Tie ball game. Both players were now one over par for the day.
“I got to playing some military golf right there,” Woods said. “You know, ‘ left-right, right-left.’ I was putting so well I kept thinking if I could just get the ball on the green on each hole, I’d have a chance. I knew three shots up on this golf course the lead could go away quickly.” He smiled. “I guess I was right.”
There were four holes to play, and they were dead even. By now, most of the country was riveted. Since NBC.com was streaming live, a lot of people sitting at desks in their offices were watching on their computers. During the last two hours of the playoff, trading volume on Wall Street plummeted.
Curtis Strange, who had worked the first two rounds of the tournament for ESPN, was back home, unable to move from his TV. “I got a call from my son Thomas, who lives in Charlotte,” he said later. “He was in a restaurant watching with some friends and he said people were just going nuts on every shot.”
Arnold Palmer had watched Sunday’s round at home, surrounded by friends. On Monday, he sat in his office with his friend and confidant Doc Giffin. “If I’d had people around, it would have been too much,” Palmer said. “I was nervous and proud at the same time. There were moments when I wanted to say to Rocco on the screen, ‘I told you for years that you could do this.’ ”
Rick Smith had completed his outing-related duties in the morning and was back in the locker room at Oakland Hills. “I almost couldn’t breathe by the time they got to 15,” he said.
Cindi, having done her job by telling Rocco to slow down, was now a complete mess. “The last few holes, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “At one point, Sticky had come inside the ropes, and I was about to say to him, ‘Help me calm down here; I need to stop crying.’ Then I looked at him and he was crying.”
The calmest person in the storm was Rocco. He hit another perfect drive at 15. Woods, still in the military mode, missed the fairway dead right. “I was in a zone then,” Rocco said. “I’d hit the ball, look at it in the air, and say, ‘Yup,’ and then move on to the next shot. If I hit a shot that wasn’t exactly what I wanted, I was surprised.”
Woods would later describe his drive at 15 as a “pitch out.” “Catcher called pitch out, and I hit it over there to the right,” he said.
He was so far to the right that on the one hole on the golf course that didn’t have a bunker, he had found one — on the adjoining ninth hole.
He had a difficult lie but a reasonable angle to the green and was 170 yards away — a seven-iron shot for him. “I had to start the ball at the middle of the right bunker and just rope it in there,” he said. “I hit it so flush it was probably the best shot I hit all week, feeling-wise. And it hit up right behind the hole.”
“We were so far away we really couldn’t see what Tiger was doing over there on the other side,” Rocco said. “When he finally got over the ball and hit it, Matt said to me, ‘Where’d it go?’ I said, ‘Just watch the flag.’ Sure enough the ball came from out of nowhere, landed on the green, and stopped ten feet away.”
It was a superb shot, one of those one-in-a-million shots Woods pulls off. Even though Rocco’s drive had found the fair-way, he had still been away and hit a solid second shot that had stopped 18 feet above the hole. Woods’s shot rolled inside Rocco’s, finally stopping no more than 10 feet from the hole.
“Ridiculous,” Rocco said. “I run out of words to use when he hits a shot like that. Think about it: I hit a good second shot, and he’s inside me hitting his second shot from Pluto.”
Woods was likely to make his putt, so Rocco hit his birdie putt hard, figuring he had to make it to stay even. “When he hit it,” Woods said, “I thought it was going at least 10 or 12 feet by the hole.”
So did Rocco — until just before the ball got to the hole, when he realized his line was perfect and the ball was headed straight for the middle of the cup. As the ball got close to the hole, Rocco sensed something special was about to happen. “Oh, wow,” he said. “Oh, wow. Oh, wow…” The ball hit the hole and almost popped up into the air, but since it had hit the back of the cup dead center, it stayed in. The roar was, to put it mildly, deafening.
Which was good, because Rocco was so stunned, he let loose with “Oh, my f —— God” after dropping his head in disbelief when the putt went in.
