Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (9 page)

They were married the following spring. By then, Rocco was playing well enough on tour and making enough of a living that
they were able to buy a house in Ponte Vedra, Florida, right near the tour’s headquarters at the TPC Sawgrass.

All the work with Rick Smith and the year of experience on tour had started to pay off during 1987, that second year on tour.
Rocco began to make cuts on a more consistent basis (19 of 32) and found himself playing later and later on Saturdays and
Sundays. The second-place finish behind Inman at the Provident Classic in July — he lost by a shot — was worth $62,000, more
than triple what he had made in all of 1986. He finished the year with $112,099 in earnings, which was good for 91st place
on the money list.

“It was such a great time in my life,” he said. “Every day was a learning experience on the golf course, on the practice tee,
in the locker room, away from the golf course. I was just a kid trying to figure things out. For me, the PGA Tour those first
few years was like going to golf college. A lot of guys went out of their way to help me, which I’ve tried never to forget.
Now when I see young guys out here with that wide-eyed look I’m sure I had twenty years ago, I try to help them whenever I
can.”

And it wasn’t just his golf swing that needed refining. One morning Rocco walked into the locker room at Muirfield Village
Golf Club, the site of Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial Tournament. It was pro-am day, and he was wearing a pullover sweater and comfortable
pants. “They were kind of puffy,” he said. “Not all that sloppy, not like painter’s pants or anything, but not exactly dressy.”

“Hey, kid, come over here,” he heard a voice say, and looked up to see 1973 British Open champion Tom Weiskopf waving at him.

Dutifully, Rocco made his way over to Weiskopf’s locker.

“Do you think the people who paid money to play with you today want to see you looking like that?” Weiskopf said. “You want
to be a pro, you have to look like one. You need new pants — real pants.”

He handed Rocco a card. “Call this guy. Tell him I told you to call. Get him to make some good pants for you.”

Rocco did what he was told. Since then he has worn nothing but tailor-made pants on days when he goes to the golf course on
tour. In fact, he’s become a serious clotheshorse. He has a huge collection of belt buckles and gets his belts made too.

Other more experienced players also took him under their wing. Curtis Strange was the number one player in the world when
Rocco arrived on tour and didn’t play with him much, since they were in different categories when pairings were made, but
Strange remembers frequently running into Rocco early on.

“You may not play with a guy, but you do run into people on the practice tee and in the locker room,” Strange said. “Rocco
was quieter then, but you could just tell he was a good kid. A lot of young guys show up on tour and act like the world is
supposed to be at their feet. Rocco was never that way. You could tell he thought he was lucky to be doing what he was doing,
and he loved a good story — whether he was listening to one or telling one. The Rocco people see now was always there; it
was just a matter of him getting the confidence to show it.”

Arnold Palmer was seeing a lot of Rocco too. He wasn’t playing very much in those days, but whenever Rocco went home, he would
go over to Latrobe and play with him.

“I probably lectured him too much,” Palmer said, smiling, years later. “I saw so much potential in him. By the time he had
been on tour for a couple of years, he had a very good golf swing and had become one of the best ball-strikers I’d seen in
a long time. Plus, I knew he had the kind of personality that would make him a star and someone who would be very good for
golf if he started to win with some consistency.”

But Palmer had concerns too. “I worried about him. I saw his weight going up at a young age and didn’t think that was a good
thing. I thought he needed to spend more time on the putting green because at times he putted very well but at other times
not as well. With the way he hit the ball, I thought he should be scoring better.”

Weight was starting to become an issue as Rocco became established on tour. “People look at him now and they forget there
was a time when his shoulders were wider than his hips,” Janzen joked.

Of course Rocco knew that putting on weight wasn’t a good idea for any golfer. He had been in good shape at Florida Southern
because of Matlock’s boot camps, but living on the road, especially after he started to make some money, he found it tough
to keep weight off.

“I was probably like any guy in his twenties who was making money for the first time,” he said. “Plus, I was away a lot. Linda
was there some of the time, but not all the time. It wasn’t as if I was out partying all night; if I had been I wouldn’t have
been able to play. But I definitely liked to eat. After a while I got to be a pretty big boy.”

At six-foot-one and 190 pounds in college, Rocco was in good shape. By the time his first son, Rocco Vincent Mediate, was
born late in 1990, his weight had ballooned to close to 250 pounds and his waist size was a forty-two. The extra weight didn’t
affect his stamina, but it did start to affect his back.

