under,’ and you say, ‘Great!’ and you’re happy for them, but inside you’re dying because that’s one less spot for you.”
Rocco had finished more than two hours before the last group would finish. That meant he and Cindi and Matt had to wait. Rocco decided to go sit in the car.
“He was sulking,” Cindi said. “He was feeling sorry for himself. At one point Matt, who was sick, said, ‘I’m going to go into the clubhouse and get some water.’ Rocco said, ‘I don’t need any water.’ I looked at him and said, ‘Did it ever occur to you that Matt might need some water, Mr. I’m-the-Only-One-on-Earth?’ He was a little better after that.”
When the 132 players who made it through all 36 holes were finished, Rocco’s analysis proved to be exactly right: Carl Pettersson, a fine tour player, was the medalist at 131. In all, sixteen players had shot 138 or better, and they were all being handed paperwork to take with them as they headed for their cars — and San Diego. There were eleven players tied at 139 and seven spots still available. That meant a playoff — eleven players vying for seven spots in the Open.
“You’re going to be just fine,” Cindi told him when it became apparent he was going to be part of a playoff.
“I was exhausted at that point and angry with myself for putting myself in such a hole in the morning,” Rocco said. “It was eight o’clock by the time we teed off [since Ohio is on the western edge of the eastern time zone, there is light in early June until after nine o’clock], and when I looked around I realized I was ten years older than everyone else in the playoff except for Tom Pernice.
“They put me in the second group — five guys went off first, and then the six of us went off after them. After we’d hit our tee shots, I waved at the other guys as we walked off the tee and said, ‘Come on, children, let’s see if we can get this thing finished before your bedtimes.’ ”
As the six-some headed down the 10th fairway at the Scarlet, word filtered back from the green that no one in the first group had made a birdie. That meant anyone who birdied in the second group would be in the Open.
“I had hit a good drive,” Rocco said. “There was a big bunker about 290 yards out on the left side of the fairway. The young guys just blasted their drivers right over it. I had no chance to do that, so I just played away from the bunker and kept my ball in the fairway. The other guys were so far ahead of me I could barely see them when I got to my ball.”
Even though Rocco’s ball was well back from the others, he actually had an advantage because he was on flat ground. “Over the bunker the fairway dips down and then goes back up to the green,” he said. “From where I was, I had a flat lie and I could see the flag. A lot of them were on downhill lies or sidehill lies and they were so far below the green they couldn’t see the target nearly as well as I could.
“I just checked it off to the wisdom of age.”
Regardless of the reason, Rocco found himself with a nine-iron in his hands and a shot he felt very comfortable trying to hit. “I said to Matt, ‘Boy, are these guys in for a shock when I knock this to three feet,’ ” he said. “I hit a nice little cut and it felt absolutely perfect coming off my club.”
He was a foot off on his prediction — the ball settled four feet from the flag. No one else in the group got to inside twenty-five feet. One of the five, Justin Hicks, holed his birdie putt, meaning he was going to San Diego. By the time Rocco got over his putt, it looked more like forty feet than four. “It occurred to me that I’d played 37 holes and worked my ass off all day to get to this moment and I better not blow it,” he said. “I hadn’t been in position to make a putt that was that important in a long time. My heart rate was definitely up. I could feel it. My hands may have been shaking; I’m not sure. Fortunately, I didn’t overthink it; I just told myself it was going in and it did.”
It was 8:30 in the evening, and the shadows were getting longer by the minute. There were maybe fifty people standing around the green watching, and for a moment, Rocco couldn’t find Cindi, who had been hanging back, too nervous to get close at that moment. When he did spot her, he felt as if he had won the Open rather than simply qualifying to play in it.
“She had this huge smile of satisfaction on her face,” he said. “I walked over to her and said, ‘You were right.’
“She just said, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of you right now.’ I told her she should be proud of us. It was one of the cooler moments I can remember having in a long time.”
