Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (7 page)

Rocco shot 69 that day. Palmer shot 70. “My dad still has the scorecard,” he said, grinning broadly. “I’ve probably played
with Arnold hundreds of times since then, but that’s the round I’ll never forget. I mean, I know he was already like a hundred
at the time [ fifty-three, actually], but think about it: a college kid, me, beating Arnold Palmer? No way.”

Thus, when Rocco returned to college in the fall he had the following to report about what he had done on his summer vacation:

• Played Oakmont under U.S. Open conditions and shot 72 or 73.

• Played Latrobe Country Club with Arnold Palmer and shot 69 — to beat the King by a shot.

A pretty good summer’s work. Or so Rocco thought.

“You didn’t play in any of the big amateur tournaments,” Matlock told him. “You want to be a pro, you have to play consistently
against guys who are going to be pros. You have to prove to yourself that you can compete with them.”

Rocco understood the message his tough-love coach was sending him. He knew that his good play at Oakmont and with Palmer proved
something, but it wasn’t enough. He began planning to play in big amateur events the following summer. And that spring, finally
eligible, he became a key part of Matlock’s team, along with Janzen, Greg Gamester, and Jim Northrup. Then, as planned, he
went off to play against the best competition he could find.

He began the summer by trying to qualify for the U.S. Open, which was being played that year at Winged Foot. He won the local
qualifier and then made it into the Open at the sectional. “In a year I’d come from being thrilled to get to play the Open
golf course after it was over to actually playing in the Open,” he said. “I thought that was pretty cool.” He played respectably
at the Open, but missed the cut by three shots.

He played in the U.S. Amateur and won his first-round match against Jay Sigel, one of the best amateur players not to turn
pro (he did years later, when he turned fifty and played on the Senior Tour), and reached the quarterfinals before losing.
Then, in the Western Amateur, he beat Scott Verplank, who had won the U.S. Amateur. A year later, Verplank won the Western
Open while still an amateur. Rocco made the final at the Western Amateur before losing to John Inman.

In all, a pretty good summer. By the time he returned to Florida Southern for his senior year, Mediate had decided to give
PGA Tour Qualifying School a shot the following spring. He wasn’t at all convinced that his game was good enough to get on
tour, but he wanted to try anyway.

“I didn’t want to be one of those guys who looked back years later and said, ‘Gee, I wonder if I might have made it if I had
tried,’ ” he said. “Plus, to be honest, there was nothing else I was interested in doing. I didn’t have any kind of backup
plan.”

The lack of a backup plan bothered his mom. She kept nudging him to keep going to class and graduate, and he kept telling
her not to worry, that he would be fine. He had a superb senior season, making the Division 2 All American team while becoming
the best player on Matlock’s team. “He played as well that year as anyone who has ever played for me,” Matlock said. “And
I’ve had some very good players.”

Rocco set a number of records — course records, tournament records — that year, most of which, he likes to point out, were
later broken by Janzen. But he finished the year filled with confidence and headed off to the first stage of tour qualifying
at Indiana University. For ten years, and through 1981 the tour held Q-School twice a year — once in the late spring, once
in the fall.

“Which turned out to be a good thing for me,” Rocco said. “Because I bombed out completely, didn’t even come close. I was
lucky, though, because there was another qualifier a few months later and I got another shot at it.”

Before he left for the second qualifier in October, Rocco made a deal with his mom: If he didn’t make it to the tour this
time, he would go back to school to get his degree. “Now
that
gave me incentive,” he said, laughing. “I had no intention of going back to school.”

Even so, the first stage didn’t begin much better the second time around. He had signed up for a qualifier at the University
of Georgia, in part because it was closer to Florida Southern, but also because Tom Gleaton, who had been a couple of years
ahead of him at Florida Southern, was going to play up there. The two of them decided to share a hotel room for the week.
On the first day, Rocco shot 75 and was so disgusted he was ready to go home.

Gleaton came back to the room and found him packing. “I can’t play,” Rocco told him. “I’m not good enough.”

Gleaton told him he was crazy, that one bad round wasn’t that big a deal. “You didn’t play that badly,” he told him. “You
go out tomorrow and play well — not great, just well — and you’ll be right back in this thing.”