As tense as the situation had just become for him, even Woods couldn’t suppress a small smile. “I couldn’t believe it when it went in,” he said. “Neither could he. I can’t repeat here what he said when he realized he’d made it.”
Now, suddenly, Woods had to make his putt to stay even. He went for it just as Rocco had, but it veered inches wide of the hole and didn’t stop until it had rolled a good four feet past the hole. Shockingly, Woods had to make a true “throw-up zone” putt (as in, when a player sees he has that much left he wants to throw up) or he would be two shots down with three holes to play.
“I looked at it and said, ‘Well, here’s the tournament. If I miss this putt, the tournament is over. I make this putt, I can still win in regulation. Here we go. Get it done.’ ”
And, as he always seems to do when there’s no choice in the matter, Woods made the putt. Even so, Rocco led by one. He had birdied three holes in a row under the most incredible pressure imaginable. He had gone from three strokes down on the 11th tee to one up on the 16th tee.
Even Woods, who has done just about everything that can be done on a golf course, said, “That hat trick [the three birdies] was one of the more impressive things I’ve ever seen on a golf course. For all of his talking, Rocc gets himself into a nice little zone when it’s time to get over the ball. He talks and talks and then he goes into that zone, hits his shot, and then it’s blah-blah-blah all over again. It’s actually kind of cool to see.” Or, as Paul Azinger had said in a text to Cindi earlier in the day, “The world is about to learn our little secret; the boy can play!”
The tension was now officially unbearable. The crowd had been riding along, perfectly happy to see Woods win, but when Rocco turned things around so emphatically and so quickly, they began to sense that they were witnessing one of the great golf duels — and perhaps one of the great golf upsets — in history.
“You could tell,” Cindi said later. “It wasn’t that anyone was rooting against Tiger. It was that Rocco had won them over.”
That was exactly right. The great TV director Frank Chirkinian, who produced Masters telecasts for CBS for almost forty years, once made the point that golf may be the only sport on earth where neutral fans root for the stars and against the underdogs.
“They don’t mind seeing the little guy compete with their heroes,” he said. “But in the end, they want their hero to win.”
That had almost always been the case with Woods. Most fans liked to see him win, liked to see him pull off unthinkable shots and comebacks. Now, though, it was Rocco who was trying to pull off the unthinkable, and many, if not most, who were watching wanted to see it happen. Early in the day the roars had been equally loud for both players. By the time they walked to the 16th tee, the Rocco roars were almost drowning out the Tiger roars.
Both players made par on the par-three 16th. For a split second it looked as if Woods’s 30-foot birdie putt was going to go in, but it stopped a couple of rolls short of the hole. “Thought I’d made it,” he said.
Rocco was now two holes from winning the U.S. Open. In the back of his mind was the memory of Sunday, especially knowing that Woods would have the advantage again on the par-five 18th. “I had almost birdied seventeen on Sunday,” he said. “The thought occurred to me that if I could birdie it now, it would be almost impossible for him to beat me.”
That thought occurred to Woods too. He hit a solid second shot to inside 20 feet, and after Rocco’s 35-footer had gone wide, he again hit a near-perfect putt. But it came up just short. Both players tapped in for par.
They were now exactly where they had been a day earlie
r: one hole to play, Rocco leading by one. The only difference was that they were playing together rather than one group apart.
In Rocco’s mind, he needed a birdie to win the championship. He knew that if Woods found the fairway with his drive, he would probably have an iron in his hands for his second shot. Rocco had been able to go for the green only once all week — on Friday — and that had been with a three-wood after he had crushed his drive. For the week, Woods was driving the ball almost exactly 40 yards past him on the holes where the USGA measured for length off the tee.
“I knew, just like on the other days, I was going to have to really rip one to get it out there where I could go for the green,” Rocco said. “So I went for it, swung hard. I hit the ball right on the center of the club, caught it just about perfect. But I hit it a few yards left of where I was aiming. I was trying to start it out down the right side and have it drift back to the middle and bounce to the left side of the fairway. I started it out right in the middle; it drifted to the left side and bounced into the bunker. That eliminated any questions about going for the green.”
