Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open

by Rocco Mediate

  After he and Janzen finished, they had lunch in the clubhouse and then Rocco decided to go to the putting green to hit some putts before calling it a day. While he was there, his phone rang. It was Paul Azinger — a longtime friend and, perhaps more important, the U.S. Ryder Cup captain for 2008.

  “Hey, just calling to see what’s up,” Azinger said. “I forgot to check. Did you make the Open?”

  “I’m standing on the putting green at Torrey Pines right now you ——,” Rocco said, laughing because in truth there was no reason for Azinger to know he’d gotten in.

  “It’s not like I was a serious candidate to make his team at that moment,” Rocco said. “I’d had one pretty good tournament all year. At the start of the year, having played okay in ’07, I said to myself, ‘This is your year to make the Ryder Cup team.’ I think I’d been close to either making it on points or getting chosen a couple times in the past, but I was thinking with Zinger as captain, knowing he might need some older leadership with what was looking like a young team, I might have a chance if I played well.

  “The way I’d played the first half of the year, I’d almost stopped thinking about it because it seemed pointless. I guess he had too.”

  Azinger asked how things were going, how Cindi was feeling, how he thought his game was.

  “I must have sort of gushed about everything,” Rocco said. “I told him I was hitting the ball great, that I loved the greens, my back was wonderful, and I was driving up to L.A. to see Cindi that night. I think I said something like ‘Life is pretty close to perfect right now.’ ”

  Azinger listened to his friend and, even knowing how enthusiastic he could be, was impressed. “You sound like you think you can win the tournament,” he said.

  Rocco thought about that for a minute. “You know what,” he said. “You’re right. I do think I can win.”

  It was the first time he had actually thought in those terms. He liked the way it felt.

  AS PLANNED, HE DROVE TO LOS ANGELES that night to see Cindi, to get her to work on his back, and to spend a couple of days relaxing before heading back to San Diego. It was not exactly the approach most players take to a major.

  “First of all, I think practice rounds are overrated,” Rocco said. “Especially if you know the golf course. Even with the changes and the different conditions, I knew Torrey Pines. People don’t understand that when you play 18 holes in a practice round, it’s almost like playing two or three practice rounds. You hit two or three shots off the tee, you play the ball from different spots on the fairway, you putt to places where you think they might put the pins once the tournament starts. It isn’t like you’re just playing one ball and trying to post a score; you’re not. You’re trying to get to know your way around the golf course.

  “After playing a few holes on Saturday and 18 holes on Sunday, I felt I had the feel for the golf course. Lee and I got lucky on Sunday because we were out early and a lot of guys weren’t there yet or were just arriving. Plus, there were almost no spectators, so it was easy to get around.

  “By Monday, when everyone’s in town and they let the fans in, playing a practice round is a lot tougher. It can take forever because guys are hitting two and three balls, so pace of play can be brutally slow — especially at an Open, where you have a lot of nontour players in the field who really want to try to get to know everything they possibly can about the golf course.

  “The other thing was I wanted to be absolutely sure I was rested and ready to go on Thursday morning. I wanted my back to feel strong and I wanted to feel fresh. You can overpractice. You can even overthink. If you’re at the golf course for three or four straight days before a major, you can obsess about it. You start thinking about what to hit off certain tees, where you want the ball on certain greens. You can walk onto the first tee on Thursday and already be mentally exhausted. I wanted to avoid that.”

  He spent two relaxed days in Los Angeles, playing a little hit-and-giggle golf with his friends Brad and Tom Shaw, all the while having Cindi work on his back to make sure he would be physically ready to go when he got back to Torrey Pines. On Tuesday night, he and Cindi drove to San Diego.

  Wednesday morning he was back on the golf course. By now, everything had changed since Sunday. There were people everywhere — the Open, like the Masters, sells at least as many tickets for practice rounds as it does for the four days of play. There were fans wall-to-wall. The locker room was packed. So was the golf course.

