He slept better than he thought he would, no doubt completely exhausted by the events of the day. When he woke up, shortly after 6 A.M., Cindi did her usual morning work on his back and then he showered and went to get dressed.
“I only had one clean shirt left,” he said. “It was red.”
Woods has made the red shirt his Sunday trademark. Rocco wondered if he would wear red for a Monday playoff or if the color was reserved strictly for Sundays. Either way, he had no choice. “My options were a red shirt, a dirty shirt, or no shirt,” he said. “I went with red.”
The hotel lobby felt empty early in the morning, since most of the players had already flown home. He and Cindi got in the car and drove to Bruegger’s. As soon as they got out of the car, Cindi cringed. “It was closed,” she said. “They were tearing it apart. The sign said, ‘Closed for renovations.’ I guess they had stayed open through Open Sunday and then started the work first thing Monday morning.”
Rocco shrugged it off, but Cindi was not happy. “Bad harbinger,” she said. “He’d had this perfect routine going for four days: Bruegger’s, Starbucks, golf course. Now it was broken.”
They still went to Starbucks for Rocco’s quadruple shot of espresso, but Cindi was already feeling queasy when they pulled into the virtually empty players’ parking lot at eight o’clock. She couldn’t help but notice that the range was completely empty, which made sense, since there were only two players left competing for the championship.
“I like to go out on the range with him when he warms up,” she said. “I feel comfortable because I know everyone now and they know me. Plus, if he needs that last stretch before he goes to the tee, I can do it right there and it literally takes a few seconds. But with no one out there and so much media around, I felt like I’d stand out. I couldn’t blend in the way I normally do. So I decided not to go.”
Cindi was already nervous about media attention. A number of people who regularly covered golf knew her and knew she had been traveling with Rocco regularly. He had confided to a few friends in the media that he and Linda were getting a divorce. Rich Lerner from Golf Channel had walked nine holes with Cindi on Saturday, and Jeff Babineau from Golfweek had secured her media armband to get her inside the ropes on Sunday and Monday.
Now, though, with Rocco suddenly in the spotlight, a lot of people who didn’t cover golf as often were wondering who she was. The simplest answer was that she was his physical therapist, the person who had helped him overcome his back problems. That in itself made her a story. Cindi knew a number of members of the national media wanted to talk to her in more detail about her relationship with Rocco. She wanted none of that.
“I just wanted it to be about him,” she said. “If I talked to them at all, it became at least in part about me, and I didn’t think that was right.”
She made herself scarce, hiding out in the player-family dining area while Rocco warmed up. He was the first one on the range. Woods arrived a couple of minutes later and walked over to say hello. Only he didn’t say hello.
Dressed in his Sunday red for a Monday, Woods walked over to Rocco, hand extended, and said, “Nice fucking shirt!”
Rocco cracked up. Instead of explaining that this was his only clean shirt, he said, “I thought you only wore red on Sundays!”
That set the tone for the day.
“I know how he is, especially when he’s got a major on the line,” Rocco said. “But I wasn’t going to change who I was. I was going to talk because that’s what I do. I was going to have fun because that’s what I do. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t trying to kill him and he wasn’t trying to kill me, but it just wasn’t going to get tense like I know it does sometimes with him and some other players.”
The only U.S. Open playoff that may have been comparable to this one in terms of contrasting personalities had taken place at Merion in 1971 between Lee Trevino and Jack Nicklaus. Trevino, a nonstop talker like Rocco, had tossed a fake snake at the ever-serious Nicklaus on the first tee to loosen things up. Whether that played a role or not, Trevino won the playoff by three shots. Rocco wasn’t going to throw any snakes, but he also wasn’t going to let Woods go into one of his no-talking trances for 18 holes.
“I wasn’t trying to psyche him out by talking,” he said. “In fact, I think it probably loosened him up a little. But I had to go out there and play and act the way I would play and act on any other day on the golf course.”
THE USGA IS GOLF’S LAST GOVERNING BODY that still clings to the 18-hole playoff format. The Masters has played sudden death since 1979, and the British Open and the PGA Championship both conduct four-hole playoffs.
