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

by Rocco Mediate

  He did just that, the ball dropping in the side of the hole, the speed close to perfect. His birdie wasn’t as dramatic as Woods’s had been, but it was at least as important because it stopped the bleeding. He walked to the 18th tee one shot behind Westwood and tied with Woods, who had found the fairway with a pretty cut shot off the tee.

  When Woods reached his ball and checked his distance to the green and the hole, he almost smiled. Always meticulous in his preround preparations, he had hit a number of five-wood shots during his warm-up, thinking he might need to hit a five-wood off the tee at the 16th. The wind change had made the hole play shorter, but now he found himself 227 yards from the hole — pretty close to the exact distance he thought he would hit his five-wood.

  “I hit the same shot I had been practicing,” Woods said. “It carried to the middle of the green.”

  The flagstick was up middle-left behind the water, so there was almost no chance to get close to it with a wood. Woods’s shot landed on the front of the green and rolled hole high, about 30 feet to the right of the pin.

  As he and Karlsson walked onto the green to a screaming ovation from the crowd, Westwood was leaving the interview tent figuring that he would be tied for the lead with Woods at two under par or perhaps there would be three leaders if Rocco could also birdie the 18th.

  Naturally, Woods had other ideas. After he had looked the putt over from about fifteen different angles — no one in golf takes longer looking over a putt than Woods, but the results often make the wait worthwhile — he gently rolled the putt across the green. As the ball approached the cup and picked up some speed, it was apparent that it was going to be dead center. The only question was whether the speed was right.

  It was exactly right. The ball disappeared into the cup as the crowd noise got so loud that Rocco and Appleby, waiting in the fairway, were practically knocked backward.

  “I almost started laughing,” Rocco said later. “I mean, the guy is just ridiculous sometimes. He makes eagle from off the planet on 13, chips it in at 17, and then makes another eagle at 18? Come on. That’s a joke.”

  Woods’s reaction to the putt going in was different from his normal reaction to a monster putt. There was no fist-pumping, just a big smile and a fist in the air for an instant. “I can’t tell you why,” he said. “At 13, I went nuts. At 18, I just thought, ‘Sweet.’ ”

  It was very sweet, because it jumped him over Westwood into the lead, the first time in three days he had been the outright leader in the championship. It also put him in a place he had been thirteen times before — leading a major after 54 holes. His record in those situations was decent: thirteen leads, thirteen titles. Everyone in golf was fully aware of that stat.

  Back in the fairway, Rocco knew that Woods had the lead after his putt went in. He was a little more than 100 yards from the flag, having laid up to comfortable wedge distance, hoping for a birdie-birdie finish. While Appleby was playing his third shot, Rocco walked over to Mark Rolfing, who had been walking with the group all day for NBC, and asked him if a birdie would put him in the final group Sunday with Woods.

  “No,” Rolfing answered. “Westwood’s at two [under] already. Since he finished first, he goes last.”

  “Damn,” Rocco said, disappointed.

  Somewhat surprised, Rolfing reported Rocco’s reaction to Dan Hicks and Johnny Miller in the tower. None of them was accustomed to someone actually wanting to play with Woods on the last day of a major.

  As it turned out, it was a moot point. Rocco had to make sure he didn’t leave his wedge short and bring the water into play, so his shot went about 15 feet past the flag. His putt slid to the right, and he tapped in for par and a one-over-par 72. Given that only three players had broken 70 that day — led by Brandt Snedeker, who had made the cut on the number and had shot 68 to move into a tie for 15th place — and only six others (Woods included) had shot 70, that was a solid round starting the day in the last group, especially when compared with the scores of some other players who had started the day in serious contention.

  In addition to Appleby’s 78, Karlsson had shot 75, Davis Love had come in with a 76, and Ernie Els had produced a 74. Any hopes of a miracle rally by Phil Mickelson had gone aglimmering when he made a nine on the 13th hole after being 80 yards from the flag in two.

  “I’ve made nine on that hole before,” Mickelson said afterward. “I was eight years old at the time, but I have made a nine there.”