Rocco decided to give it one more shot. Gleaton later told Matlock that he had talked Rocco into staying because he didn’t
want to pay for the hotel room — $36 a day — by himself if Rocco went home. Rocco knows there was more to it than that.

“He just wasn’t going to let me give up on myself,” he said. “After that pep talk, I stopped feeling sorry for myself.”

But whatever Gleaton’s motives, he was right — the next day went better. By the fourth and final day, Rocco was right around
the number he knew it would take to get through the qualifier. “I’m not sure why, but you always know at Q-School to within
a stroke, maybe two at most, what it’s going to take to get through,” he said. “You can tell by how tough the course is playing,
by the conditions, by how tightly the field is bunched starting the last day. I got to the back nine and figured I needed
to shoot two under par to make it.

“I made a couple birdies and came to 18, which was a par-four, figuring that worst-case scenario, if I made a par I would
play off and if I made birdie I was in for sure. I couldn’t reach the green in two and I ended up with about a 25-yard pitch
shot that had to go over a swale to the hole, which was on the back of the green.

“I was standing there with a pitching wedge in my hand, when all of a sudden I decided to hit a seven-iron. I just grabbed
it out of the bag and decided I was playing a pitch-and-run kind of shot. The ball goes up over the swale, disappears, runs
toward the cup — and goes in.

“I was thrilled. I thought, ‘Great, I’m in for sure now, no problem.’ I signed my card and found out that by chipping in I’d
gotten into a playoff! If I’d gotten up and down, I’d have been out. It was three guys for two spots. I birdied the first
hole and made it. If I had known I had to hole the pitch on 18, no way would I have come close.”

In those days there were only two stages of Q-School. (These days there are four.) The finals that year were at Greenlefe
Country Club, which wasn’t too far down the road from Lakeland.

“I’d played the course like a million times,” Rocco said, under-stating things as always. “I knew it blind. Needless to say,
I went in there with a lot of confidence. I was convinced I was destined to make it to the tour after what had happened at
Georgia. I played very solid golf right from the start.”

The finals are six rounds — 108 grinding holes of golf. After five days and 90 holes, Rocco was tied for 28th place. Fifty
players would get tour cards, so he was in a good position. Even so, there was reason to be nervous. The margin between 28th
place and 51st place was four shots, and stories about players skying to a high number in the final round were (and are) a
major part of Q-School lore. Like anyone on the eve of the biggest day of his life, Rocco struggled to sleep.

“I remember having a dream,” he said. “On the first hole, I hit a driver down the middle and hit six-iron for my second shot
— and it went in. I actually woke up with a smile on my face, thinking I was going to be okay.”

He felt even better when he walked onto the first tee and saw Lee Janzen and Marco Dawson standing there. They had been playing
in a tournament in Jacksonville over the weekend and had made a last-minute decision to drive to Greenlefe instead of back
to Lakeland to watch their two ex-teammates (Gleaton was also in good position) try to make the tour.

“We’d gotten up early to drive back to school,” Janzen remembered. “We were about halfway back, when all of a sudden it seemed
the car wanted to head to Greenlefe. We decided we could miss a day of class to go out there and show some support for Rocc
and Tom.”

Rocco hit a perfect drive on the first hole and had a six-iron left from the middle of the fairway. “I hit it to two feet,”
he said. “For a second I thought it was going to go in. That would have been too weird.”

He was delighted to start with a birdie and played steadily all day. The only unnerving moment came at the 16th, a long, narrow
par-three with out-of-bounds left of the green. Dave Rummels, one of the other players in the group who was also comfortably
inside the qualifying number at that moment, hit a three-iron off the tee, hooked it, and watched it hop out of bounds.

As soon as he saw Rummels’s ball bounce past the white stakes, Rocco turned to his caddy and said, “Give me a five-iron.”

“But you can’t possibly reach the green with a five-iron.”

“I know that. Give me the f —— five iron.”

