Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (16 page)

Rocco wasn’t shaking standing on the 12th tee — his back hurt too much for him to be nervous. He took an eight-iron even with
the hole playing short and he hoped he could take an easy swing and have enough club to clear the creek.

“I almost made it,” he said later. “When the ball was in the air, I thought it might get to the front of the green and I’d
be okay. Then I could see it was short and I was hoping it might somehow stay dry.”

It didn’t. It came up just short of clearing the water. The silence as the ball hit the water was deafening. Rocco walked
to the drop area, hoping he could get his wedge close enough to salvage a bogey. Instead, he went into the water again. The
all-time record for turning the 12th into a nightmare is a 13, set by Rocco’s onetime mentor Tom Weiskopf in 1977. Rocco didn’t
get to the record, but he came close. He hit three balls into the water from the drop area.

“I was honestly beginning to think I might never get the ball on the green,” he said. “In fact, the thought crossed my mind,
‘Am I going to run out of golf balls?’ If I did, that’s it, I have to walk back in, I’m done. Fortunately I had a dozen balls
in the bag. The fourth shot from the drop area I actually hit pretty well.”

He got it to five feet and made the putt for 10. Any hope for a top ten or even a solid finish drowned in Rae’s Creek.

“If I’d been smart, I’d have walked in right then,” he said. “But I didn’t want to look like I was quitting because I’d made
a mess of 12. At that point, like it or not, I had to find a way to finish.”

He did, actually playing respectable golf on the last six holes to shoot 45 on the back nine. That was nine over par, seven
of those nine shots coming on the tiny 12th. He signed for an 80, which left him tied for 36th place, and went home knowing
he wasn’t going to play golf for a while.

“Hilton Head [the week after the Masters] is usually one of my favorite events,” he said. “There was no way I could play there.”

He went home to rest and get the back treated. He wasn’t sure what was more upsetting, getting hurt again or getting hurt
at a moment when he had a real chance to win the Masters. He was beginning to wonder if he was ever going to be healthy again.

“Dr. Day had told me this was the way it was going to be,” he said. “I didn’t have a ruptured disk like I’d had when he did
the surgery. I still had a bad back. It’s the kind of thing where if you don’t play golf for a living, it can be annoying
and at times painful, but you can function. But if you play golf for a living, there are going to be times when you can’t.
And you never know when it’s going to happen. That was probably the worst part of it.”

He came back to play a month after the Masters in Charlotte. He managed to make the cut there — finishing in a tie for 59th
place — but the rest of the year was a lot like 2004: stops and starts, the back flaring up, the back feeling a little better.

“If I’d been smart I would have just stopped playing,” he said. “I would have rested it for a long time and maybe gone to
see someone about a different kind of rehab program because clearly what I was doing wasn’t working. There were times when
I would be home alone and I would walk down the hall to get something and I would just go down. I would have two options:
Lie there until someone came home to help me, or crawl to a chair or into my bed. At times I felt like a complete cripple.

“The pain wasn’t even the worst part; the frustration was. I had the feeling this was something that was never going to go
away, that I had probably been lucky to play healthy for as long as I had and this was it. I really thought there was a good
chance I was done — especially since it didn’t look like I was going to make enough money to keep my card.”

He ended up playing only ten more tournaments after the Masters. He shot a 68 the first day at Westchester but had to withdraw
because the back went on him again. This time he was out for six weeks trying to get healthy. He attempted to play the Buick
Open, a tournament he had won in 2000, and had to withdraw again. That led to another six-week break before he was finally
able to play in five events in the fall. He managed to make four straight cuts, but except for the tournament at Jackson —
a second-tier event that was played at the same time as a lucrative World Golf Championship tournament — he never finished
higher than 50th. He was 16th at Jackson, but with the purse not as high as most weeks, that was worth only $39,400.

When the painful year was finally over, he had entered eighteen events and made eight cuts. His winnings were a paltry $145,899,
by far his lowest total since he had returned from back surgery in 1996. He finished 227th on the money list and found himself
asking the tour for a medical extension at the start of 2007.