  He limped home with a 76, leaving him at nine over par (12 shots behind Woods) in a tie for 47th place. He was behind — among many others — Rocco’s amateur playing companion of the first two days, Michael Thompson, who had shot a very respectable 73 to finish the day at seven over par for the championship, tied for 35th place. Mickelson would be on the tee Sunday morning at 9:20, meaning he would be finishing his round right around 1:30 — the last tee time of the championship — and exiting the golf course just as Woods entered it. There was some sort of symmetry in that, though no one was exactly certain what that symmetry was.

  The pairings for the final day were now complete: Woods and Westwood would be the final group, with Rocco and Geoff Ogilvy — who trailed Woods by four shots — right in front of them. D. J. Trahan and Hunter Mahan would go right before them, with Robert Allenby and the rapidly rising youngster Camilo Villegas, both at two over, directly in front of them. Those who still had an outside chance if they could somehow go low, very low, were Ernie Els, Mike Weir, and Sergio Garcia, who were all at three over par.

  “Catching Tiger from six shots back,” Els mused later when the subject came up. “Not something I would count on.”

  Catching Woods at all on a Sunday at a major had never been done, so Els’s analysis, though simple, was almost certainly going to be accurate.

  AS SOON AS HE SIGNED his scorecard, Rocco headed for the flash area. On the last two days of the Open, the USGA asks the leaders to go through two interviews: a relatively brief one in the flash area that is for TV crews who just want a quick sound-bite or two about the round and for deadline-rushed writers. On a Saturday night (early deadlines), with the round ending after ten o’clock in the east, quite a few people were in that situation.

  Woods was just finishing his session in the flash area when Rocco walked in and saw him departing the podium.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Woods, can I ask you a question?” he said, acting as if he were a reporter. Seeing Rocco, Woods smiled. “Are you out of your mind with what you’re doing out there? Are you sick or something? I mean, come on!”

  Woods laughed and high-fived Rocco as he departed. It was the first time the two men had been face-to-face all week.

  Rocco was now very much in the spotlight. Woods had played the last six holes in four under par to take the lead and he had hit extraordinary shots at 13, 17, and 18. His limp was becoming more pronounced with each passing day, and he admitted that it was getting worse. He was clearly everyone’s lead story. Most of America’s columnists would be waxing eloquent about the greatness of Tiger in the Sunday-morning papers.

  But Rocco was a big part of the story too, arguably the lead supporting actor. People wanted to know where in the heck he had come from after playing so poorly all year prior to the Memorial, to know how his back felt, to hear his story about the qualifier and laugh at his one-liners. While Woods was amazing America, Rocco was charming America.

  “I just can’t begin to tell you guys how much fun I’m having out there,” he kept saying. “This has been an amazing experience. I can’t wait for tomorrow.”

  He was being honest. He was keenly aware of Woods’s record when leading going into the final day of a major. When someone brought that up in the interview room, Rocco didn’t even wait for the question to be finished.

  “When Tiger has a lead going into the final round, as you know…”

  “He’s never lost.”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah, I know about all that.”

  “How difficult…”
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  “It’s going to take a ridiculous round by one of us to beat him. If we can go out and shoot four or five under par, one of us, you never know… But you can’t ever count on anything. It’s just you can’t really predict what is going to happen.

  “But it’s not over yet. And I’m sure he’ll tell you the same thing. Because this is a U.S. Open course, and you just don’t know what the heck is happening sometimes.

  “But it will take a pretty spectacular round, it will take a perfect day, a perfectly clean day for me, with making five or six birdies and no bogeys, to win this golf tournament. And that still might not do it. You never know. But it will take something crazy.”

  He also said — again — that he was disappointed not to play with Woods. “How many chances do you get to do that?” he said. “Because he was in front of us, it was just exciting all day, it was just cool to be part of that.” He smiled. “Maybe he’ll get to see me do something good tomorrow. You never know.”