Woods, knowing he probably couldn’t afford to miss the fair-way the way he had on Sunday, crushed his drive. “I was actually thinking eagle to win,” he said. “But I wanted to make sure I at least made four, because after Rocco’s drive I knew there was a good chance that would at least keep me alive.”
The drive was Woods’s best of the day, one of his best of the week. It flew 320 yards and left him with 217 yards to the hole — a four-iron shot for him.
Rocco hit a good second shot, laying up to almost exactly 100 yards. The flag was deeper on the green than it had been Sunday, 19 yards from the front edge and six feet from the right edge. That meant he had a little more room to work with.
Woods’s second shot was a dart that landed in the middle of the green and rolled to a stop 35 feet from the hole. Rocco was now certain he had to make birdie to have a chance to win.
“Even with the flag back a little, I just couldn’t play it too cozy,” he said. “I didn’t hit a bad shot; it just had no chance to check up.”
The ball hit just below the pin but spun left, leaving him with 18 feet for birdie.
As the two players walked up to the green, the crowd noise was so loud that even walking right next to each other, neither could hear the other one speak. Rocco was going on about how the whole thing was “insane,” but Woods couldn’t hear a word he was saying.
“If I had shouted right in his ear at that moment, I don’t think he would have heard me,” Rocco said. “It was that crazy.”
It got quiet again as they lined up their putts. Knowing Woods’s penchant for doing undoable things, Rocco realized that he might have to make his birdie putt to tie. As soon as he saw the ball come off Woods’s putter, he knew that wasn’t going to be the case. It was low all the way and went about four feet past the hole.
Now Rocco’s birdie putt was to win the U.S. Open championship.
“Every kid who has ever played golf has dreamed that moment,” Rocco said. “Make this putt, win the U.S. Open. I’d dreamed it a million times. Now it was real, right there. I told myself, ‘Whatever you do, don’t you dare leave it short. Give yourself a chance.’ ”
He didn’t leave it short. But the putt was left of the hole all the way and didn’t take the break to the right Rocco thought it might when it got to the hole. When he walked down to mark, he was somewhat stunned to see he had a good three feet left. “On that green, it was anything but a tap-in,” he said.
Woods’s birdie putt was actually a tad longer. After talking it over at length with Williams, he calmly knocked it into the center of the hole. “I just couldn’t get a read on it; I couldn’t see anything. I asked Stevie what he thought [unusual; Woods usually reads his own putts], and he couldn’t see anything either. So I played it dead straight and put a little bit more on it to make sure it didn’t take some kind of break.”
It hit the back of the hole solidly, never straying an inch.
Now Rocco had to make his putt for par to keep the match going. A miss, and Woods would win by a shot.
“I said to Matt, ‘I’m not even going to read anything into this putt; I just have to make it,’ ” he said. “It was really a matter of making sure I didn’t baby it and put break into it. I was probably more nervous over that putt than any I had all week. Three-putting the last green for bogey would have been a horrible way to lose. I just had to get that putt in the hole.”
He did, looking calm, even if he wasn’t. After 18 holes, they were still tied: Both men had shot even-par 71. After 90 holes, they were also tied, each of them still one under par. For all the USGA’s talk about the fairness of an 18-hole playoff and the unfairness — “flukiness,” as Fay called it — of sudden death, the championship would be decided in sudden death.
Before that, though, there were a couple of things that had to be done. For one, both players had to sign their scorecards. “It was a stroke play round, so they had to add up their scores and sign their cards to make it official,” Mike Davis said. “We hadn’t really thought about what would happen if they tied.”
The scoring area was a long way off, in the clubhouse. What’s more, there was no one there. So the two players sat down on the fringe of the green, added up their scores, and signed their cards.
The next step was to get them back to the seventh tee, which was where the playoff to decide the playoff would begin. The USGA had carts waiting. Rocco was ready first and he hopped into one of them and headed for the seventh tee, which wasn’t very far from the 18th green, one of the reasons the USGA had selected it as the place to begin sudden death if it was needed.
