Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (2 page)

“Johnny called me to apologize about the comment,” he said. “There was nothing to apologize for, and I told him that. I understood
what he was saying. If I had been sitting at home, I would have been saying, ‘There’s no way this can happen,’ just like everyone
else was saying it.

“What people didn’t understand was I wasn’t afraid of [Woods]. Not because I don’t think he’s great — I do think he’s great.
He hasn’t got a bigger fan in the world than me. But why would I be afraid of him? I’m always amazed when I see guys go out
and play against him and they’re afraid. Why? No one expects you to win — he’s Tiger Woods and you’re not.

“To be in that arena with the greatest player of all time. If you’re a golfer, why wouldn’t you revel in every second of it?
If there’s one thing that makes me happy about it all, it’s that I don’t have to look back and say, ‘Gee, I wish I’d been
able to enjoy it and savor it while it was going on.’ I did do that. Every second of it right until I missed the last putt.
I loved it all.”

There’s proof that Rocco isn’t just saying that in the aftermath of the event. Mike Davis, the USGA official who directs the
U.S. Open, walked every step of the way with Woods and Mediate during the playoff. He was responsible for setting up the golf
course each day, for deciding on where tee markers were placed and where the hole was located on each green. During the playoff
he was the walking rules official, responsible for letting the players know what to do if they needed any sort of drop or
if they weren’t sure about any rule that might come into play during the round.

On the sudden-death playoff hole, number seven at Torrey Pines, Rocco drove his ball well to the left, into an almost unplayable
lie in a bunker, meaning he was going to have a difficult time staying alive, since Woods had put his ball in the fairway.

“I was walking off the tee thinking that Rocco was really in trouble and this might be the end of it all,” Davis said. “I
was feeling bad for him because he’d been so close to pulling the thing off. All of a sudden, I feel an arm around me and
I look up and there’s Rocco with this big grin on his face. He says, ‘I can’t tell you how much fun I’m having out here. In
case I forget, I want to make sure you know I think you really nailed the setup, not just today but all week.’

“I couldn’t get over it. Here he is in desperate trouble, probably about to lose, and he’s got this big smile on his face
and he’s talking about how much fun he’s having. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone enjoy himself under pressure like that
in my life.”

Rocco ended up losing the playoff on that hole. Woods walked up to him, hand out to offer congratulations.

“Sorry pal, this doesn’t call for a handshake,” Rocco said. He wrapped his arms around Woods in a hug, a moment both men were
entitled to after what they had gone through.

“Even now, months later, people still act as if I won,” Rocco said after his whirlwind second half of 2008. “Sometimes I feel
like I have to remind them that I played great, I’m really proud of what I did, but I didn’t win. The other guy won.”

That’s true. Tiger, it seems, always wins. But in this case, there is no doubting the fact that his opponent didn’t lose.
He won — not the U.S. Open but the hearts of golf fans everywhere, and the hearts of a lot of people who had never heard of
him before that week in San Diego.

Tiger Woods is the 2008 U.S. Open champion. His performance was nothing short of amazing. But Rocco Mediate was the champion
of all Americans — a true underdog who captured the sheer joy of playing and competing. Together, Rocco and Tiger created
a singular moment in sport, and an indelible memory for millions that isn’t likely to be matched any time soon.

___

T
HE FIRST TIME
I
MET
Rocco Mediate was more or less an accident. I certainly knew
of
him, but I didn’t know him personally. He had been on tour for seven years and had just won for the second time in his career,
at Greensboro, a few months earlier.

I was researching
A Good Walk Spoiled.
One of the people I was working with on that book was Lee Janzen. About a month after Janzen won the 1993 U.S. Open at Baltusrol,
he and I were supposed to go to dinner and spend the evening discussing the events of that weekend in New Jersey. Janzen had
come out of nowhere to beat Payne Stewart and win the Open.

“Mind if I bring a friend to dinner?” Janzen asked when I called to set up a time to meet.

In truth, I wasn’t thrilled. When you are trying to interview someone, a third person is usually a distraction. But Janzen
was giving me his time, so if he wanted to bring someone along, I was in no position to object. The third person turned out
to be Rocco Mediate.

And his presence made the interview work about twice as well as it would have if he hadn’t been there.

Janzen is what we call in my business a good talker. He’s a nice guy who knows how to tell a story. But with Rocco sitting
next to him, he became a great talker. He was loose and comfortable, and Rocco often reminded him of details as Lee walked
me through his pre-Open life and the Open. What’s more, Rocco told me exactly where he was and what he was thinking as he
watched his friend play the back nine on Sunday.

“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.

R
OCCO
M
EDIATE 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.”

T
HROUGHOUT 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.