  After warming up, Rocco walked to the first tee, where Adam Scott, the young Australian who was ranked number three in the world, was getting ready to tee off. Butch Harmon, swing coach to the stars (his pupils in the past have included Tiger Woods and Greg Norman; currently he works with Scott and Phil Mickelson, among others), was also on the tee, preparing to walk a few holes with Scott. Rocco and Matt joined Scott, Harmon, and Tony Navarro, Scott’s caddy, whom Rocco had known for as long as he had been on tour.

  “It was actually kind of fun to hook up with them,” Rocco said. “I don’t know Adam that well, but he’s a good guy, and Butch and Tony are old friends. You walk on the first tee to play a practice round at a major, it’s almost like a crapshoot. You might find someone there you don’t really like or a complete stranger. Either way, it isn’t going to be ideal because you can’t say, ‘I don’t want to play with you’ — it’s rude. I was very happy to be with those guys.”

  Rocco actually felt sorry for Scott. The USGA had taken the unprecedented step of pairing the top twelve players in the world with one another for the first two rounds. Although the USGA doesn’t do its pairings by computer or have a specific system, it has traditionally kept the bigger stars far away from one another in terms of tee times for a couple of reasons.

  One reason is traffic flow on the golf course. It is less than ideal to have Woods and Mickelson on the same nine at the same time because it is likely that more than half the fans on the grounds will be following those two groups. Other name players — like Sergio Garcia, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, and Jim Furyk — will also draw large audiences, so they are usually spread out too.

  The other reason — of course — is television. The Open is televised by NBC and ESPN. All the weekend play is on NBC and most of the Thursday–Friday play is on ESPN. Naturally, the networks would rather have Woods in one wave of players, Mickelson in the other wave, and the other stars spread around them. Most tournaments — including the Open, even the Masters — routinely cooperate to keep the TV people happy.

  It was Mike Davis who had first thought about doing the pairings based on world rankings. “Things are a little bit different with a West Coast start because people start watching TV later in the day in the east and the Midwest,” he said. “I thought if we put the Tiger-Phil group a little bit early one day and a little bit late the other, it could work out. We were still going to have to deal with a huge amount of people trying to follow one group, but to be honest, it couldn’t be that much bigger than what Tiger normally gets. There simply wouldn’t be room.”

  Davis floated the idea with Fay, who liked it. And so, when the pairings were announced, there were the top three players in the world, Woods, Mickelson, and Scott, playing together.

  Under the best of circumstances, that was going to make it a difficult two days for Scott. He is a very popular young player, especially overseas, and is especially popular with young female golf fans — it doesn’t hurt that he’s rich, handsome, and single. Playing with Woods and Mickelson, though, he was going to be the invisible man. He was going to have to put up with multiple security people — none of whom would have much interest in protecting him — walking every step of the way with his group for 36 holes.

  Worst of all, that wasn’t Scott’s biggest problem. A week before the Open, as he was preparing to get into a car, a friend had accidentally slammed the door on his right hand and broken it. He was trying to play with a bandage on his hand, and his discomfort swinging the club was obvious.

  “He was
struggling,” Rocco said. “I mean, he was managing. He could grip the club just enough to get it back and get through the ball, but he didn’t have any of his usual power. I could tell he was going to have a rough time of it. I felt for him. Normally he could have just gone off and played and only a few people would have been around watching him try to play at 50 or 60 percent. Now he was going to have the whole world — not to mention Tiger and Phil — watching him try to play at 50 or 60 percent.”

  At that moment, on Wednesday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours before Tiger, Phil, and Adam were scheduled to tee it up, no one was 100 percent sure if Tiger was going to make it to the first tee.

  “I think we all thought he would play,” Rocco said. “But there was certainly plenty of talk about what kind of shape he’d be in. He hadn’t played at all since the Masters. He wasn’t playing a full practice round — which wasn’t that big a deal, since he knew the course so well, but how ready could he possibly be?

