Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (14 page)

Of course, it isn’t Rocco’s way to sit and think things through in great detail. Once he knows an idea makes sense, he acts
on it instantly. He is the kind of person who never tells a waiter in a restaurant he needs a few minutes to look at the menu.
He walks in knowing exactly what he’s going to order.

Which is why Linda knew it was pointless to argue with him when he started talking excitedly about moving to Naples. “When
you are an athlete’s wife, you have to understand that in the end it is all about them,” she said. “I knew that for a long
time. When he wanted to go to Naples, it wasn’t something we were going to debate, it was something we were going to do.”

Rocco didn’t win again that year, but he finished second twice — at the season-opening Mercedes Championships and then in
September at the Deutsche Bank Championships. He went into the last full-field event of the year needing only to make the
cut to qualify for the Tour Championships — and didn’t make the cut. That was a disappointment. Even so, he finished the year
with $1,832,656 in earnings — a good thing given the cost of the new house. By then he had signed with Callaway and was making
good money off the golf course too, since he was frequently asked to do corporate outings as a well-known player with a reputation
for being outgoing and friendly.

“He was a good Monday guy,” Zoracki said. “Outings are held on Mondays, and Rocco’s reputation was as a guy you wanted at
your outing. He learned a lot from Arnold about making people feel comfortable when he was with them.”

That year also produced one of the bigger thrills of his career even though it came at an event watched by almost no one that
meant almost nothing. Having turned forty at the end of 2002, he was invited to play in something called the UBS Cup — a corporate-run
Ryder Cup–copycat event that matched players over the age of forty from the U.S. against a “Rest of the World” team of players
over forty.

The event was staged by IMG, the management giant that represents, among many others, Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer, and it
was held in Sea Island, Georgia — one of the more scenic places on earth.

Palmer was the U.S. captain. Getting to play on a team headed by Palmer was a big deal in itself for Rocco. Getting to represent
the United States in an event that wasn’t the Ryder Cup or even the Presidents Cup was also exciting. But the best part of
the weekend was getting to be Tom Watson’s teammate for one of the matches.

“I actually went to Arnold and said to him, ‘Can I please play with Tom one day,’ ” Rocco said, laughing. “I was like a little
kid. All the years I’d been on tour I had never even been paired with him. The thought of being his teammate was almost more
than I could handle. In fact, it was more than I could handle. I played terribly. I was so nervous.”

That weekend was a tough one for Watson. His close friend and caddy Bruce Edwards was in the latter stages of ALS and was
caddying for him (in a cart) for what he knew would be the last time. “If anyone could have cheered me up under those circumstances,
it would have been Rocco,” Watson said. “He certainly tried. The problem was, neither one of us played very well.”

“Yeah, let’s blame the loss on him,” Rocco said. “But in truth, that isn’t fair. I was so nervous I could barely swing a club.”

A couple of weeks after the UBS Cup, Rocco was at home playing with Mark Murphy, a friend he had met in Ireland while playing
at Waterville in 2000. Murphy was a pro who played on the European Futures Tour — the equivalent of the U.S. Nationwide Tour.

“I went down again while we were playing,” Rocco said. “It didn’t seem to be that bad at first, but by the time we got off
the course and got home, Murph practically had to carry me into the house. It got better after I rested it, but I wondered
if I was in trouble again.”

The trouble wasn’t as bad as it had been ten years earlier. He hadn’t ruptured anything, and Dr. Day told him he didn’t think
he needed any more surgery or, for that matter, that surgery would do any good. “He just said the same thing to me again:
You have a bad back — period. When you cut on one part, even after it gets strong again, there’s always going to be extra
pressure on other places in the back. Sometimes it will feel okay. Other times it won’t. Basically he said I had to live with
it — keep doing what I was doing with my exercises, keep my weight down because that was always going to be a factor — and
hope that I could play pain-free more often than not.

