Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (10 page)

“People just liked him,” Jim Carter said. “He always had time for people — he was that way early on, when there weren’t many
demands made on him, and he stayed that way even after he became better known. Rocco was the guy people could always go to
for a quote or to help out with a clinic or to spend extra time signing autographs. I think he’s one of the few guys who actually
enjoys all that. A lot of players see it as a burden. Rocco saw it as fun.”

He was easily recognizable too, in part because he was always talking and smiling, but also because of the long putter.

“Long putters had always been thought of as being for old guys,” he said. “I was twenty-eight when I won using it. It definitely
got me attention I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. But that wasn’t why I was using it. I felt comfortable with it and I putted
better with it. Then, when my back started to bother me, it made my life a lot easier because I didn’t have to bend over to
putt.”

As he got older and put on weight, Rocco began to experience occasional back pain, but it wasn’t anything he was that concerned
with, because all professional golfers experience soreness in their backs at some point.

“The body just isn’t meant to spend hours and hours making the motion we make when we swing a golf club,” said Raymond Floyd,
the four-time major champion who was another of Rocco’s early mentors. “It’s a lot like pitching. The arm and the shoulder
just aren’t designed for the kind of pressure pitchers put on them when they throw a baseball, which is why so many pitchers
have shoulder problems and elbow problems.

“It’s the same with golfers and their backs. The twist and the torque and the thrust you put into a swing just aren’t good
for your back. One of Rocco’s strengths as a young player was always his desire. He loved practicing, loved going out there
for hours and hours and hitting balls. It’s why he kept getting better. But it isn’t easy. I’ve always been able to keep my
weight at a pretty good place, and my back would hurt anyway after long practice sessions. You throw in the added weight with
all the time he spent practicing, it was almost inevitable that he was going to get hurt somewhere along the line.”

Strange and Carter both played with Rocco enough after his back troubles began to know how much pain he was in.

“I know enough about bad backs to know that it’s tough to get out of bed in the morning when your back hurts, much less try
to swing a golf club and walk 18 holes,” Strange said.

Carter could often see that his friend was in pain even when he didn’t talk about it. “Sometimes you could just tell by the
look on his face,” he said. “Later in my career, I tried to play through shoulder problems and I know how awful that was,
so I think I have a sense of what he was going through back then.”

Back miseries are commonplace on tour. Today, most players go into a fitness trailer that travels from tournament to tournament
to be stretched at length before they hit a single practice ball. Many work with back specialists and chiropractors to try
to ward off back pain. Players like Fuzzy Zoeller, Fred Couples, and Davis Love III — among others — have been forced to change
their practice patterns and have missed considerable playing time because of back troubles.

For years now, Couples has rarely practiced for very long because he doesn’t want to risk his back. In 1994, he was in contention
on the last day at Doral when his back went into spasm on the driving range while he was warming up. He collapsed, screaming
in agony, and had to be carried into the fitness trailer. Players who were on the range that day still vividly remember Couples
crying out in pain and the sight of him on the ground.

“Worst pain I’ve ever felt,” Couples said years later. “When it happens that way, it’s as if someone has stuck a knife in
your back. You’re on the ground before you know it.”

It didn’t happen exactly that way to Rocco, but it wasn’t all that different. His victory at Doral in March of 1991 spring-boarded
him to his best season yet on tour. He finished the season with $597,438 in earnings, having finished in the top ten seven
times and the top 25 fourteen times in 25 events. For the first time in his career, he qualified for the season-ending Tour
Championship (only the top 30 players on the money list get to play), and he finished fifteenth on the final money list.

His life had changed completely since he first arrived on tour and either drove from tournament to tournament or searched
out the cheapest airfare he could find when he had to fly. He and Linda had moved into a new house in Ponte Vedra, and his
friends joked about how fast he spent money.

“We used to say that Rocco’s money must be on fire because he had to spend it before it burned up,” Lee Janzen said. “I can
remember him telling Linda she needed to spend
more
than she was spending. How often does a husband tell a wife that? She was always very careful about money. Rocco wasn’t.
It just wasn’t his way.”

