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

  “I kept thinking, ‘This is Lee, my buddy Lee, the guy I spent all those hours practicing with when we were in college,’ ” he said. “When he was walking up 18, I remembered how we used to talk about what we were going to do when one of us won the U.S. Open and how we’d celebrate. And then it hit me: This is real; he’s actually going to win the U.S. Open. I sat there with tears rolling down my face, not believing it was actually happening.”

  As he told the story, his voice caught at the memory. Janzen was equally emotional: “After I finished and shook hands with Payne, the first person I saw coming off the green was Rocco,” he said. “He had tears rolling down his face. That’s when I lost it myself — when I saw him.”

  I told Lee afterward he could bring Rocco along anytime he wanted in the future.

  Rocco and I became friends after that night. Sometimes I’d go to him looking for a quote; other times we’d stand on a driving range or sit around a locker room talking about anything and everything. I vividly remember him at the 2006 Masters, sitting in the locker room with his friend and teacher Rick Smith, talking about how cool they both felt with Rocco in contention that year. I also remember the look on his face walking off the 18th green on Sunday after his back had exploded on him earlier that day, when he was tied for the lead.

  “I just couldn’t quit,” he said. “I couldn’t quit and I couldn’t play. It was a pretty awful feeling.”

  Like everyone else who follows golf at all — and a lot of people who don’t follow golf at all — I watched Rocco through his Open weekend at Torrey Pines waiting for the roof to fall in on him. He was tied for second on Thursday and still in contention on Friday and Saturday. But when Tiger Woods made two eagles on the back nine on Saturday (and chipped in for birdie at 17), there really wasn’t that much point in watching on Sunday. After all, once Tiger gets the Saturday night lead at a major, the Sunday scramble is for second place. Thirteen times before, he had led majors on Saturday and thirteen times he had held the trophy the next day.

  My hope was that Rocco would play well on Sunday and at least cash a big check. I knew he had struggled for several years, back troubles making it difficult for him to play with any consistency at all. So when he actually took the lead on Sunday, I was delighted. He wasn’t going to shoot 80 on the last day — as he had that day at Augusta two years earlier, when his back went out on him — and he and Lee Westwood were actually making Tiger work to pull out a victory.

  Everyone knows what happened after that. Rocco played superbly down the stretch, and Tiger had to make a miraculous birdie at the 18th, his 12-foot putt just catching the side of the hole and spinning around and in to create the playoff.

  When that putt went in, I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed. My feeling was that Rocco’s one great chance to win the Open had just come and gone. After all, over 18 holes in a Monday playoff, what chance did he stand against Tiger Woods? I think most of America felt the same way, a notion that was further enforced when Rocco bogeyed the ninth and tenth holes the next day to fall three strokes behind in the playoff.

  Those next two hours left all of us with our jaws slack and our hearts in our throats. Had Rocco somehow pulled out the victory, there wouldn’t have been a need for this book: Hollywood would be writing the screenplay right now. As it is, the story is a richer one, even more mind-boggling when one knows the details and all the events that led up to that day.

  “I have a poster of Rocky on my wall at home,” Rocco says. “It says on it, ‘He was a million-to-one shot.’ Sometimes when I think about my career and my life and then that weekend, I laugh because in truth I was more like a billion-to-one shot.”

  There’s a lot to that: a high school sophomore who couldn’t come close to breaking 80 joining the PGA Tour six years later. A guy who needed disk surgery on his back when he was thirty-one years old still playing on the tour at forty-five. A player ranked 158th in the world, who needed a playoff just to qualify for the Open ten days before it began, pushing the greatest player of this or any generation to the absolute limit, going to places with him competitively that no other player had ever been.

  All of which is why it was Rocco who came up with the title for this book. “What should we call it?” he asked me one day. I told him I hadn’t really had time to think of a title yet. He laughed and leaned forward and, looking at a photo of him and Tiger standing together on the first tee during the playoff, he shook his head and said in pure Rocco, “I’ll tell you what we should call it. We should call it Are You Fucking Kidding Me?”