“I’d had a good run with only occasional flare-ups of pain — seven years. But I wasn’t getting any younger — I was forty-one,
and that’s a time in life when guys who have played a lot of golf and have good backs sometimes run into trouble. In a way,
it was almost predictable.”

So were his struggles in 2004. He was on and off the tour throughout the year, and even when he played, he didn’t play well.
He got to play in only 19 tournaments and made only eight cuts all year — his lowest total since 1995, when he had sat out
the second half of the year. He only finished in the top 20 twice — a tie for 16th in his first tournament of the year, the
Bob Hope, and a tie for 15th at the International, in August.

In many ways, ’04 was like ’94 and ’95 had been. Week to week he didn’t know if his back was going to allow him to play. He
had to withdraw from Bay Hill when the back went on him during a practice round. He only got to play in two of the four majors
— the Masters and the PGA. By autumn he knew he was in serious danger of falling out of the top 125 on the money list for
the first time since his rookie year.

“I tried to play the last four [tournaments] that year because it was a matter of pride for me to try to get into the top
125,” he said. “I knew I had the top 50 list to fall back on, but I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to save it in case I needed
it for later.”

The top 50 list is the tour’s list of all-time-leading money winners. It is, needless to say, top-heavy with today’s players,
since purses today completely dwarf those of the past. To get a sense of how ridiculous today’s money is compared to that
of the past — even the recent past — consider the career money totals of three of the greatest players of all time: Sam Snead,
Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus.

Snead won 82 times on tour — still the all-time record — and won a total of $487,000 in prize money for his career — which
is less money than a player receives these days for a second-place finish in one tournament. Palmer, fifteen years younger
than Snead, won 62 times during his career, good for $1,861,857. That haul — he teed it up in 734 tournaments — would have
placed him 45th on the money list for the 2008 season. Nicklaus, ten years younger than Palmer, had the most dominant career
in history until Woods came along. He played in 594 tournaments and won 73 times. His earnings were $5,734, 322 — meaning
his career earnings would have placed him third on the 2008 money list.

Through 2004, Rocco had earned a little more than $11.3 million in his career. That put him in 47th place on the all-time
money list, largely on the strength of that five-year period from 1999 through 2003 when his lowest money total for a year
was $963,075. The tour allows any player who is in the top 50 on the career money list a one-year exemption if he finishes
out of the top 125 at the end of a year. Most players who are in the top 50 like to hold on to that exemption to use when
they get close to age fifty and their game falls off a bit and they are waiting to be eligible for the Champions Tour.

“I would have preferred to never need it,” Rocco said. “If I was going to need it, I’d rather have needed it when I was forty-nine.
I was forty-two. But I had no choice. I knew I couldn’t get any kind of medical, especially since I had played the last four
tournaments of the year, even if my total starts had been six less than my usual number. I had to use the top 50 exemption
and hope I was healthy enough to play well the next year. If I couldn’t do it, then it would be time to start thinking about
alternatives.”

He smiled. “I told my mom that at least if I needed a fallback plan it would come twenty years later than she had thought
it would.”

Donna Mediate laughed when the subject of Rocco’s fallback plan came up late in 2008. “I still like to think he’s going to
finish college,” she said. “But I think I know better by now.”

L
OOKING BACK NOW
, R
OCCO CAN SEE
that his life was not in especially good shape in 2004, 2005, and 2006.

The back pain had become more persistent, and he was worried about his golf career. The move to Naples had been expensive
and had not gone terribly well in any sense: The kids had struggled with the move and with their new schools. Linda wasn’t
happy because they weren’t happy and because she could see that Rocco wasn’t happy. Rocco was also drinking more than he could
remember drinking in the past.

“I didn’t like taking too many painkillers,” he said. “I mean, I tried all different kinds of prescriptions and they helped
at times, not so much at others. After a while, when I was home and the pain was bad, scotch became my painkiller. It masked
a lot of the pain, but, looking back now, I realize it was masking more than just back pain.”

