Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (12 page)

He was in contention the entire week at Phoenix. There is no tournament on the tour with bigger, louder crowds than Phoenix.
Being loud and drunk at Phoenix is considered the right way to behave as opposed to other tournaments, where it is likely
to get you removed from the grounds. Some players have trouble dealing with the Phoenix crowd mentality; Rocco — naturally
— thrived.

“I love it there, always have,” he said. “Hey, golf is supposed to be fun for everyone — players, fans, all of us. As long
as they don’t yell in the middle of my backswing, I’m fine. Hey, if I was watching I’d be yelling too.”

With the crowds very much in his corner, Rocco put together four solid rounds, 68–67–70–69, to finish in sixth place. That
finish earned him $42,088 — almost five thousand dollars more than he needed to clinch his playing privileges for the entire
year. “I felt good all week,” he said. “The 68 the first day was big — gave me a confidence boost. I think the fans knew I’d
been hurt. They were great every day.

“What a relief that week was,” he said. “It meant I could make my schedule for the rest of the year, my travel plans — everything.
Plus, I didn’t have to worry about asking people for a spot in their events. I’ve had friends who have gone through that,
and it’s no fun. You don’t like to be dependent on anyone else to have the chance to do your job. After Phoenix, I felt like
I had my job back.”

He did his job extremely well for the rest of that year. At the Players Championship in March, he was having a reasonably
good tournament, heading for about a 30th-place finish on Sunday, when he suddenly got hot on the back nine. He birdied the
last six holes — the first player ever to accomplish that feat on the TPC Sawgrass — and jumped into a tie for fourth place,
three shots behind winner Fred Couples. Since the Players has the biggest full-field purse of the year (in 2008 it was $9
million, with $1,620,000 to the winner), the tie for fourth combined with the sixth at Phoenix meant that Rocco had clinched
his card for 1997 before the end of March 1996.

The rest of that year went about as well as Rocco could have hoped — except for the fact that he didn’t win again. He played
twenty-one times — dropping a few tournaments from his normal schedule to rest his back — and was in the top ten almost half
the time (10). He earned a little more than $475,000 for the year, which put him a very solid 40th on the money list. The
sleepless nights wondering if his back would ever be strong enough for him to compete on tour again were in the past. He and
Linda had had their third son, Marco, in 1995, and all was well in Mediate Nation.

R
OCCO’S COMEBACK YEAR
, 1996, was his eleventh on the PGA Tour, although almost two years had been lost because of his back troubles.

“Even when I played in ’94 and ’95, I couldn’t really play,” he said. “I was just trying to get through tournaments without
falling flat on my face — literally.”

He had made a total of 12 cuts during those two years and finished in the top ten three times, never coming close to contending.
He had gone from a hot young player to a player whose future appeared to be in doubt. He had gone from averaging just under
$500,000 a year in on-course earnings from 1990 to 1993 to making about $150,000 combined during those two injury-plagued
years.

“Money became a concern during that time,” he said. “Really, what saved me was that Titleist stuck with me. They kept paying
me even when I couldn’t play and certainly couldn’t do anything to promote their product. That and the fact that Frank had
talked me into getting disability insurance.”

Frank was Frank Zoracki, who had become both a friend and a business adviser to Rocco through the years. Zoracki was a couple
of years older than Rocco and they had met quite by accident one afternoon at Greensburg Country Club.

Zoracki had joined Greensburg for two reasons: He had gotten hooked on golf even though he hadn’t played it much as a kid,
and he thought it was a good place to network. He had graduated from the University of Pittsburgh as an aspiring dentist,
but when he didn’t get into Pitt dental school he had gone to work for Prudential Insurance.

“I’d become a decent player,” he said. “And the golf course, specifically the country club, was a good place to meet people
who had money and needed insurance.”

Zoracki was playing with some friends in the fall of 1986, when he encountered Rocco and his friends on the golf course.

“It wasn’t long after Rocco had gotten his card for the first time,” Zoracki remembered. “I was out playing with some friends
and I think I had missed a putt on the 15th hole — a par-three — which had put my partner and me down in the match we were
playing. I guess I was a little bit annoyed and I was a tad slow walking off the green. As I was about to leave, a ball lands
on the green a couple yards away from me.