For all intents and purposes, he laid up to a par-three. “I hit it short of the bunkers, away from any trouble,” he said.
“I would have been happy to make bogey. The one thing I didn’t want to do was hit it OB and make six or something. I ended
up pitching it close and making par.”

Standing on the 18th tee, Rocco knew all he really had to do was finish the hole and he would get his card. “I was shaking,”
he said, laughing at the memory. “I mean, that hole has about the widest fairway in golf and I wasn’t sure I could hit it.
Once I got the ball on the green I relaxed a little, because at that point I think I could have six-putted and still made
it. When I holed out, the relief was unbelievable. I was on the tour — and I didn’t have to go back to college.”

At that moment, he didn’t need a backup plan.

T
HOSE WHO HAVE PLAYED
for a long time on the PGA Tour will tell you that there are few experiences in golf more bittersweet than the first time
they successfully climb the Q-School mountain.

At the finish there is elation, exhaustion, and relief. Then comes the understanding that getting to the tour is only a small
first step, that there are many golf miles to be traveled before one is considered successful on the tour.

“At some point, no matter who you are, the thought crosses your mind, ‘Okay, I’m on the tour, but am I good enough to stay
there?’ ” Rocco has said often. “If you know anything about Q-School, it is that more than half the guys who make it through
in a given year are right back there the next year.”

Rocco’s elation on the last day at Greenlefe lasted a few hours — at most. He received congratulatory hugs from Janzen and
Dawson and joined Gleaton, who had also earned his card, for a brief post-round celebration. He called his parents and tearfully
told them he was on the tour. Soon after that he was in his car on his way back home to Greensburg — still thrilled but with
no one to talk to about what he had accomplished.

“It was a strange trip home,” he said. “On the one hand, I found myself thinking about how amazing it was that I was going
where I was going. I thought about the fact that six years earlier, I couldn’t break 80 and now I was on the PGA Tour. That
part was great.

“But it was also kind of scary, realizing how much work I had already done, but that I had that much more to do to try to
compete once I got out there. I wasn’t a college kid anymore; I was a professional golfer. It was what I wanted to be, but
I knew it wasn’t going to be at all easy. I really wanted to talk to people the whole way home, but there were no cell phones
and it was the middle of the night anyway. It was just me and all my thoughts.”

He didn’t stay home for long, heading down to Florida right after Christmas to find some warm weather so he could prepare
for his tour debut, which would come in early January at Pebble Beach. This was before the tour began its season with two
tournaments in Hawaii the way it does now.

He spent a fair amount of his time in Florida working with Rick Smith. He had met Smith through Janzen, who had grown up playing
at Imperial Lakes, the golf course where Smith’s older brother was the pro. After Rick left East Tennessee State, he had come
home to work for his brother as a jack-of-all-trades around the golf course. He had spotted Janzen, then in the seventh grade,
hitting golf balls one day and made a suggestion to him about his setup.

“He told me that I had no chance to hit the ball well setting up the way I was,” Janzen said. “I figured I had nothing to
lose by making the change he was suggesting. I felt more comfortable over the ball right away. I wasn’t very good at that
point, so I figured almost anything might help. In almost no time I went from struggling to break 100 to shooting in the low
80s. I was completely hooked. After that, every time I saw Rick, I said to him, ‘Give me something to work on.’ He always
did, and we became good friends and he became my teacher even though I wasn’t formally taking lessons from him.”

When Janzen and Rocco became friends, Janzen introduced Rocco to Smith. Although Rocco had continued to take lessons from
Jim Ferree while in college, he enjoyed working with Smith too. In Smith, he found someone young enough to be a friend and
someone as obsessed with the technique of the golf swing as he was. Plus, his teaching methods were not all that different
from Ferree’s, since a lot of Smith’s understanding of the swing came from Ferree. By the time he finished at Florida Southern,
Rocco was spending a good deal of time on the practice tee with Smith.

Nervous but excited, Rocco flew to Pebble Beach for his first tournament as a full-fledged member of the PGA Tour. In those
days, Pebble Beach was one of the more glamorous events on the tour and drew a stellar field. Rocco walked onto the driving
range on Tuesday morning and spent a solid hour just watching other players hit range balls.