Eighteen-hole playoffs are anachronistic, almost always boring and anticlimactic, and are a logistical nightmare for almost everyone involved.
People count on a Sunday finish for golf tournaments. Players are accustomed to going back out on the golf course on Sunday to play off when tied for first place. TV has to juggle schedules if a tournament bleeds over into Monday. Volunteers, who are critical to any golf tournament, most often are scheduled to go home or back to work (or both) on Monday. Airplane flights have to be changed. And yet, the USGA won’t let the 18-hole playoff go.
“I hear all the arguments, and they make sense,” David Fay said. “And I’ll admit we’ve had our share of clunkers. But I still think eighteen holes is the fairest test; there are no fluke winners. And I like the fact that we’re the only ones still doing it. It makes us different.”
True enough. But the USGA has abandoned 18-hole playoffs in its other championships, so the implication is that the U.S. Open is more important than the U.S. Women’s Open or the Senior Open. Which, to be fair, it probably is — except to the people playing in the other Opens.
The USGA didn’t actually settle on the 18-hole format until 1950, when Ben Hogan beat Lloyd Mangrum by four shots at Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia to climax his miraculous comeback less than a year after he almost died in a car accident. There were actually people trying to compare Woods’s playing on a bad knee to Hogan’s comeback, which, as Woods himself pointed out, was patently ridiculous.
Prior to 1950, there had been 18-hole playoffs, 36-hole playoffs, and, in 1931, a 72-hole playoff, Billy Burke beating George Von Elm 296 to 297 at Inverness after they had tied at 292 at the conclusion of the first 72 holes. Woods versus Rocco would be the fourteenth 18-hole playoff since the 18-hole format had taken root. The last one had been in 2001: Retief Goosen beating Mark Brooks by two shots at Southern Hills in one of Fay’s “clunkers.” That had been the Open in which Rocco finished fourth, his best previous finish in a major.
By now, Cindi and Rocco had developed a pre-tee-off routine, stopping several yards from the first tee, around a corner where they were just outside the view of the grounds and the TV cameras. “This is exactly what I’ve waited for my entire life,” he told her, his voice very soft. “I know,” she said. “Go get it done.”
Cindi headed back inside the ropes, carrying her trusty pen. When the two players arrived at the first tee, the mass of humanity they found there was remarkable. The USGA would report later that 25,000 people were “scanned” coming through the gates that morning. That was fewer than the 42,500 who showed up each day of the tournament, but it was a huge throng for a Monday playoff, especially when one considered that every one of them was following the only twosome on the golf course.
“It just shocked me when I walked on the tee,” Rocco said. “You expect it to be crowded, because even if the overall crowd isn’t that big, we’re the only ones playing. But it was just unbelievable. Everywhere you looked, all you could see were people.”
Woods was in his third playoff in a major championship. He had beaten Bob May in a four-hole playoff at the 2000 PGA and Chris DiMarco in sudden death at the 2005 Masters. Overall, he had been in eleven playoffs as a pro, winning ten of them. His only loss had been to Billy Mayfair in Los Angeles in 1998. Rocco was 2–0 in playoffs, having beaten Curtis Strange for his fir
st tour victory at Doral in 1991 and Steve Elkington — on the fourth hole — at Greensboro in 1993.
Woods had the honor on the first hole, and for the first time in five tries, his drive found the fairway. He was so happy to be in the short grass that he threw his arms into the air in (semi) mock celebration. Rocco may have felt a bit tight starting out, but he split the fairway with his drive. From there, he missed the green with a slightly nervous five-iron and ended up making a two-putt bogey. Woods found the center of the green and made a routine par. On the hole that had been his Achilles’ heel all week, Woods had quickly taken a one-shot lead.
“Not the start you want, but it’s just that — a start,” Rocco said. “At that moment I was awfully glad we weren’t playing sudden death. I’d have been down the road in a hurry.”