“I wasn’t in the best mood as it was, so I looked back at the tee and yelled something like ‘Hey, watch what you’re doing.’
I remember I got some attitude back, something along the lines of I should be clearing the green faster. I walked off kind
of angry, and when I got to the next tee, one of my buddies said, ‘Hey, that was Rocco Mediate you were yelling at just now.’

“I knew the name. I’d seen stories in the local paper about him when he was in college and when he got his card. Plus, I had
sold some insurance to his parents, so I was familiar with the name. But at that moment, I really didn’t care. I was like,
‘I don’t care who the guy is, he just hit into me.’ ”

By the time Zoracki had finished his round, he had cooled off. When Rocco and his friends walked into the grill room after
they had finished their round, Zoracki went over and introduced himself. There were no hard feelings on either side. A couple
of days later, Zoracki was in Tony Mediate’s salon getting a haircut, when Rocco walked in.

“I asked him if he had any insurance,” Zoracki said. “He said he didn’t, and I told him it would be a good idea if he got
some.”

Out of a shouting match on the golf course and a brief discussion about insurance, a friendship was born. A couple of months
after buying life insurance through Zoracki, Rocco ran into him in West Palm Beach, when he was getting ready to start the
new PGA Tour season.

“We played together a couple of times,” Zoracki said. “I was down there on a golf trip, and one of the guys I was with was
Arnie Cutrell, who was one of Rocco’s buddies. So we hung out quite a bit.”

Eighteen months later, after Rocco and Linda had gotten married, he asked Zoracki to put together a medical-insurance plan
for him. While he was at it, Zoracki suggested he buy disability insurance.

“Waste of money” was Rocco’s first response.

Which made sense. After all, he was a twenty-five-year-old golfer. What was the likelihood that he was going to become disabled
and unable to continue playing golf?

Zoracki kept after him. “It wasn’t an easy sell,” he said. “To begin with, the only company that would even write disability
insurance for a golfer was Lloyds of London, and it was expensive — several thousand dollars a year. Rocco kept telling me
it was crazy, but I kept after him. Athletes get injured. He was planning a family. I thought it made sense. He finally did
it, but every year when he had to write the check to pay the premium, he would scream and yell at me about wasting his money.”

There was no more screaming and yelling in 1994 and 1995. It took a while for Lloyds to be satisfied with all the paperwork
needed, but once the claim was settled, Rocco got about $25,000 a month in disability insurance while he was off the tour.

“It was a lifesaver,” he said. “Anything else Z does the rest of his life, I’ll be grateful to him for that.”

The two are now close friends and Zoracki, who left Prudential after ten years to go work for Northwestern Mutual Life, is
now a money manager, handling all of Rocco’s finances and acting as his agent most of the time in recent years. He has also
become Rocco’s bad cop, the guy who delivers the bad news to people when Rocco has to say no — or, worse, has to turn what
was a yes into a no.

“I’ve kind of pleaded with him for years to say no first when he’s not sure about something,” Zoracki said. “I’ve told him
it’s a lot easier to turn a no into a yes than the other way around. He hates saying no to people, and I get that; it’s part
of what makes him who he is. But sometimes because he doesn’t want to say no, he’ll say yes to an outing or a speech and then
when he thinks about it and realizes he can’t do it, he’ll just say something like, ‘Z, you gotta get me out of this.’ That
isn’t always pleasant for me.”

Zoracki does it because, like most of the people in Rocco’s life, he is intensely loyal to him. “Rocc is Rocc and that takes
in a lot of territory,” Zoracki said, laughing. “He is, first and foremost, a lot of fun to be around. What you see is what
you get. He’s not phony at all. The guy people see on TV who they like so much is the same guy you see when you’re with him
a lot.

“But he does have an obsessive personality. He’s always been that way from what I can tell. He can’t just have a Mercedes,
he has to have the best Mercedes. A restaurant isn’t just good, it is the absolute best, and when you go in there with him
he’s going to order for you and you damn well better like it. He never just likes anything. He either loves it or hates it.
There’s no in-between. If you ask him about a round of golf, he’ll almost never say he played okay. He’ll tell you, ‘I shot
a million,’ or ‘I shot nothing.’ There’s nothing ordinary in his life.”