  Many in the media were skeptical about the notion that someone would actually want to play with Tiger in the final round. Rocco was asked repeatedly to explain why he felt that way.

  “Look, it’s the most, it’s the most difficult pairing, because there is so much going on,” he said. “He’s the best in the game, so everybody is watching him and pulling for him.

  “But I don’t understand why — I feel like he either brings out the worst in you, when he’s against you, or the best. And I’ve loved playing with him, like I said, a handful of times over however long he’s been out here, ten, eleven years. And I’ve played some of my best golf with him. And I love that fact. And nine times out of ten, yeah, he’s probably going to kick my butt, but that one time is what you’re looking for. Because if you can, he’s one of those guys where you can say to, you know, I can say to my boys, like when I beat him in Phoenix in ’99, when he was a couple years out, I can always tell my kids, ‘I beat the best player in the world this week, guys.’ It doesn’t happen very often.”

  He paused. “Actually, that’s the only time I can tell them that so far. I just want another chance to try to compete against him. You want to see what you have. I don’t want to lose before I tee off. I know it’s easy to do that. But if I get beat, I want to get beat going down there and fighting, just like he does. That’s what you want to do. You always want to be around the best players. I haven’t been there that many times, but I loved it when I have been.”

  Though not in the same twosome, he would get the chance to compete with Woods, the next day, with a U.S. Open at stake. That, he thought, was a pretty good deal.

  When Rand Jerris, the USGA press conference moderator, wrapped up the thirty-minute session, Rocco said the exact same thing that he had said as he departed on Friday. “Thanks. Hopefully I’ll see you guys back here tomorrow.”

  14

  One Inch Away

  IT WAS WELL AFTER EIGHT O’CLOCK by the time Rocco finished in the interview room. Often, when players are in contention in a major on Saturday evening, they will try to spend time on the range, hoping to find something that will make them a little better on Sunday and perhaps be the difference between winning and losing.

  Woods will frequently do this, even when he’s leading, sometimes staying on the range by himself until nightfall in his never-ending search for perfection.

  But none of the leaders went to the Torrey Pines range after finishing up on Saturday. Woods needed to get treatment for his knee. Rocco — and everyone else — was exhausted, and the late finish hadn’t left very much daylight anyway.

  Rocco, Cindi, and Steve Puertas headed straight back to the hotel room. The group had grown since the start of the week. Michael, Cindi’s son, had driven down from Los Angeles, and a friend of Steve’s, Gary Dylewski, was also there, as was Vince Monteparte, a boyhood friend of Rocco’s who lived in San Diego. Steve and Gary went back to Fleming’s to perform what had become the nightly pickup ritual.

  They all sat around eating and watching replays of the day. Once again they stayed up late so that sleeping in wouldn’t be so difficult. The tee times were earlier the next day — NBC didn’t want as late a finish on a Sunday as on a Saturday — but there would still be plenty of time to kill in the morning.

  Even though his back nine had been shaky — two bogeys, a double bogey, and two birdies for a 38 — Rocco felt good about the way he had played, buoyed in large part by the birdie at 17. “If I hadn’t gotten that late birdie after what happened at 13 and 15, I might have been a little down,” he said. “But I’d been able to bounce back and I was still right there. I knew how tough Tiger was going to be to beat, but I also knew he was hurting and it was the U.S. Open. I had a chance. That was all I could possibly ask for.”

  He had arranged through a friend to get Cindi a media badge for the next day so she would be able to walk inside the ropes. It hadn’t been that tough to follow his group the first two days, but on Saturday, as the crowds swelled, it had become more difficult for her to get a clear view of what was going on. This would allow her to move around more easily and see what was happening.

  “I wanted to look like a reporter,” she said. “So I got a pen and carried it with me. The only problem, if anyone was looking closely, was that I didn’t have anything to write on.”

  Rocco slept well — better, actually, than he had thought he would. Perhaps not being in the lead helped. Even though he was no longer under the radar, he still wasn’t the focus of most people’s attention — Woods was. No one really expected him to win the next day with the exception of a handful of friends and family — and, increasingly, Rocco himself.