The Mediates had been married for almost twenty years. They had worked hard to raise their three boys, but the combination
of Rocco’s travel and his back woes had caused them to drift apart. To say that this happens often to players on the PGA Tour
is a little like saying that 2008 was not an especially good year for the economy.

Golf is probably tougher on marriages than any other professional sport. In team sports, players are home for half the season
and there is usually an off-season that lasts at least four months. It can still be tough, but there are long stretches built
in where players are home, and even in-season, they are never away for more than two weeks at any one time — usually less
than that. Football players have by far the best life in that sense. Other than three weeks of training camp, they make no
more than a dozen road trips — all of them, with the exception of a Super Bowl, overnight.

Golfers might get one or two home games in a year if they happen to live in a city that hosts one or, in the case of a couple
of Florida cities, two PGA Tour events. The tour season begins in early January and stretches for most players into early
November. Some players in need of extra cash will then play “Silly Season” events — unofficial late-year tournaments where
the money doesn’t count toward the official money list but does count toward paying bills.

Because golfers tend to have their peak years later than most athletes, they are often away playing while their families are
growing up. Team sport athletes are frequently retired by thirty-five — if not sooner — and thus home in most cases by the
time their kids are old enough to go to school. Tennis players, the only other major sport athletes who don’t have a home-and-away
schedule, are usually retired by thirty.

“It’s a good news, bad news story,” said Davis Love III, who was a comeback story in 2008 when he won a tournament for the
first time in two years after suffering a serious ankle injury at the end of 2007. “On the one hand, it’s great that I can
still realistically be out here competing when I’m forty-four years old. On the other hand, I have a daughter who is now in
college and a son who is in high school, and I’ve spent long chunks of time away from home working at my job while they’ve
been growing up.”

It takes a strong marriage to survive all that time away, especially when the wife is left home alone for lengthy stretches
to take care of school-age children. “Even in the summertime, when in theory your family can be out on tour with you, they
really don’t want to be there,” Rocco said. “Why should they? They have friends at home and activities and it’s a lot more
fun than schlepping around from one hotel to another. Even if you have enough money to rent a house at times or stay in a
really nice hotel suite, it isn’t the same as being at home and being with your friends. If I were them, I’d rather be home
too.”

Some players travel the tour in RV’s to try to make it easier for their families to come with them. Others, as Rocco says,
spend the money to rent houses for a week at tour stops rather than putting their families through life in a hotel. But most
understand that, in the end, they are going to have to spend long periods of time on the road without their families.

Family life for those who play on the tour was best described years ago by 1992 U.S. Open champion Tom Kite. “When you’re
at home,” he said, “you feel like you’re missing something by not being out on tour. When you’re out on tour, you know you’re
missing something by not being at home.”

What makes those gaps in family life bearable for those who play the tour is the fact that they are being paid — quite handsomely
when they play well — to play a game they love. They enjoy the camaraderie of the locker room and they revel in the competition
and the chance to test themselves from week to week.

“It’s like anything else,” Rocco said. “When you’re playing well, the weeks fly by. You look up in September and say, ‘Where
did the year go?’ But when you’re struggling or when you’re hurt or — God forbid — you’re hurt and you’re struggling, every
week feels like a month out there.”

That’s the way it was for Rocco for most of three years. What made it worse was that he understood that he wasn’t doing all
that good a job at home either. “I was so focused on the idea of getting better, of figuring out a way to be healthy and to
play good golf again, that I probably wasn’t paying as much attention to the kids when I was home as I should have been. And
I know for sure that I wasn’t paying enough attention to my marriage.”

A struggling player can easily find his life becoming a vicious circle: He is miserable on tour because he’s playing poorly;
then he’s miserable at home because he’s brooding about his play and he finds no solace in his family, which is a lot more
interested in his role as husband and dad than golfer. It is a large part of the reason why the divorce rate on the PGA Tour
is extremely high. Second marriages are so frequent that players often refer to their second wives as “mulligans.”