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

by Rocco Mediate

  Which it was, the instant it came to rest. “I just blanked on the rule,” Rocco said. “I forgot that the ball just has to land in the circle to be in play and for a second thought it had to end up in the circle. Thank God Mike screamed at me.”

  If Rocco had picked up the ball, the championship would have been over at that instant. He would have been disqualified for picking up a ball that was in play. Woods would have been required to putt out to make it official, but it would have been the worst possible ending to one of the great days in the history of golf.

  As soon as he heard Davis screaming, Rocco stood up, thanked him, and regrouped. “All I really wanted was to get the ball somewhere on the green and give myself a putt at it,” he said. “That was my only hope. When the ball bounced out of the circle, I didn’t have a very good lie at all. I actually hit a hell of a shot from there.”

  He lofted the ball onto the green, and it rolled to a halt 18 feet past the pin, just inside the distance Woods had from below the hole. Woods had 20 feet for birdie to win. If he missed, Rocco would have to make his putt for a tying par.

  Woods cozied his putt up close to the hole — no need to take any chances — and tapped in. Rocco took his time over his par putt, read it a couple of balls outside right, and gave it a good run. “For one second I thought maybe,” he said. “But then I could see it was going to go above the hole. I knew then it was over.”

  If Woods has one bad habit on the golf course — other than the occasional thrown club — it is that he does not first congratulate his opponent after the final putt has dropped or not dropped. After one of his victories in the U.S. Amateur — also in sudden death — he ran to his father while his vanquished opponent stood waiting for him to come and shake hands.

  This time he went and hugged Williams first. When he got to Rocco, who was standing and waiting for him, he put out his hand.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Rocco said. “I think this calls for a hug.”

  Woods got it instantly, and the two men hugged. “Great fight,” Woods said in Rocco’s ear above the cheers raining down on both of them.

  “Thanks,” Rocco said. “You too.”

  That was a perfect description of the day. It had been a great fight, the two of them repeatedly knocking each other down and getting up from a punch to deliver another one. Both were exhausted and exhilarated, Woods by the victory, Rocco by the battle.

  It had been a week that would change both their lives for entirely different reasons. And one that those who watched would remember for a long, long time.

  16

  Suddenly Famous

  IN THE HOUR AFTER HE HUGGED WOODS on the seventh green, Rocco had little chance to even begin to grasp what had happened.

  As soon as Rocco missed his final putt, Cindi had made a beeline for Matt, in part because she was looking for comfort, but also to make certain she didn’t get swallowed by the crowds. There had been very little security of any kind on the sudden-death hole, since the marshals who had worked the hole earlier in the day were long gone. Fans had spilled into the fairway once Rocco and Woods made their way onto the green.

  “I felt so proud of him for the way he played but also sad about it all,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something so badly for someone in my life. He was so close, played so well. Tiger has won how many — fourteen majors? For Rocco there may be other chances, but there may not be. He’s forty-five. It could happen again, but it might not.”

  In fact, had Rocco won, he would have been the oldest Open champion in history, a few months older than Hale Irwin was when he won the Open — on the 91st hole — in 1990.

  The notion that his best chance might have just passed hadn’t hit him as he rode on the cart along with Cindi and Matt back to the 18th green for the awards ceremony. “I was still pumping adrenaline,” he said. “The whole day and week had been such a high. The cheers were still ringing in my ears at that moment.”

  It was during the awards ceremony that the sadness Cindi felt began to hit him. “I always wanted to be part of that awards ceremony,” he said. “I’d seen it a million times. I remember standing there when Lee won and thinking how cool the whole thing was. So there I was, finally a part of it, but they gave Tiger the big trophy. I got a silver medal. It wasn’t what I had been shooting for. I didn’t even want to touch the trophy. It wasn’t mine; it was his. Touching it, even looking at it, would have made it even harder.”