  So that’s what we called it. Almost.

  1

  The Dream

  ROCCO MEDIATE WAS ACTUALLY GETTING a little bit tired of the dream. He’d had it in different forms for as long as he could remember. Sometimes the dream happened when he was wide awake, practicing. Like almost any kid who ever played the game of golf, he would be locked in a duel with someone — usually his hero Tom Watson — for the United States Open title.

  “It would come down to a putt,” he said. “If I was practicing five-footers, it would be a five-footer. Sometimes I’d make one from across the green. Sometimes I’d hole one from the bunker.”

  More recently, the dream had occurred when he was asleep. It was always a little bit foggy — the circumstances changed but weren’t ever completely clear — but he was always about to win the U.S. Open. “I love all the majors,” he frequently told friends. “But there’s nothing like the Open. It’s just the one for me.”

  Now it seemed he was having the dream again, only it felt completely real. What was eerie was the detail and the specifics of this dream. He was pacing up and down in the scoring area inside the clubhouse at Torrey Pines Country Club, the municipal golf course outside San Diego where the 2008 U.S. Open was being played. On a television monitor in front of him, Tiger Woods — it had to be Tiger, right? If you were going to dream about beating someone to win a U.S. Open, why would you dream about anyone else? — was on the 18th green, lining up a 12-foot birdie putt. If he made it, there would be an 18-hole playoff the next day: Tiger Woods, the greatest player in history, against Rocco Mediate, the greatest player to ever grow up in Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Tiger Woods, the number one player in the world, against Rocco Mediate, the number 158 player in the world.

  Rocco wondered when he would wake up. He wasn’t completely certain he was capable of even dreaming this scenario. He was aware of the fact that there was a TV camera on him, watching his every move and reaction as Woods circled the green, lining up the putt from every possible angle.

  “He’s going to make it,” Rocco thought. “He has to make it, right? He’s Tiger Woods. He always makes these putts.” Then again, he knew how bumpy the 18th green was. After four dry days in San Diego, all the greens at Torrey Pines were bumpy, and he knew that Woods could hit a perfect putt and it might catch one of those bumps and bounce away from the hole.

  “He’s going to do everything right, I know that,” he thought. “He’s going to get the right line and the right speed. His hands aren’t going to shake. The moment isn’t going to get to him, because he’s been in this moment like a zillion times in his life. He’s not going to choke; he’s not going to get so nervous that he hits a bad putt. In fact, he’s going to hit a perfect putt.

  “But it still might not go in. He’s going to do everything he has to do to get the putt to go in, but there are some things — like a bad bounce — that are even out of his control. He could, through no fault of his own, miss.

  “And if the putt doesn’t go in, I’ll be the U.S. Open champion.”

  THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THERE HAVE BEEN unlikely U.S. Open champions. Because the Open is truly an open, almost anyone who can play the game at an elite level can qualify. In 2008 a total of 8,390 players had entered the Open, most of them forced to go through two stages of qualifying to make the 156-man field that teed it up in June at Torrey Pines. Those who entered included players from the PGA Tour, members of the various major-
and minor-league and mini-tours around the world, and club pros and amateurs. If you had the $100 entry fee and a handicap of 1.4 or lower, you could sign up to play.

  Of course the Open is won most often by the game’s most glamorous names. Woods had won it twice, Jack Nicklaus and Byron Nelson four times. Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Tom Watson were all Open champions. But Sam Snead had never won it. Neither had Nick Faldo, Steve Ballesteros, Phil Mickelson, or Vijay Singh.

  But surprises happen. Jack Fleck, a club pro, beat Hogan in a playoff at the Olympic Club in 1955. Andy North, who had won only one other tournament in his entire career, won the Open twice — in 1978 and again in 1985. Steve Jones came through qualifying to win in 1996, and Michael Campbell did the same thing before beating Woods by a stroke at Pinehurst in 2005.

  But no Open precedent could have prepared fans for Rocco Anthony Mediate. He had also been forced to qualify, playing 36 grueling holes in Columbus, Ohio, ten days before the Open was to begin. He had birdied his second-to-last hole of the day to get into an eleven-man playoff for the final seven spots. Then he birdied the first playoff hole to make the field.