A year later, Rocco didn’t play as well as he had in 1991, but he still had a solid year, finishing 49th on the money list.
Not happy that he hadn’t finished higher than third in a tournament and that he had not played nearly as well as he expected
to, he rededicated himself to the practice tee in 1993, and the work paid off.

In March, he finished tied for second at Bay Hill behind Ben Crenshaw, which was a thrill because it was Palmer’s tournament.
In 1985, during Rocco’s senior year at Florida Southern, Palmer had given him a sponsor’s exemption into the tournament. Rocco
had shown up with a Florida Southern bag and no caddy, and when Palmer spotted him playing a practice round carrying his bag
(college players almost always carry their own bags in tournaments), he sent one of his caddies out with a Bay Hill bag and
instructions to carry that bag for the youngster for the rest of the week.

Having a chance to win Palmer’s event meant a lot to Rocco. A month later at Greensboro, he won his second tournament, again
in a playoff. This time it took four holes and his victim was Steve Elkington, one of his good friends on tour. Rocco finally
birdied the fourth hole of the playoff to win.

By the time the tour got to Las Vegas, the last full-field tournament of 1993, Rocco had made more than $600,000 and was comfortably
qualified for the next week’s Tour Championship, which was being held at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.

Since he was one of the bigger names in the Vegas field, he was asked to participate in that week’s Merrill Lynch shootout.
The shootouts were held on Tuesdays to try to entice bigger crowds to come to the golf course on practice days. Ten players
participated over nine holes, with the high score on each hole being eliminated until two players were left to play the last
hole. Ties were broken by chip-offs or shots from a bunker — anything to entertain the crowd. They were lighthearted games,
with CBS’s Gary McCord usually playing the role of MC and a couple of players wearing microphones so they could interact with
McCord or chime in with wisecracks. Naturally, Rocco was one of the miked players.

The shootout was being staged on the back nine that day, and there were four players left — including Rocco — when they got
to the 16th hole, which is a reachable par-five over water.

“I hit a three-wood for my second shot and got it onto the green,” Rocco remembered. “I handed the club to my caddy, took
about two steps, and felt this spasm of pain like nothing else I had ever felt. It wasn’t the first time I’d had back pain,
but nothing, I mean
nothing,
like this had happened before.

“I’m not quite sure how I walked onto the green, but I remember saying to my caddy, ‘I can’t move.’ I had to quit right there,
couldn’t even think of putting. They took me straight to the fitness trailer, and the guys worked on me and gave me a lot
of Advil. It loosened up that night, and I was able to play the first three days even though it was still pretty sore.”

In those days, Vegas was a 90-hole event with the cut coming after 54 holes. Rocco somehow made the cut. But on Saturday,
playing the 12th hole, he felt the pain again. Not wanting to miss playing in San Francisco, he withdrew immediately and went
back to the trailer for more work. Again, the boys in the trailer and lots of Advil helped. He took a couple of days off and
then tried to play a practice round at Olympic the day before the Tour Championship started.

“I was out there early by myself and it felt okay for a while,” he said. “But then it went again. I was on the 15th hole,
which is a par-three, and I tried to hit a seven-iron. There’s a bunker in front of that green that’s about 120 yards from
the tee. I couldn’t reach it with my seven-iron.

“There was no one around, so I started to walk in because we weren’t that far from the clubhouse. There’s a big hill that
leads up to the 18th green, and I couldn’t get up it. I kept going down, getting up, and going down again. Finally I ended
up crawling up the hill to get to the clubhouse. I probably should have sent my caddy in to get a cart for me, but I was being
stubborn. It probably took me an hour to go the last 300 yards.”

He was determined not to withdraw. For one thing, it was a prestigious event that he had worked hard to qualify to play in.
For another, since there were no alternates, Steve Elkington, whom he was scheduled to play with on Thursday, would be left
to play alone. And for another, there was no cut in the tournament, and if he finished 72 holes, the worst he could do was
cash a check for $48,000 — which was not exactly money to be laughed off.