He was on his way to the tee, when Woods finished his card and said to Mike Davis, “I need to go to the bathroom.”
Uh-oh. The USGA hadn’t really thought about that either. The locker room was a hike from the 18th green. The public porta-johns nearby would be jammed, and to get Woods to and from one would be chaotic. Davis jumped on his walkie-talkie and, fairly desperately, said, “Anyone have an idea where I can take Tiger to go to the bathroom?”
David Fay was listening up in the NBC booth. He grabbed his walkie-talkie and responded. “You’re only a few yards from the NBC tower,” he said. “There’s a porta-john there at the bottom of the stairs. Use that.”
Brilliant solution. Davis had one other concern. The porta-john was convenient and private, since it was inside the ropes, but it was still, well, a porta-john.
“Tiger,” Davis said gingerly, “are we talking number one or number two?”
Woods laughed. “Number one,” he said.
Davis breathed a sigh of relief and escorted Woods to the NBC tower. Both men were feeling better when Woods and Steve Williams were carted out to the seventh tee, where Rocco was waiting.
The seventh was not an ideal hole for Rocco to play sudden death. It is a 461-yard dogleg right. Woods could hit a high cut off the tee, aim at the corner, and shorten the hole considerably. Rocco can play an occasional cut, but his shot is the high draw, meaning the hole didn’t set up well at all for him.
“I’d been hitting a big hook off the tee all week,” he said. “Start it out right and have it come back to the center of the fairway as close to the dogleg as possible. I pulled it off a couple days, but I also landed in the first cut a couple times and in the left-hand bunker. It wasn’t a good driving hole for me.”
So much so that Mike Davis actually got angry e-mails and letters from people claiming the USGA had chosen number seven as the playoff hole because it wanted Woods to win. But the playoff hole had been decided on the previous Wednesday.
“Our thinking was twofold,” Davis said. “First, it was close to the clubhouse and the 18th green, which would make it easy to get the players back there and relatively easy for fans to walk over there to watch, since they’d have a few minutes in between. Second, seven-eight-nine are a par-four, a par-three, and a par-five. We liked having three differen
t pars on the first three holes if it went that far. The last thing we were thinking when we made the decision was who might be in a sudden-death playoff.”
Woods, hitting first after his birdie at the 18th, hit a perfect shot, cutting the dogleg, the ball rolling to a halt just in the fair-way on the right side, leaving him with a relatively simple shot to the green. Rocco tried to hit his high hook again but — a little bit like at 18 — started it too far left. This time, though, he was way left, and the ball hopped into a bunker to the left of the fairway.
“Right away,” he said, “I knew I was in trouble.”
He knew he was in bigger trouble when he got to the ball and saw that it was in the front of the bunker, almost up against the lip, meaning he had virtually no chance to get the ball over the lip and still get it to the green. He had to give it a try, though, because he knew the likelihood that Woods was going to make anything worse than par was slim.
“I swung really hard and just flipped it,” he said. “That’s why the ball went so far left.”
It was way left, up against the grandstand, short and to the left of the green. Woods, seeing where Rocco was, didn’t try anything fancy, hitting a nine-iron safely onto the front of the green, leaving himself about 20 feet for birdie.
Because the grandstand was an artificial, immovable hazard, Rocco was entitled to relief. The grass in that area was so thick that the USGA had marked off a drop circle for any player who had to take a drop away from the grandstand. Davis showed Rocco the drop circle after he had picked up his ball. He walked over to it, held his arm up as the rules prescribe, and dropped the ball.
It landed in the circle, but the ground was hard enough that it hopped a little bit and rolled outside the circle. Instinctively, seeing the ball leave the circle, Rocco bent over to pick up the ball and drop again. Fortunately for everyone, Davis had not turned away but was looking right at Rocco at that moment.
“I saw him reach down for the ball and I thought, ‘Oh, my God!’ ” Davis said. “I screamed, ‘Rocco, ball’s in play, the ball’s in play!’ ”
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 26