  He and Woods again went through the gauntlet of media interviews: TV, the interview room, then one-on-one with various national TV outlets.

  Woods was a gracious winner. When he was asked again about struggling through the week on his surgical knee, he talked about Rocco’s struggles with injuries throughout his career. “I think we saw what kind of player and competitor Rocc is this week,” he said. “When he’s healthy, he’s a great player.”

  Woods was his usual circumspect self when the subject of his immediate future came up. He said he was going to “shut it down for a while,” adding that he had no idea when he would play again.

  British Open? “I hope so,” he said. Had he hurt the knee more by playing? “Maybe,” he said.

  He called it his greatest victory ever, which took in a lot of territory. Dealing with the injury, having to make birdie twice on 18 to stay alive, and the way Rocco had competed combined to make it number one on his lengthy list.

  In a sense it was Rocco’s greatest victory too. “If you think about where I was going into the Memorial and where I was when that day ended, it was pretty amazing,” he said. “I had made no money before Memorial; in fact I was hurting financially with everything that was going on in my life, and I didn’t know when or if I would find my game again.

  “Then I finish sixth at Memorial, make it through the playoff to get into the Open, and go 91 holes head-to-head with the greatest player alive. I’d say it was a pretty good couple of weeks.”

  In truth, he had no idea how good those couple of weeks had been. As he left his golf outing in Michigan, Frank Zoracki’s cell phone began exploding. People had been calling his office in Greensburg and had gotten his cell number.

  “One minute there was a call from Leno’s show, the next Letterman. Then the Today show,” he said. “It seemed as if every news outlet in the country was calling. There was no way I could return all the calls in any kind of timely way. I just did the best I could.”

  As he was leaving the interview tent, Rocco was unaware of all this. He knew he had played well, knew how close he had come, but he didn’t really understand that most of the country had been riveted by the playoff or that the prime-time ratings for NBC on Sunday had been off the charts. He had no idea that people who knew nothing or almost nothing about golf now knew his name.

  When he had finally done the last of the interviews, he and Cindi drove to the hotel to pack for the trip back to Los Angeles. The lobby was jammed with people who had watched the playoff, then walked over for a drink or to get something to eat.

  “When we walked in the door, someone spotted me and yelled my name,” Rocco said. “Then a few more people. Then it became completely insane, like I had walked into a pep rally or something. People were just going nuts, clapping and screaming and patting me on the back. That was when I first realized what was going on. I’d never seen anything quite like that.”

  The realization began to hit home even more when he finally had a chance to call Zoracki, who began ticking off the media requests. “I only gave him the highlights,” Zoracki said. “There wasn’t time to go through all of them and there was no way he was going to be able to do all of them, even though I knew he’d be willing to try.”

  Doing the network morning shows would mean getting up at 3 A.M. on the West Coast, but Rocco knew he couldn’t afford to say no. Leno wanted him to come on the next night as a surprise guest. That sounded like fun. In fact, a lot of it sounded like fun.

  “I enjoy all of that,” he said. “I like performing and
I like talking and I like people, so I’m fine with it most of the time. Plus, to be honest, I knew there was an opportunity here. I hadn’t exactly been on the front burner in the public’s mind for a while. I knew that even if I didn’t want to do all of this, I would need to do it. Fortunately, even though I was exhausted, almost all of it was fun.”

  Rocco continued to charm America in all his interviews. He joked about how ridiculously good Woods was, about how amazed he was that he’d had a chance to beat him. He kept saying the whole thing was “a blast, the most fun I’ve had in my life.”

  Woods was long gone from the public eye by Tuesday. Once he finished his interviews on Monday afternoon, he headed straight to a private plane to go home to Florida. He would not be doing any morning shows or making surprise appearances on Leno. In fact, the day after the playoff, it was announced that he was going to be “shutting down” for a long time — the rest of the year.