Rocco’s most vivid memory of the next day is Elkington. “He picked my ball up out of every single hole,” he said. “He figured
my caddy had enough to do trying to get me around.”

He somehow managed to play all 72 holes — “and didn’t finish last” — but he flew home very concerned about the state of his
back. “I was hoping, to be honest, that a good long rest would be all I needed,” he said. “The guys in the trailer had given
me some rehab exercises to do during the off-season and they politely suggested I try to lose a little weight. I worked hard
on the rehab and came out for ’94 hoping the rest and rehab would be enough. They weren’t.”

Rocco was not the only member of his family dealing with health issues — in fact, his problems were relatively minor compared
to what his mother had gone through during 1993. Donna Mediate had been diagnosed that summer with multiple myeloma, cancer
in her bone marrow. The prognosis was, in a word, terrible.

“I still remember everyone who knew my mom going on about how awful it was and wailing and crying,” he said. “I understood
all that, but I honestly didn’t believe that was the best way to help her. My mom is a strong woman. A lot of my toughness
comes from her.

“When I found out what was going on, I sat down with her and told her, ‘Look, I know this is rough and it’s unfair. But you’re
going to get better. You are going to deal with the treatments and whatever else you have to deal with, but I know you can
handle it. I honestly believed that if all she heard from people was how terrible it was and that she was going to die, she
would die. I told her she wasn’t going to die and she needed to look at this as a fight and just go and win the damn fight.

“I upset some people by saying all that, because they thought I was being cavalier about it. I wasn’t being cavalier. I thought
if I told her she should feel sorry for herself, she would. If I told her to go get better, she would.”

Donna ended up going to the University of Arkansas for a bone marrow transplant and treatment. She and Tony made the trip
more times than either can remember, but a year later she was cancer free.

“Rocco was tough on me,” she said years later. “The things he was saying weren’t necessarily easy to hear, but they were probably
good for me to hear.” She smiled. “The bottom line is I’m still here.”

Eight years later, Donna had a second bout with cancer. This time it was lymphoma. There was no surgery, but there was more
chemo and more radiation. Once again, her son more or less ordered her to get through it. Once again, she did.

“If only,” he said years later, “I was as good at ordering myself to get healthy. I might have won four or five majors by
now.”

R
OCCO BEGAN
1994
BY PLAYING
in five early-season tournaments. Even though he was still hurting, he managed to make four cuts. By spring, the pain was
so bad that after being forced to skip the Masters, he went to see Dr. Arthur Day, a noted back specialist, in Gainesville.

“He told me I had a choice: I could do surgery right away to repair my disk or I could do surgery later to repair my disk.
‘You’re going to have to have surgery, especially if you want to keep playing golf for a living,’ he told me. ‘It’s not a
matter of if, it’s a matter of when.’ ”

Rocco knew that surgery would means months of rehab and time away from golf and the tour. He also knew that the U.S. Open
was only a few weeks away and it was at Oakmont — the golf course where he had first started to wonder how good he might become
after playing there following the last round of the ’83 Open.

“Plus, it was a home game for me, and I knew it was going to be Arnold’s last Open and I might get paired with him because
the USGA does stuff like that,” he said. “I decided to wait at least until the Open pairings came out.”

David Fay, the executive director of the USGA, still did the pairings in those days. He always liked to put together three-somes
for the first two days that made sense for one reason or another: It could be three past U.S. Amateur champions or two players
who had once met in an Open playoff.

In this case, Fay wanted to put together a threesome for Palmer that would be meaningful, since it would be his last U.S.
Open. He chose John Mahaffey to be one member of Palmer’s group because Mahaffey had won the PGA Championship at Oakmont in
1978 and thus had history with the golf course, just as Palmer did.

Then, looking through the names in front of him, Fay came to Rocco’s. “It was a natural,” he said. “Pennsylvania kid, grew
up near Oakmont, plus I knew that Arnold had been one of his mentors.”