  “If it was anyone else in the world, you’d say, ‘No way, he has no chance.’ But when it’s Tiger, you never say that. Still, I’m not sure anyone — maybe even including him — knew what kind of shape he’d be in when he got to the first tee.”

  Woods, Mickelson, and Scott were scheduled to tee off at 8:06 A.M. Pacific daylight time. Rocco had a 7:33 A.M. tee time. Chances were pretty good that a few more people would be watching the Woods-Mickelson-Scott group than his. That was fine with him. He was ready to play.

  11

  A Good Beginning…

  THURSDAY MORNING, JUNE 12, dawned clear and breezy in La Jolla, something of a relief to USGA officials.

  “Our only weather concern was what they call the ‘June gloom’ out there,” David Fay said. “We’d had some problems in the past getting started at Pebble Beach because of fog issues in the morning, but we were told this wasn’t usually as bad. Still, when you’ve got 156 players to get around the golf course, you really don’t want to start the day with any kind of delay.”

  There was no delay. The first groups off the first and tenth tees at 7 A.M. — D. A. Points, Patrick Sheehan, and David Hearn off number one and Robert Garrigus, Peter Tomasulo, and Craig Barlow off number 10 — were on the golf course right on schedule, and Torrey Pines buzzed with activity as 42,500 people poured onto the grounds for day one of serious play. Most of the buzz was about one player: Eldrick Tiger Woods. Would he play? And, if he did play, how would he play, fifty-eight days after knee surgery, having not walked an 18-hole round of golf during that time?

  “To be honest, I think we were all concerned with how Tiger would play,” Mike Davis said. “Part of it was that you always want the best player in the world to be in contention because it’s good for the event. But I was also a little worried that if he came out and played poorly on a golf course where he’d won six times — where he’d once shot 22 under for 72 holes and had been 18 under six months earlier — people would blame it on our setup. I knew it was more likely if it happened it would be because of the knee and rustiness, but I also thought we might get some heat if he somehow missed the cut.”

  Woods was in his twelfth year as a professional. The Open was his forty-sixth consecutive appearance in a major championship. He had won thirteen times, been second five times — including to Trevor Immelman at the Masters in April — and had missed one cut. That had come at the 2006 Open at Winged Foot. He had played there six weeks after the death of his father, his first tournament since Earl Woods’s death on May 3 and his first event since that year’s Masters.

  He had clearly not been all there emotionally, reacting almost calmly to poor shots and off-line putts. He had missed the cut comfortably — by four shots. If nothing else, his inability to come storming back so soon after losing his dad proved him human. Of course he had then gone on to win both the British Open and the PGA Championship, quieting anyone who had wondered if he would somehow lose some of his fire with his father no longer around.

  This was very different. Woods wasn’t battling his emotions, he was fighting a frailty in his body. The April surgery had been the second one on his left knee. What the public didn’t know as the Open began was that he also had a stress fracture in his leg and had been told by his doctors that he was going to need more surgery soon. He had decided to play the Open, knowing he probably would not be able to play either the British Open or the PGA, because it was the Open — the major in which he’d had the least success (he’d won it “only” once) — and because it was on a golf course he loved.

  “I think every single player in the field was aware of what was going on with Tiger and had thought about it,” Rocco said. “How could you not? Any time he’s in a golf tournament, it feels different than when he’s not. And if he’s on the leader board, even if he’s five or six shots back of the leader, you’re crazy if you’re not aware of his presence. You can’t not be. Any time he does anything, if you’re on the golf course you hear the reaction and you know it’s him. No roar in golf sounds like a Tiger roar. I’m guessing it was that way for Arnie once upon a time and for Jack, but now it’s that way for Tiger and Tiger only.”

  Mike Davis had made a point of letting both Woods and Mickelson know in advance that they were going to play together. He knew they would be asked questions about it and wanted to give them some time to prepare. Woods and Mickelson have never exactly been pals — to put it mildly — and Davis wasn’t sure how they would respond to being paired together on the first two days of a major.