He settled down on number two, making a par. Even that was a little bit disappointing, since he had birdied the hole three days out of four, but this was all different and new. The par gave him a chance to catch his breath. Woods, off to a much steadier start than on Sunday, made another routine par.
The third hole was playing fairly short, but not as short as it had on the weekend. Rocco hit a six-iron that he thought for an instant might go into the hole. It landed just in front of the pin and rolled right past it before settling 18 inches from the cup. Woods missed the green, hit a poor chip, and two-putted for bogey. When Rocco’s tap-in birdie putt went in, he had suddenly gone from a one-shot deficit to a one-shot lead.
“At that point I knew I was okay, that I had come to play,” he said. “I thought before the round that would be the case, but when I started with the bogey, it shook me just a little. The birdie brought me back to where I wanted to be. The nerves were almost completely gone after that. I was playing golf.”
Rocco may have been calm, but Cindi was not. “I was trying so hard to keep myself together,” she said. “I just couldn’t do it. It was so tense inside the ropes, so many people. We got to the third hole and I just started to lose it. I went outside the ropes and found Sticky [Puertas] and said, ‘I’m losing it.’ I was crying, couldn’t stop myself. He said, ‘My God, Cindi, it’s the third hole. You can’t start breaking down on the third hole.’ I said I’d try. But it was really, really hard.”
The rest of the front nine didn’t make Cindi feel any better. Both players parred the fourth hole, then Rocco bogeyed the fifth after missing the green and hitting a mediocre bunker shot. Woods made par and they were all even. Woods had not yet made a birdie. That changed on the sixth hole, when he rolled in a 15-foot birdie putt. He followed that with another birdie at the seventh, and just like that he had a two-shot lead.
“For some reason I wasn’t panicked,” Rocco said. “Look, it’s Tiger Woods. He isn’t going to go 18 holes and not make some birdies. But the way the weekend had gone, I had to figure he wasn’t going to play a perfect round either. His knee was hurting; I could see that. I didn’t expect him to fall over or anything like that, but I thought there was still a lot of golf left to be played if I could just get something going on my side of it.”
Woods did make a mistake on the eighth, finding the rough off the tee and making his second bogey of the day from there. Rocco’s par brought him to within one again.
But then it was Rocco’s turn to make a mistake. On the ninth, his third-shot wedge went 18 feet past the hole, leaving him with a longer birdie putt than he wanted. Trying too hard to make it, he watched it roll five feet past the hole. Then he missed coming back. Woods made a par, and they turned with Rocco two shots behind.
Around the country, as NBC took over the telecast from ESPN at two o’clock eastern time, most people who hadn’t been paying attention until the network telecast began shook their heads knowingly when the nine-hole scores went up: Woods — 35; Mediate — 37. Rocco certainly wasn’t embarrassing himself, but Tiger — as usual — appeared to be firmly in control.
As the players made their way to the 10th tee, Cindi was receiving almost constant text messages from friends around the country. They all said basically the same thing: “Tell him to slow down!”
“When I get my adrenaline pumping, I can get too fast at times,” Rocco said. “I’m too fast getting ready to hit the ball, too fast with my swing — everything. I’d done a very good job for four days not letting that happen, even under the gun on Sunday. I was very calm, going at a very good pace for me the entire time. I guess for a while there on Monday, I got a little too wound up after he made those two birdies and got a little bit fast.”
With the text messages flying at her, Cindi knew she needed to find a moment to get close enough to Rocco to look him in the eye and remind him to slow down. The problem was she had gone back outside the ropes, in part because crouching and kneeling and lying down on her stomach to stay out of the way of the fans screaming, ‘Get down!’ at all those inside the ropes was starting to wear her out, and in part to calm herself down again.
“I knew I needed to get someplace where he would see me,” she said. “The problem was the crowds were so huge I couldn’t get back inside the ropes on 10.”
In fact, at one point she got trapped when security decided to hold the portion of the crowd she was in to try to spread people out a little bit. “I was waving my media credential, saying, ‘I’m with the media,’ ” she said, laughing later. “To say that no one cared is putting it mildly.”