  But that was only part of the story. He was forty-five and had thought his career over because of back miseries on more occasions than he cared to think about. He had undergone major back surgery once and been forced to leave the tour for extended periods several times.

  As recently as July of 2007, he had gotten out of his car on a Sunday afternoon at Los Angeles Country Club, planning to play a round of golf with friends, taken one step in the direction of his trunk, and fallen flat on his face, his back completely seizing up. In a scene out of a movie, he had managed to reach into his pocket for his cell phone and, remembering that using cell phones was against the rules in the parking lot, sent a text message to his friends inside the clubhouse.

  “In parking lot face down. Help.”

  He was a long way from that parking lot now, two weeks after qualifying, and he wondered when he would wake up, thinking how nice it would have been to find out if Woods made the putt. It would have been fun — even for an instant — to be the U.S. Open champion, even if it was just another dream.

  Only he didn’t wake up. He was still sitting there, watching the TV monitor while the TV camera watched him, as Woods finally got over the putt. How long had it been since he had finished his own round? Twenty minutes? An hour? Ten hours? At the very least it felt like an eternity.

  Woods stood over the putt for so long that Rocco began to wonder if he was hoping someone would give it to him, like in match play. “That one’s good, Tiger; pick it up.”

  Finally, the putter came back and moved forward in a silky-smooth motion. The ball wobbled toward the hole, bouncing along just as Rocco had known it would. For one millisecond, it looked as if it was going to be just wide to the right side of the hole. But it kept swerving, just a tiny bit, and at the last possible instant, it caught the right corner of the hole, spun around the side of the rim — and dropped in.

  Rocco saw Woods go into one of his victory dances — both fists shaking, back arched, screaming to the sky joyously. His caddie, Steve Williams, was screaming too and hugging his boss as if he had just won the Open.

  This wasn’t Tiger’s dream, though; it was Rocco’s. The putt, amazing as it had been, hadn’t won the Open. It had tied him with Rocco Mediate, son of Tony and Donna, the kid who described his handicap as a high school senior as being “about a thousand.”

  And so Rocco Anthony Mediate sat there watching Woods and Williams exult, thinking on the one hand that he had been one inch from winning the U.S. Open. On the other hand, he was now going to go head-to-head with the greatest player in history for 18 holes in a playoff for the U.S. Open title the next day.

  “No disrespect to Jack Nicklaus,” Rocco said. “He was great, but this guy [Woods] is from another planet. He makes shots under pressure that no one else has ever made. If he hits fair-ways, he wins by 15. If he doesn’t hit fairways and puts the ball in impossible places, he still wins. He’s the absolute best ever, without any doubt at all.

  “But I wasn’t afraid to play him head-to-head. I wanted to show him what I could do. I wanted to show me what I could do. I wanted to show the world what I could do. When the putt went in, I wasn’t the U.S. Open champion. But I had a chance to win it in a way no one would ever have dreamed possible.

  “Except me. I dreamed it.”

  THE VERY FACT THAT ROCCO relished the idea of going head-to-head in an 18-hole playoff against Tiger Woods made him markedly different from most of his colleagues on the PGA Tour. Most dreaded the idea of even being paired with Woods for an ordinary round of golf on a Thursday or Friday at a weekly tour stop. His presence was intimidating, in part because he was without question the greatest player in the world, but also because of the way he carried himself. Every pore of his body oozed confidence, the message always the same from the very first tee: I’m better than you. I know it and you know it and so does everyone watching us.

  Only on rare occasions did Woods fail to live up to that message. He had stormed onto the tour in 1996, winning two times that fall at the age of twenty, and then had won his first major as a professional, the 1997 Masters, by 12 shots. “He’s a boy among men and he’s showing the men how to play,” eight-time major champion Tom Watson said that week.