This time the tour was generous. Because he had been forced to withdraw from three tournaments, the board deemed Rocco to
have played only fifteen times. He had averaged between 23 and 25 starts a year when healthy, so he was given ten tournaments
at the start of 2007 to make a little more than $450,000 — which would give him combined earnings of more than $660,000, which
had been the total earned by Darren Clarke, who had finished in 125th place on the 2006 money list.

Rocco was relieved to be given a reprieve at the start of 2007, but he knew it wouldn’t do him any good if he continued to
feel the same kind of back pain he had felt through most of 2006. For the first time in his life, he found himself thinking
in terms of a backup plan.

“I thought resting for a couple of months, really resting, might help,” he said. “But I’d taken a couple long breaks in ’06
and had come back and still had problems. It was better in the fall but not good enough. I had to be realistic: I needed to
play well in the ten tournaments they’d given me or I was going to be reduced to asking for sponsor exemptions. I had to think
about an alternative if things didn’t work out.”

As luck would have it, just when he was thinking about an alternative, one came along — at least a temporary one. New TV contracts
had been negotiated by the tour beginning in 2007. Included in the package for the first time was the Golf Channel. ESPN had
opted out of most golf coverage, since it was paying Tiger Woods prices to televise tournaments that almost never included
Woods. USA Network, which televised Thursday– Friday rounds of numerous tournaments, also opted out.

That opened a door for Golf Channel, which had previously been allowed to televise Champions (Senior) Tour events and Nationwide
( Triple-A) Tour events but never the PGA Tour. Under the new deal, Golf Channel had the Thursday–Friday rights to every PGA
Tour event and would televise the entire week of all the Fall Series events and the first three tournaments of the year: the
Mercedes Championships, the Sony Open in Hawaii, and the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. Those three January events were on weekends
when the NFL was televising playoff games, and none of the networks wanted to compete with that.

The new deal meant Golf Channel needed to hire a lot of people. Networks that televise golf are constantly looking for explayers
who can translate their understanding of the game to a microphone. For every one who can, there are at least a dozen who can’t.
Knowing that Rocco’s playing future was murky after his injury-riddled 2006 and knowing that he had always been glib and comfortable
in front of a camera, Golf Channel offered him the chance to work the first three tournaments.

“I figured why not give it a shot,” he said. “I wasn’t in the Mercedes anyway and I didn’t usually play Hawaii. It was a chance
for me to see if I was any good at it and to maybe give myself a fallback position if the back didn’t get any better.”

It was, in effect, a tryout for both sides.

The three weeks went well. Rocco enjoyed himself, the Golf Channel people liked what they saw. There was definitely a sense
that this could be something Rocco could do when the time came for him to stop playing.

He still wanted to play. But as he headed to Phoenix to return to playing the game rather than talking about the game, he
knew he might be ten tournaments away from asking for a more permanent chance to wield a microphone.

“The thought that I might be done — I mean really done — crossed my mind. I’d been scared after the surgery but convinced
I would work my way back and be able to play again. Now, though, there was no reason to believe that was going to be the case.
I’d done the work. I’d had the best care. I’d tried everything and I was still struggling.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”

B
ACK ON THE GOLF COURSE
with his clubs rather than a microphone, Rocco didn’t start 2007 any better than he had ended 2006. In fact, he started worse.

“At least at the end of ’06 I was making cuts,” he said. “Out of the box in ’07, I couldn’t crack an egg.”

He hadn’t played in a tournament for three months when he teed it up at the FBR Open in Phoenix. Perhaps it was just rust,
but he missed the cut by, as he likes to say, “a million.” Actually, it was by three shots. A week later at Pebble Beach,
a place where he had made the cut as a rookie when he was convinced he wasn’t good enough to play on tour, he missed the cut
again — this time by a whopping nine shots. He had eight tournaments left to make the money he needed to remain an exempt
player.

During those first few weeks on tour, Linda and the kids had traveled with him. Linda had decided at the end of 2006 to take
the kids out of school, enroll them in an online homeschooling program, and bring them on tour with Rocco.