  Both had come to Torrey Pines in the week prior to the Open to get a look at the golf course when no one was around. That was when Davis had told them what he was planning.

  “I was pleasantly surprised,” Davis said. “They both seemed up for it. In fact, the first thing Phil said to me was ‘It’s about time.’ Tiger said it was fine with him, which actually didn’t surprise me that much because in all the years we’ve dealt with him, I don’t think he’s ever complained about anything. You just tell him what’s going on and he deals with it.”

  Davis’s trepidation about the pairing was understandable given the history between the two players. It wasn’t all that surprising that they rarely spoke to each other when paired in a tournament. Neither is terribly chatty on the golf course to begin with. In fact, Woods has been known — especially on Sundays and even more so on Sundays at a major — to shake hands on the first tee and not say another word to anyone but his caddy, Steve Williams, until the handshake on the 18th green.

  “I don’t think he’s being mean or unfriendly when he does that,” Lee Janzen said. “I think he just feels like he has a job to do and he’s not going to start chatting about family or ball games until the job is done.”

  Most players tend not to talk that much on the golf course. Thursdays and Fridays at a regular PGA Tour event you may hear some chatter, especially in groups where the players know one another well. It is quieter on Saturdays, and rarely do you hear much more than “Nice shot” on Sundays — especially in the later groups, where big money or a tournament title is on the line.

  “We have a tendency to go into a zone,” said Davis Love III, who has won twenty times on tour. “I know people would like to see us talk more and smile more, but that’s just not where your focus is. There are exceptions. Trevino loved to talk, Arnold always interacted with the crowd, and Rocco never stops. That’s his way of letting off steam. Most of us aren’t that way, though. He’s an exception to the general rule.”

  Woods and Mickelson didn’t only fail to talk when competing against each other. In 2004, American Ryder Cup captain Hal Sutton decided to pair his best two players on the first day of the competition at Oakland Hills, hoping to get his team off to a fast start and set a tone. Woods and Mickelson did indeed set a tone. They lost both their matches and never uttered a word to each other during eight hours on the golf course as a “team.” Europe jumped to a huge lead and won that weekend going away.

  No American captain since then has even thought about
pairing Woods and Mickelson in either Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup play.

  “I don’t think they hate one another,” Rocco said. “They’re just very different guys.”

  That’s certainly true. Woods has actually grown far more comfortable through the years around his fellow pros. He enjoys “busting balls,” as the players put it, and is good at being given a hard time in return. He calls almost everyone by some kind of nickname — not necessarily clever ones, but adding a Y to people’s names or, in Rocco’s case, calling him Rocc, as many people do.

  Woods has loosened up a little when it comes to talking about his personal life since the birth in June 2007 of his daughter, Sam. (Her name is Sam, not Samantha, because Earl Woods called Tiger Sam as a boy.) He will talk occasionally — though generically — about the joys of fatherhood. But Elin, his wife, stays in the background almost all the time, and Woods doesn’t like anyone in his entourage — caddy, agent, swing coach, clothing rep — talking about much of anything other than golf. He’s fired a caddy, an agent, and a swing coach at least in part because they were too forthcoming with the public and the media.

  Mickelson has had the same caddy and the same agent since he turned pro in 1992. When he changed swing coaches in 2007, going from Rick Smith to Butch Harmon, he agonized over it and has made a point of staying friends with Smith since he made the change. When Woods fires someone, that is usually the last time he speaks to him except perhaps in passing.

  Mickelson is the father of three and loves nothing more than talking about how important his wife, Amy, is to his success. Any time he wins a tournament there is usually a four-person stampede in his direction as he comes off the 18th green — Amy and the three children. The day Elin Woods races onto a green to hug her husband after a winning final putt will be the same day Bill Clinton or Barack Obama is voted most popular politician on the PGA Tour.