Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (25 page)

“When you’ve played well the first day, the last thing you want is to start the second day badly,” he said. “That’s not an
easy opening hole — ask Tiger. But after hitting the green, there would have really been no excuse for making bogey. You know
you’re going to make them out there; you just don’t want to make one right out of the chute. That par putt was a big deal
for me.”

It became a little bit bigger when he birdied the second hole. “I didn’t feel comfortable on that tee all week,” he said.
“I decided to hit three-wood because it took the left bunker out of play — I couldn’t reach it. That made me feel better standing
on the tee box.”

He made a 25-footer for birdie there, meaning he had made two long putts to start the round. Given his history — always a
good driver, not always a good putter — that was both an encouraging start and a positive harbinger for the day.

“Those two putts and those two holes got the butterflies out quickly,” he said. “You never tee it up in a major — unless it’s
Sunday and you’re in the first group and have absolutely no chance — without feeling some butterflies. Making those two putts
gave me a real shot of confidence and made me feel like it was going to be a good day again.”

At three under par, he was back on top of the leader board. Streelman had teed off early that morning and had shot 77 to drop
back, and Hicks, playing a couple of groups in front of Rocco’s, was in full reverse on his way to an 80. He would make the
cut — by one shot.

Rocco’s play on the front nine was virtually flawless. He birdied the fourth hole — making another long putt, this time from
closer to 30 feet — for the second straight day, playing his natural draw on the hole by starting the ball out well right
and letting it drift back to the fairway. “Those four holes [three through six] were a key part of my playing well,” he said.
“I played those holes well all four days, and especially on the three days I started on number one, that section of the course
helped get me into a good mind-set for the rest of the day.”

In all, he would play those four holes in one under par and the other 14 holes in one over par. That doesn’t sound like much
of a difference, but on a golf course that wasn’t giving up many birdies, on a difficult stretch of holes without a par-five
involved, that was very solid golf.

He had to lay up again at the ninth and settled for par, but as he walked to the 10th tee he was four under par for the championship
and in the lead. “Twenty-seven holes is way too soon to start thinking about anything serious,” he said. “But I was certainly
feeling good at that point.”

Not long after Rocco’s group teed off at the 10th, the group of Woods, Mickelson, and Scott walked from the 18th green to
the first tee. There wasn’t a smile to be found anywhere near the world’s three top-ranked players.

Woods had again started poorly, bogeying the 10th and 12th holes to fall to three over par. He had then bounced back in typical
Tiger fashion, reaching the 13th green in two and draining a 25-foot putt for eagle. That got him his first real Tiger roar
of the week and jumped him back to even par for the day and one over for the championship. But he bogeyed both 16 and 17 to
go back to three over, meaning he trailed the leader (Rocco) by seven and was only four shots inside what would be the cut
line at the end of the day.

“I really didn’t feel as if I was playing that badly,” Woods said later. “I felt comfortable out there; I just made three
mistakes in a row — bogeying 16 and 17 and then making a par at 18 with the tees way up. When we went to the back [actually
front] nine, I was thinking if I could get back to even par for the tournament by the end of the day, I’d be okay.”

Things weren’t going any better for Mickelson — the one player in the group who didn’t have an injury excuse to fall back
on — or for Scott. Mickelson had been tied with Woods on the first nine holes of the day and was at two over par after 27
holes. Scott was one shot back of Mickelson.

As the group made the turn, there was considerable concern among the USGA and NBC honchos. David Fay, sitting in the NBC booth
as he always did when the network was on the air in case a rules explanation was needed, wasn’t seriously worried that Woods
would miss the cut. But he was worried about how much longer he was going to be able to continue playing.

“You could see right from the beginning that there were certain swings where he was in a lot of pain,” Fay said. “He wasn’t
playing well, and I honestly wondered if he might make a swing that would put him on the ground and that would be it.

“After the first day [Woods’s agent Mark] Steinberg had been very honest with our guys. He’d said that Tiger was hurting.
Of course we could all see it, but that confirmed it. I didn’t think he would miss the cut. But I wasn’t entirely convinced
he would finish 72 holes.”