During 2005 and 2006, Rocco and Linda had talked at times about divorce. According to Linda, she was the one who initiated
the conversations, wondering if separating might make them both happier. Rocco, she said, wouldn’t hear of it.

Linda had been so unhappy during that period that she went to therapy. She finally decided that maybe — just maybe — if the
entire family was together on the road for an extended period of time, it might bring them all back together.

“To be honest, it didn’t work,” she said. “Rocco was miserable. Whether it was because he was playing poorly or because he
wasn’t used to having us on the road, I’m not sure. But having all of us there was clearly too much.”

After Pebble Beach, Linda and the kids went home. The experiment was over.

The Nissan Open in Los Angeles was next up. Rocco decided to go from Pebble to L.A. to spend a couple of days hanging out
with his friends Bill and Brad Shaw before the tournament began on February 15. He drove to Los Angeles on Sunday morning
— the cut at Pebble comes on Saturday because it is after 54 holes — and, since the back felt okay, he told the Shaws he would
meet them at Los Angeles Country Club to play.

It was that afternoon that Bill Shaw asked him if he might want to get his back worked on the next day to see if it might
help him play better that week.

“Sure, why not?” Rocco said. “Who have you got in mind?”

“Cindi Hilfman,” Bill Shaw said.

“Who’s she?” Rocco asked.

Bill Shaw shrugged his shoulders. “She’s a physical therapist here in town. She works on a lot of guys who play at L.A. Country
Club. She’s very good.

“Oh, and she’s very sick; she may be dying from kidney disease.”

Rocco still remembers his friend saying those words. “He said it matter-of-fact, like, ‘And she has blond hair,’ ” he said.
“I don’t think he meant it to be cruel or to sound like he was being casual about it. I think it just struck him as one other
thing he knew about Cindi to tell me before I met her.

“I didn’t know what to think. I was certainly willing to meet her and let her take a shot at my back. I had nothing to lose.
But I almost expected her to be wheeled in or something or look incredibly feeble when she showed up. To say she wasn’t what
I expected is putting it unbelievably mildly.”

The Shaws put in a call to Cindi Hilfman. Cindi not only knew who Rocco was but had told Brad Shaw almost a year earlier that
she thought she could help him with his problems.

“I was actually sitting watching the Masters with Brad,” she said. “I saw what happened to him when his back went again that
day. I could see what the problem was watching on television. I mean, to me, it was so obvious I could see it even through
his clothes.

“The problem was in his lower back — in his pelvis. It had nothing to do with the disk he’d had surgery on. His pelvis was
asymmetrical, out of balance. I could see it when he tried to swing the club. I remember saying to Brad, ‘I can help that
man. You have to tell him I can help him.’ ”

When Brad Shaw called that Sunday afternoon, she said she would come to the house the next morning. Rocco was sitting in a
chair, feet up, talking on the phone to Frank Zoracki when he heard the doorbell. A minute later a face peeked around a corner.

“I saw this smile,” he said. “It was the kind of smile that lights up a room. I remember thinking, ‘If this is Cindi, she
certainly doesn’t look to me like she’s dying.’ ”

It was Cindi. She was forty-one and she wasn’t dying, but she had been sick most of her life. Shortly before she turned four,
she was rushed to the hospital with what doctors thought was an appendix problem. An appendectomy was performed, but it didn’t
make her better. Eventually, after numerous tests, she was diagnosed with an extremely rare autoimmune kidney disease — medullary
sponge/kidney disease, which, among other things, causes kidney stones to form in her system constantly.

“On average I pass somewhere between seven and ten a month,” she said. “The first time I obstructed, they thought it was my
appendix. When the appendectomy didn’t make me better, they ran more tests and that’s when they discovered the problem was
in my kidneys.”

The disease causes cysts to form in both her kidneys, which leads not only to the kidney stones but to blockages and to difficulty
getting the kidneys to drain. Through the years she has had stents put in to open up the kidneys and one transplant attempt
— which failed.