The years between 1996 and 2002 were better than ordinary for Rocco but short of extraordinary. He won for the third time
on tour in 1999 at Phoenix, the place where he had announced his triumphant return to the tour in 1996. One of the players
he beat down the stretch on that Sunday was Tiger Woods, who ended finishing third.

“The rest of my life I can tell people I had a chance to beat Tiger on a Sunday and did it,” he said. “What’s more, I did
it head-to-head, paired with him Saturday and Sunday. It was nice to do it — at least once.”

He won again the next year at the Buick Open and two years later won Greensboro for the second time. That gave him five wins
on tour, and after sixteen solid years — injuries notwithstanding — he had pieced together a very good career.

“Think about what it means to play fifteen years and win five times — especially dealing with coming back after the surgery,”
said Curtis Strange. “What that means is that the guy wasn’t just a player who could get hot on occasion and play well. It
means he was a very good player — a consistently good player — who, when his putter got going, could play with anybody. Those
may not be Hall of Fame numbers, but they’re very good ones.”

Not long after Marco’s birth, Rocco and Linda built a very big house at the TPC Sawgrass. It was, as his friends would say,
“typical Rocco.”

“The in-home theater was like nothing you’d ever seen in your life,” Lee Janzen said. “It was amazing.”

Life was good during this period. The arrival of Tiger Woods on tour had sent purses skyrocketing and it coincided with Rocco
playing the best — and healthiest — golf of his life. The difference in purses can be seen in microcosm through Rocco’s annual
earnings. In 1996, the year that Woods joined the tour in August but had no influence on purses, Rocco finished 40th on the
money list and earned $475,940 for the year.

Three years later, after the tour had renegotiated its TV contracts in the first year A.T. — After Tiger — and demanded that
title sponsors increase their purses to reflect the sport’s newfound popularity, Rocco finished two places higher on the money
list — 38th — and made more than double the money he had made in 1996, finishing with $963,075 in earnings.

Everyone on tour recognized that Woods was making them all into wealthy men. Even so, there was some initial resentment among
many players about Woods’s transcendent fame and the tour’s willingness to do backflips to keep the new star happy. Some players
half-jokingly began referring to their workplace as the TGA Tour — Tiger Golf Association Tour — and wondered if all of those
flocking to pay homage to Woods had ever heard of Hogan, Palmer, or Nicklaus.

Woods and his entourage were demanding and, at times, arrogant — especially early on. Woods turned pro after winning his third
straight U.S. Amateur title. Like any rookie pro, he was entitled to up to seven sponsor exemptions for the rest of 1996.
Unlike many rookies, he quickly found there wasn’t a tournament on earth that didn’t want to give him an exemption, since
he was the biggest draw in golf the instant he turned pro. Woods’s initial goal was to avoid going to Qualifying School, which
a handful of players had been able to do in the past. He needed to win as much money as the 125th-ranked player on the money
list in his seven tournaments to avoid Q-School.

The suspense didn’t last long. After finishing in a tie for 60th place in his debut in Milwaukee, Woods went on to win in
Las Vegas and at Walt Disney World. The first victory guaranteed him a two-year exemption and eliminated any thoughts of having
to go to Q-School. A few days later, having accepted a sponsor’s exemption to the Buick Challenge in Callaway Gardens, Georgia,
Woods withdrew, saying he was exhausted. He also skipped a dinner honoring him as the college player of the year that had
been scheduled in Callaway Gardens for the night prior to the first round, specifically because he had planned to play that
week.

Two weeks later, after his win at Disney, Woods told the locker room security guards to keep the media outside while he was
cleaning out his locker. PGA Tour rules are very specific about media access to locker rooms, and a tour official, Wes Seeley,
stepped in and told the guards that the media should be allowed inside.

“The tour makes the rules for everybody,” he said. “The locker room is open when Palmer’s in there, when Nicklaus is in there,
when Watson is in there, and when Tiger Woods is in there too. The kid isn’t the fifth Beatle.”