Rocco’s qualifying to play in his thirteenth Open hardly drew any notice in the golf world. The USGA puts out a blog each year chronicling interesting stories about those who come through qualifying to make the Open. There are stories about the youngest player to qualify, the oldest player to qualify, relatives of famous players who qualify, amateurs who qualify, and occasionally about women who try to qualify, like Michelle Wie in 2006. There was no mention at all of a sore-backed forty-five year old who had made his first Open as a twenty-one-year-old amateur in 1984 returning twenty-four years later after failing to make the field the previous year.
Qualifiers are often a factor at the Open, since very good players often have to go through them. Previous Open champions frequently have to qualify because the Open only gives champions a ten-year exemption. Arnold Palmer played in Open qualifying seven times late in his career. The other three majors are far more generous: British Open and PGA champions are exempt until they are sixty-five, and Masters champions are exempt for life.
The last qualifier to win the Open was Michael Campbell in 2005. Campbell almost overslept on the morning of his qualifier but was rousted out of bed by his wife. Two weeks later, he out-dueled Tiger Woods down the stretch at Pinehurst to win the Open. In 1996, Steve Jones survived a playoff at his qualifier and then beat Tom Lehman and Davis Love III over the last few holes at Oakland Hills to become an Open champion.
Rocco was well aware of both Jones and Campbell. But he wasn’t really thinking in those terms as he left the golf course on the night of June 2.
“After I hurt my back in ’94 and had to withdraw, I didn’t make the Open the next four years,” Rocco said. “That really hurt because I love the event so much. With all the talk from Cindi and Frank and others about how I was going to qualify, it occurred to me that, at forty-five, I might not have that many chances left to play in the Open. It certainly doesn’t get any easier as you get older. I was thrilled to be back. Torrey Pines had never been my favorite golf course, but that didn’t matter. I was in the Open. At that moment when the birdie putt went in, that was as good a feeling as I’d had in the game in years.
“I was psyched to get out there and to play. I couldn’t wait. I had a feeling it was going to be a fun week.”
10
Welcome to Torrey Pines
TORREY PINES COUNTRY CLUB IS IN LA JOLLA, California, several miles north of downtown San Diego, a few miles off I-5 if you are driving north to Los Angeles or south into San Diego.
It has hoste
d what was initially known as the San Diego Open since 1968. The event was first played in 1952 and had six different homes before it settled at Torrey Pines. By then it was known as the Andy Williams–San Diego Invitational. In those days, the tour frequently asked celebrities to lend their name to tournaments to add glamour to them. Bing Crosby created the first celebrity tournament in 1937, and Bob Hope added his name to the Palm Springs Golf Classic in 1965.
That opened the celebrity floodgates. Over the next few years, Jackie Gleason, Sammy Davis Jr., Glen Campbell, Danny Thomas, Ed McMahon, and Williams all lent their names to PGA Tour events. With the corporate takeover of the tour, only Hope’s name survives on a tournament masthead, and his event is now known as the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. Recently, Justin Timberlake added his name to the tournament in Las Vegas, bucking the trend of the past thirty years.
San Diego has been through four corporate title sponsors since 1981 and has been known as the Buick Invitational since 1992. Four corporate sponsors in twenty-eight years is not at all atypical in this day and age. The event now known as the BMW Classic has had seven different title sponsors since 1987.
Torrey Pines is a municipal facility, owned by San Diego County. It has two golf courses — north and south — but it is the south that has always been its signature. Both golf courses are used during the Buick Invitational. Players play one round on the south and one round on the north before playing the weekend rounds on the south after the cut has been made. In 1968, Torrey Pines South played at 7,021 yards from the back tees. Forty years later, by the time Tiger Woods won the Buick Invitational for the sixth time in January of 2008, it had been lengthened to 7,568 yards. Its official length for the Open would be 7,643 yards — 379 yards longer than any previous Open course.
Woods, who grew up outside Los Angeles, played Torrey Pines frequently as a kid and played in a number of important amateur events there as a teenager. His familiarity with the golf course and the deal he had with Buick, which paid him about $7 million a year until the troubled car manufacturer canceled it in 2009, were the reasons he always played the Buick Invitational.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 15