  It turned out that he had been playing on a knee that needed more surgery. He had a torn ACL in his knee and two stress fractures in his leg. The doctors had told him he could play in the Open but that he might damage the knee further. Regardless, he was going to need the surgery.

  Knowing he was going to be out for a while and knowing he probably had as good a chance to win another Open at Torrey Pines as any place on earth, Woods had gambled that he could get through 72 holes — or 91 holes, as it turned out — and had won the gamble. He had hobbled away with the Open trophy, a feeling of amazing satisfaction, and a knee that he hoped surgery would repair once and for all.

  The news that Woods had a torn ACL made his victory even more legendary in the minds of the golfing public. But it would not have been as special to most had he not been pushed so hard for so long by Rocco.

  “If he had won going away, the way he does so often, a lot of people would have said, ‘He’s just that much better than everyone else that he can still whip everyone even when he’s hurt,’ ” Lee Janzen said. “But the fact that he had to fight his way through it, play another round even though he was clearly in pain, and battle Rocco right to the finish, well, that just made it an even bigger deal. It’s hard to imagine that Tiger could become even more larger-than-life than he already was, but this did it for him. And Rocco was a big part of it.”

  All the buzz about Woods and his impending surgery only made people want to hear more from Rocco. His appearance on The Tonight Show was a huge highlight. After Leno had gone down the guest list for the evening, he said he had one more guest, a surprise guest, someone the entire country had been watching over the past several days. When he introduced Rocco, the entire audience was on its feet, giving Rocco a standing ovation.

  “Insane,” he said, repeating his favorite word. “It was completely insane — just like the whole week.”

  He did one interview after another, spending the entire day Wednesday in a Los Angeles studio cranking them out, somehow sounding cheerful and enthusiastic throughout, even though he was hitting a wall.

  There was more, though, than just media. Before Rocco and Cindi left the grounds on Monday, Cindi had received a text message from Tony Renaud, the Skins Game promoter she had talked to at the Memorial. “Where do I send a contract?” the text said. All of a sudden, Rocco had gone from a likable journeyman to a star who could perhaps save the Skins Game.

  Offers to do outings were also pouring in. Because of his personality, Rocco had always done well as a golf celebrity at corporate outings. Outings are the unseen financial perk that golf pros enjoy. Fees can range from $1,000 a day for someone on the Nationwide Tour to $5,000 for tour rookies to $250,000 for a Phil Mickelson to well over $1 million on those rare occasions when Woods might do an outing.

  Rocco’s fee was in the $25,000 range, and if he did more than one Monday — outings are almost always on Mondays because pros are available on most Mondays — in a month, that was a very good month. After the Open, his fee doubled — and occasionally went higher — and he had offers stacked up well into 2009 and even 2010.

  All of that was important because Rocco’s finances had been in tough shape prior to the Open thanks to the divorce, the fact that the house in Naples still hadn’t sold, and his poor play the first half of the year.

  After taking the week off — from golf but not from off-course work — following the Open, Rocco went to Flint, Michigan, to play in the Buick Open. More insanity.

  “I couldn’t move most of the time,” he said. “I did a Tuesday press conference, but everyone in the media wanted their own ‘five minutes’ with me. I had never said no to any of those guys before; I didn’t want to start now. I didn’t want people to think because I had one great week I was a different guy. So I tried to do everything.”

  He had always been popular with golf fans, but now he had gone to a whole new level. No one in the field drew bigger galleries during the week. No one had more people waiting for autographs when he walked out of the locker room, off the driving range, or out of the scorer’s tent.

  “It just never stopped,” he said. “By the end of the week, for the first time I was starting to feel a little bit tired.”

  He played reasonably well, especially given the circumstances, finishing in a tie for 28th place. From there, it was on to Washington — specifically Congressional Country Club in Bethesda — for what is formally known as the AT&T National Pro-Am but is called by everyone on tour “the Tiger.”