For NBC, Woods making the cut wasn’t really enough. The network didn’t need him teeing off with the rabbit groups on Saturday
morning; it needed him in contention. Even with Mickelson in contention until the final hole at Winged Foot, even with a wild
and crazy finish there, the ratings without Woods had dropped noticeably from 2005, when he had finished second at Pinehurst.
They had gone up again in 2007, when he was in the last group on Sunday at Oakmont.

So while Rocco was making his way around the back nine that afternoon having the time of his life, there was a good deal of
attention surrounding the group that went off the first tee shortly after four o’clock Pacific time.

As he had done on Thursday, Woods drove the ball wildly on number one. This time, though, he caught a break — one that might
have changed the tone of the entire week for everyone involved in the championship. Instead of burying in the rough or going
behind a tree where he would have no shot, Woods’s ball came to rest just to the left of a tree trunk on some hardpan dirt,
where his lie was decent and he had a difficult but hardly impossible shot to the green.

“Give him an opening and he’ll make something happen with it,” Rocco would say later in the week.

This was no exception to that rule. “It was a lucky break,” Woods said. “I had about 157 yards [to the] hole and a pretty
clear shot, plus I could control the ball off the lie I had. I was able to get at it with an eight-iron.”

The only real issue on the shot was that Woods had to stand on a cart path to take his swing. By rule, he was entitled to
a drop because of that, but he opted to play the ball from where it was. “If I had dropped, I would have had to drop behind
a tree,” he explained.

These days, many pros have taken to wearing golf shoes with soft spikes in them, because they are lighter and more comfortable
to wear than metal spikes. Woods still wears metal spikes, meaning he had to be careful not to slip while standing on the
cart path. He didn’t.

The ball ended up on the green, 18 feet from the hole. When Woods holed the putt for birdie, he shook his fist — not the exaggerated
Tiger fist-pump that is so often imitated, just a little ‘Okay, let’s get going’ type of fist-pump. Instead of making another
bogey after a bad drive, he had made birdie. Suddenly, he felt he was back in the game.

When Woods starts to feel confident, particularly with his putter, he can get on the kind of roll that no other player in
the world can get on. This turned out to be one of those afternoons. He drained a 20-foot putt for birdie at the second hole,
made another 18-footer at the fourth, and then swished a 25-footer at the fifth. That made four birdies in five holes and
sent him from three over par to one under par. He went from a tie for 55th as he made the turn, seven shots back, to a tie
for fourth, just one shot back of the coleaders at that moment, Stuart Appleby and Rocco, who had bogeyed the 10th hole and
the 12th hole to fall back to two under par.

More than that, it changed the mind-set of everyone on the grounds. Woods went from shuffling around, head down, wondering
if he really should be on the golf course given the condition of his knee, to pumped up, full of confidence, knowing he could
win the championship. The only player Woods believes can stop Woods is Woods. He certainly didn’t look at the leader board
and worry about Stuart Appleby or Rocco Mediate or anyone else up there. The only name that mattered to him, now in a red
number as opposed to a black one, was his own.

Around the golf course, in the clubhouse, on the driving range (where a large TV screen had been set up), and around the country
— it was now prime time on the East Coast — people watched the Woods birdie binge. Most thought the same thing: Here comes
Tiger; his knee is just fine.

They were half right. The knee wasn’t fine. Tiger was coming anyway.

___

R
OCCO, A COUPLE OF HOLES
deeper into his round than Woods because he’d started thirty-three minutes earlier, certainly noticed when Woods’s name appeared
on the leader board. Unlike some players who claim not to look at leader boards — sometimes to the point of actually doing
stupid things as a result — Rocco looks at them all the time. He wants to have an awareness, regardless of how early or late
it is in a tournament, of where he stands, how the golf course is playing (the best scores tell him that), and whom he might
be competing with should he get into contention.