  ___

  SUNDAY WAS ONE OF THOSE perfect San Diego days. Rocco and Cindi went back to Bruegger’s for a fourth straight day and then on to Starbucks again. By the time they made the short drive to the golf course, the sun was shining brilliantly and there was just the hint of a breeze. The cool weather would make for a fast golf course, but that was okay. The only real concern was the greens. Poa annua greens, which grow best on the West Coast, tend to get bumpy after a lot of play on them. After a week of practice rounds and three days of play without a hint of rain, they would be bumpy.

  “It could come down to someone getting a lucky bounce or an unlucky bounce,” Rocco said to Cindi as he warmed up on the range. As always, Cindi was standing on the range with him just in case he needed to have his back loosened up one more time before he walked to the tee. As it turned out, there was no need. The back felt fine.

  There are few places quieter than the range on the last day of a major, especially once the early groups have teed off and their spots have been taken by the players who are in contention. In all there were thirteen players within six shots of Woods. But while the most important thing at stake was the title, there were other things to play for too: The top 15 finishers automatically qualified for the 2009 Open; the top eight qualified for the 2009 Masters. There was also a good deal of money on the table, a total of $7.5 million in prize money.

  Walk onto a range on a Thursday or a Friday at most tour stops, especially in the afternoon, and you might think you’ve blundered into Cheers. In fact, Jeff Sluman, the 1988 PGA champion who is now on the Champions Tour, has been known to his friends as Norm for years because when he walks onto a range everyone yells, “Slu!” in anticipation of him telling stories for the next hour. “He’s the only man in golf who needs two hours to hit one bucket of balls,” his friend Jay Haas has often said of Sluman.

  Rocco can be that way too. But not on Sunday, June 15 — Father’s Day to most of the country, U.S. Open Sunday to the golf world. Like everyone else, he was quiet warming up, knowing he had a long day and a big job ahead of him. He was paired with Geoff Ogilvy, like Appleby an Australian and someone whose Open pedigree was strong — he had won the championship two years earlier, after Phil Mickelson’s epic 18th-hole collapse at Winged Foot.

  “Loved the pairing,” Rocco said. “Geoff’s a good guy and a really good
player. It was great.”

  Understand, if Rocco had been paired with Ebenezer Scrooge (before his Christmas Eve dream), he would love the pairing. Rocco can play with just about anyone, which is one reason why players enjoy being paired with him.

  “He’s going to talk all day, but guys don’t mind,” Lee Janzen said. “They know that’s Rocco and they know he isn’t doing it to get inside their heads or anything. He’s just being Rocco when he does it.”

  Janzen was at the golf course early that day too. He had missed the cut but had stayed for the weekend. He was flying to Hartford on the charter plane the tournament was sending the next day. He went out to the range early to work on some things before the players still in contention got there. Once he finished his work, he left to spend some time with his fourteen-year-old son, Connor, and a friend of Connor’s.

  “I knew I was going to be too nervous to sit there and watch for the entire afternoon,” Janzen said. “So I made plans to do stuff with the boys during the early part of the afternoon, and then I figured I would go back to the hotel and see how Rocco was doing.”

  By now, all of those who knew Rocco were completely caught up in what was happening outside San Diego. Tony and Donna, who had moved into a new one-story house to make it easier for Donna to get around, didn’t invite anyone over to watch with them that day.

  “It would have been too nerve-racking,” Donna said. “Tony can never sit still when Rocco’s playing well. He has to get up and walk around and talk as if Rocco can somehow hear him. ‘Come on, you need this putt,’ or ‘Make sure this one’s in the fairway.’ He feels inhibited when people are there and it makes him more nervous.”

  Frank Zoracki had planned a golf outing with friends in Michigan long before Rocco had even qualified for the Open. On Saturday night he called Rocco to remind him about the dream he’d had in which Rocco had been holding a trophy. “Maybe both our dreams are about to come true,” he said.