  The tournament had been launched a year earlier, with Woods as the host, when the tour event in Denver lost its corporate sponsor and Commissioner Tim Finchem saw its demise as a way to get back into the nation’s capital, bringing Woods — who wanted his own event, à la Palmer and Nicklaus — along with him. The presence of Woods opened the doors of Congressional, a past and future (2011) U.S. Open site that had previously been lukewarm to hosting a weekly tour event. With Tiger’s name on it, that changed.

  Except that the host was nowhere to be found in 2008. Not only was he not in the field, he wasn’t there at all, saying that getting on an airplane, even a private one, was too tough a week after his knee surgery. In his absence, Rocco was asked by the tournament organizers to stand in for him at the pre-tournament sponsor party. This was normally the night that those who put up big bucks got to shake the Great One’s hand and have their picture taken with him. They may have been disappointed that Woods wasn’t there, but they were charmed by Rocco, who did the glad-handing and picture-taking and told funny stories all night.

  “I was happy to do it for him,” Rocco said. “He’s been my friend for a long time and I genuinely like the guy. If I could help out, why not?”

  He played well again in Washington, coming back after an opening-round 73 to shoot 68–67–66 and finish in a tie for 18th place. Two weeks later, he was tied for the lead after one round of the British Open and had people murmuring that maybe he could do it again. But a very tough, windy golf course — Royal Birkdale — wore him out the last couple of days, and he finished tied for 19th. In all, a very solid run.

  Which was important for one reason: He desperately wanted to make the Ryder Cup team. In the past, he had been on the fringe of contention for Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup teams but had never been on one. With Paul Azinger as captain and with four captain’s picks available — as opposed to two in the past — the consensus was that Rocco would be an ideal pick even if he didn’t finish in the top eight in the standings and earn one of the automatic spots.

  “I think I can help this team,” he said. “It’s going to be a little bit younger than in the past and I’m, well, older. I’m not going to be intimidated by anything the Europeans do or by any of their guys. I’ll go into the room and raise some hell and say let’s go kick some butts. If I keep playing well, I would think Zinger will pick me.”

  Azinger wanted to pick Rocco for his experience, his enthusiasm, and his competitiveness. This would be a different U.S. team than the one that had lost the last three Ryder Cups, if for no other reason than the fact th
at Woods wouldn’t be there. Many people in golf thought this might be a good thing for the U.S. because Woods had never liked playing in the Ryder Cup much, and his relatively mediocre (10–13–2) record was a reflection of that.

  With Woods hurt and Davis Love III and Fred Couples not playing well enough for various reasons (age, injuries) to be on the team, the only player with a lot of experience was Phil Mickelson, who had played on six Ryder Cup teams with mixed success. What’s more, Mickelson wasn’t going to be a vocal “Let’s go kick some butts” kind of leader. Rocco could play that role.

  “Basically, Zinger has said to me I need to just keep playing well and not worry about standings or anything else,” Rocco said the week before the PGA Championship. “That’s what I’m trying to do. Problem is, right now I’m really tired.”

  The schedule made taking a break impossible. In addition to playing almost every week, he was doing outings almost every Monday, posing for magazine covers, still responding to all the interview requests, and trying to help Linda and the kids get settled in Seattle. Linda had started dating someone who lived there and decided to make the move to the Pacific Northwest. Rocco was delighted, since he was spending most of his time in Los Angeles and the flight from there to Seattle was a lot easier than flying from there to Naples.

  “It’s great,” he said of the family’s move. “I met the guy and he’s terrific. I think this is a good thing for everybody.”

  CINDI HAD FLOWN EAST for the World Golf Championship event in Akron — which brought back memories for Rocco because he had first met Tom Watson at Firestone Country Club twenty-seven years earlier — and for the PGA Championship, which was at Oakland Hills, outside Detroit.

  Rocco played a good first round in Akron but again wore out as the week went on. He also played solidly in the first two rounds of the PGA, making the cut easily by shooting 73–74.