“Tiger on the board is like no one else on the board,” he said. “He’s Tiger. Tiger at his very best you aren’t going to beat.
Tiger playing okay you’re still going to have to work to beat. When he popped up on there after not being there for a while,
I thought, ‘Okay, he’s here now; he isn’t likely to go away any time soon.’ ”

Rocco had bogeyed the 10th hole, disappointing because it was not one of the tougher holes on the golf course, but not too
upsetting because it was his first bogey of the day. “You’re going to make bogeys at the Open,” he said. “There wasn’t a hole
out there where you could fall asleep and not get into trouble. I hooked my drive left of the bunkers and had no chance to
get on the green. There’s never a hole at the Open where you can make a mistake like that and expect to get away with it.
This isn’t like a regular PGA Tour event where guys can go out almost any day and make six birdies, an eagle, and no bogeys.
You hope to make birdies at the Open, but you almost never walk off a hole after a par feeling anything but good.”

The wind was coming up a little bit by now, and the greens were beginning to speed up. The USGA had wanted them at about 13,
but they had been a bit slower in the morning because of the June gloom. By late afternoon, they were probably in the 13 range.

“Fact is, I missed a couple of shots on the back nine,” Rocco said. “On the 12th, I simply can’t afford to miss the fairway,
because it’s a 500-yard par-four [actually 504 on the scorecard], and even from the fairway I’m going to need a long club
to get to the green. I don’t mind that; I’m very comfortable hitting long clubs, and I can hit them high enough that the ball
will stop on the green. But there’s no margin for error on that hole.”

He missed the fairway left at 12, his drive starting down that side and drawing into the rough — again beyond the bunker —
instead of starting down the right and drawing into the fairway. From there, he found a green-side bunker, blasted out to
ten feet, and missed the putt for his second bogey of the day.

He had to lay up at the par-five 13th, so he settled for par there, and then he missed another fairway at the 17th, leading
to his third bogey in eight holes. By then, for the first time all week, he was a little frustrated.

“I wasn’t mad and I wasn’t down,” he said. “I just wasn’t happy with myself for missing three fairways out of six [11 and
16 are par-threes], because that’s not me, especially when I’m playing well. I mean, there are times, when I’m home and out
playing with guys and there’s no pressure, where I might go a week without missing a fairway. I’m not exaggerating. Now, this
is different. There’s pressure and you’re talking fairways as wide as my hotel room. [The Open fairways ranged from 24 yards
to 33 yards wide, far narrower than those of just about any other tournament in the world. At Augusta National, the fairways
are generally about 50 yards wide.] So I don’t expect to hit every fairway. But three out of six sucks.”

Standing on the 18th tee, now one under par for the championship, Rocco wanted badly to finish the day with a birdie. “The
only way for me to have a chance to go at the green is to really blast a drive,” he said. “I had to hit my draw and get it
out there in the fairway to have any chance. If I miss, it isn’t that big a disaster; it just means I have to lay up. I went
after that drive a little bit.”

He hit it perfectly — not well, perfectly.

“One of the best drives of my life,” he said. “I really drilled it. Even so, I still had 248 to the front and 266 to the hole,
and I had to stand there in the fairway and think for a moment if I wanted to take a shot at it. The last thing I wanted to
do was miss the shot a little bit, end up in the water, make six, and shoot 40 on the back nine. That would not have been
good. But I really thought I could get the three-wood there and I could aim it a little bit right to stay away from the water,
so I decided to go for it.”

The gamble paid off when he bounced the ball onto the green, leaving himself a 35-foot eagle putt. He hit a good first putt,
leaving himself about two feet — his shortest birdie putt of the first two days. He knocked that one in to finish the day
at even-par 71: two-under-par 33 on the front nine, two-over 38 on the back. There had been three birdies (2, 4, and 18) and
three bogeys (10, 12, and 17).

“If I had parred the 18th, it still would have been a pretty good round, and I certainly would still have been in contention,”
Rocco said. “But finishing with a birdie always feels good, especially when you’ve bogey-trained it for a while before that.
I was very happy with where I was walking off that green.”

He was not the only one of the three players in his group who would play the weekend. As is often the case for the Senior
Open champion, the golf course was just too long for Brad Bryant. He shot 77–79 to miss the cut by seven shots. Michael Thompson,
though, had no trouble with the length of the golf course and managed his game surprisingly well for an inexperienced twenty-two-year-old.
He followed his opening day 74 with a 73 that put him comfortably inside the cut line.