She finally managed to wedge her way back inside as the players reached the 10th green. By then, Rocco was in more trouble, having missed yet another green. Woods made par, but Rocco couldn’t get up and down for par. He had made back-to-back bogeys on two of the easier holes on the golf course and hadn’t made a birdie since the third. Woods led by three strokes with eight holes to play.
“Now or never,” Cindi thought.
As the players walked onto the 11th tee, she got Rocco’s attention and waved him over close to her. “Slow down!” she hissed.
“What?” he said, initially unsure of what she was saying.
“I said, slow the f —— down!” she said emphatically.
This time Rocco got it. “Okay,” he said, returning to the tee as Woods went through his pre-shot routine.
If there was ever a moment when TVs around the country were going to be turned off, this was it. Tiger Woods with a three-shot lead on the back nine is about as close to a lock as anything on earth short of the sun rising in the east or the New York Jets collapsing in December.
In Greensburg, Tony Mediate paced around and told his wife, “He’s in trouble.”
“Calm down,” Donna said. “I think he’s going to be okay. It’s not even close to over.”
A few miles away, Dave Lucas, Rocco’s childhood buddy, felt the same way as Donna, even though he knew there was no logic to it. “It’s just always been Rocco’s way that when he gets to a point where his back is against the wall and there’s absolutely no reason to believe he can succeed, he figures something out,” he said. “It gets back to the self-confidence he always had that always seemed so misplaced. Put him in a spot where he has no chance, and he’s really dangerous. What could be more of a no-chance than three down to Tiger?”
Rocco’s family and close friends often saw him as Han Solo in the famous Star Wars scene in which Solo is trying to maneuver his spaceship through an asteroid field. “Sir,” shrieks C-3PO, “the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3,720 to 1!”
To which Solo replies, “Never tell me the odds.”
Rocco never wanted to know the odds. They simply didn’t matter as far as he was concerned.
With Cindi’s “slow down” mantra echoing in his head, Rocco watched Woods miss the 11th green. The hole was playing 221 yards, so he needed a three-iron. Taking his time, Rocco put a perfect swing on the ball and found the green. When Woods couldn’t get up and down, and Rocco two-putted for par, the margin was back to two.
“Two shots is nothing,” Rocco said. “You can make up two shots on one hole on a golf cour
se like that. I realized I still had a great chance to win the thing. A thousand things could happen over seven holes.”
What happened next was that Woods bogeyed the 12th. He would talk later about how the Monday round was a microcosm of his week: “A little of everything. I made eagles, birdies, hit great shots, hit terrible shots. I’d birdie two in a row, then bogey two in a row. I never knew exactly what was going to happen next.”
Neither did anyone else.
On 13, Woods missed the fairway to the right. Rocco was down the middle, but had to lay up.
Woods found the green — again — from the rough, missed the eagle putt but tapped in for birdie. He didn’t gain any ground on Rocco, though, because he had hit his third-shot wedge — after laying up — to five feet and made his putt for birdie. The margin stayed at one with only one par-five left to play.
The tee was up again at 14, the USGA having decided that playing the hole short on Sunday had added a lot of suspense and decision making to the round. The hole was playing a little bit longer than Sunday, though, because the teeing area was on the back portion of the tee rather than on the front of it, and the players had a little bit of a wind in their faces.
That made the clubbing decision easy for both: driver for Rocco, three-wood for Woods.
“Playing it longer helped me,” Woods said later. “I wasn’t between clubs the way I was on Sunday. I actually hit the ball in a good spot and had what should have been an easy pitch. But the lie was just a little bit funky.”
Both players barely missed the green, Rocco’s ball ending up right in front, Woods’s a little to the right, just in the rough. For once, Woods got a bit of a bad break: There was a small tuft of grass under his ball, which made it harder for him to spin the ball the way he normally would. His pitch ended up about 15 feet from the hole. From there, his birdie putt slid just past the cup. Rocco, with nothing impeding him, hit a pretty shot to about two feet and holed the putt for a birdie.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 25