  Woods hadn’t let up much since that Masters. He had eye surgery and knee surgery, and always seemed to come back better than before. He piled up victories at a stunning rate, especially for the modern era. At a time when any player winning twice in the same year was thought to have had a superb year, Woods averaged more than five wins a year during his first eleven seasons on tour. By 2008, he had already won thirteen majors as a pro, putting him second all-time and well on his way to Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen. During one extraordinary stretch in 2000 and 2001, he won four majors in a row. Considering the fact that any player who wins three majors in a career is considered a lock Hall of Famer, the four majors in ten months — known in golf circles as the “Tiger Slam,” since he won all four of the game’s Grand Slam events in succession but not in a calendar year — was arguably the greatest feat in golf history.

  “Playing with Tiger is just hard,” said Paul Goydos, a veteran pro who, as with most players, liked Woods when he didn’t have to compete against him. “Most of it isn’t his fault. The galleries are always huge and they’re always moving after he hits or putts out. They’re noisy. Getting from one green to the next tee can be tough because security is so focused on him.

  “He’s not unfriendly out there, but when it’s important to him and he’s grinding — which is almost always — he gets this look in his eyes that tells you he doesn’t want to hear any jokes or kid around. You can almost see the intensity radiating off his body, especially if it’s Sunday and he’s in the hunt.”

  Which, as Goydos points out, is almost always. In 2007, Woods had had a fairly typical year. He played in sixteen tournaments and won seven times — including the PGA Championship. He finished second three times, including in the Masters and the U.S. Open — results that angered him. In all, he had finished in the top ten twelve times and the top twenty-five fifteen times. That gave him sixty-one victories in his career and 144 top tens in 230 career starts. Some perspective: Phil Mickelson, the number two player in the world, who is guaranteed to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, went into 2008 with thirty-two victories (a remarkable number by mortal standards) and 130 top tens. He had played in 363 tournaments to accumulate those numbers — 133 more than Woods.

  It wasn’t just the numbers that made Woods scary. Anytime he showed up on a leader board, other players began thinking about what second-place money was worth. When Woods was injured and off the tour, Lee Janzen, a two-time U.S. Open champion, joked that “our purses just went up 18 percent.” The winner’s share on tour is 18 percent of the total purse.

  In fact, Woods didn’t even have to be on the leader board to m
ake people nervous. In 2003, when he was going through his second swing change and struggling, Woods had to get up and down from a bunker to make par on his last hole in the second round just to make the 36-hole cut at the Masters. Watching on TV, veteran tour caddy Mark Chaney watched Woods make his par putt. He walked over to Brennan Little, Mike Weir’s caddy.

  “Well, Butchie,” he said, calling Little by his nickname, “I thought there for a second you guys had a chance to win. Tough luck.”

  Weir was leading the tournament at that moment — and leading Woods by 11 shots. As it turned out, he did win, but not before Woods closed to within a shot of him early on Sunday. Even with his game at its low ebb, Woods still frightened the competition.

  It wasn’t a coincidence that on all five occasions when Woods had finished second in a major championship, the winner had not been paired with him on Sunday. And even when it appeared he had no chance to win, he still managed to put a scare into people.

  In 2002, he trailed Rich Beem by five strokes with four holes to play in the PGA Championship. Then he birdied the last four holes. Beem, playing two groups behind him, managed to keep his composure and win by one. In 2007 at the Masters, Woods needed to hole out from the fairway on the 18th to tie Zach Johnson, who had already completed his final round. With the ball in the air, everyone — including Johnson — held their breath, wondering if Woods could pull off the miracle.

  Tiger didn’t hole the shot that time, but Johnson said later that “anyone else, you know the odds in a situation like that are very much in your favor. With Tiger, I figured the chances were about fifty-fifty.”

  No one wanted to be paired with Woods late in a major championship. He had clearly established his ability to intimidate en route to that first dominating Masters victory in 1997, when he had a two-shot lead on European Tour veteran Colin Montgomerie after 36 holes. Montgomerie, one of the best head-to-head players in Ryder Cup history, spoke confidently on Friday night about his experience in big situations and how he thought that would help him playing with the rookie the next day.