He had played steadily in 1988 and 1989, still not winning but maintaining his playing privileges without any problem. In
1990, he began to turn a corner and become a player people noticed.

“I think at that point it was just experience kicking in,” he said. “I knew the golf courses, I knew which hotels to stay
in, I knew how to get the best fares and upgrades on planes. [These days the tour has a travel office and a travel specialist
who works out of the locker room, booking flights and hotels for players; back then they were on their own.] I was completely
comfortable. Plus, my swing was really good. When I putted well, I could really score.”

That has always been the book on Rocco: excellent ball-striker, streaky putter. “He always hit the ball very high and he always
had that draw,” Carter said. “He never lacked confidence with a driver or an iron in his hands. It was the putter that kept
him from winning those first few years.”

In his fifth year on tour, he became a consistent contender. He finished second at the Greater Hartford Open and had a third
and a seventh. By the time the year was over, he had made a career high $240,625 and was 62nd on the money list. He still
hadn’t won, but he felt he was getting very close to that breakthrough.

Late that year, back pain prompted Rocco to begin using a long putter. Only a handful of players — most of them on the Senior
Tour — were using a long putter at that point, but Rocco decided to try it for two reasons: He thought it might help him putt
better and he hoped it might take some pressure off his back.

“My back wasn’t bad at that point, but I had put on some weight,” he said. “If I had been a great putter I never would have
changed, but I wasn’t a great putter so I thought it was worth a try. As soon as I picked it up I felt comfortable with it,
so I just kept on using it.”

In the early 1990s, a long putter on the regular tour was usually a sign of trouble. “Old guys were supposed to use them,
not young guys,” Strange said. “If you saw a guy with a long putter or putting cross-handed or doing anything that wasn’t
conventional, the first thing you thought was, ‘This guy has issues.’ Rocco was probably the first guy on the regular tour
to use the long putter and actually have serious success with it.”

Rocco was using the long putter at Doral the following March when he made back-to-back birdie putts on the last two holes
to get into a playoff with Strange. “I guess that was a pretty good clue that he was putting well,” Strange said, laughing,
years later. “I remember I had finished ahead of him and had played well down the stretch. I thought I was in pretty good
shape even when he made the birdie at 17, because birdieing the 18th at Doral to get into a playoff is a pretty tall order.
But he hit a great second shot (to about 10 feet) and made the putt, and my thought was ‘Good for you.’ ”

Because of a rain delay, the playoff was held the following morning, meaning Rocco had to sleep knowing he would need to come
out firing the next morning, since the playoff was sudden death. On paper, the advantage had to belong to Strange, who had
won 17 times on tour — including back-to-back U.S. Open victories in 1988 and 1989.

“I felt pretty good about it, to tell the truth,” Strange said. “On the other hand, Rocco had finished hot by making the two
birdies to tie me. In sudden death, it’s really a matter of who comes up with a shot first. We both came up short of the green
in two because it was playing dead into the wind, and we both hit good chips to set up makeable birdie putts.”

The first playoff hole on tour is almost always the 18th. TV likes it that way, and it is easier on fans who don’t have to
go sprinting to another hole to get into position for a playoff. Even the Masters, which for years started playoffs on the
10th hole, now sends the players back to the 18th tee.

But this was 1990 on a Monday morning, and neither TV nor fans were a factor. So Strange and Rocco played Doral’s par-five
first hole. Rocco’s wedge shot was just inside Strange’s, so Strange putted first — and missed. That left Rocco with an eight-footer
for his first win. He drained it.

“I still remember him dropping the putter before the ball got to the hole,” Strange said, laughing. “I thought, ‘Okay, that’s
inexperience tempting fate like that.’ To be completely honest, I was disappointed not to win, the way you’re always disappointed
when you have a chance like that and don’t win, but I was really happy for Rocco. I’d seen how much time he spent on the practice
tee and how hard he worked at his game. Plus, I liked him. There are guys I could lose a playoff to and walk away really angry
about it. Not Rocco. He earned it too — it wasn’t like I just gave it to him. He birdied the last three holes he played. That’s
good golf.”

The Doral victory wasn’t exactly the way Rocco had pictured his first win: Because it was Monday morning, there were only
a handful of spectators around. There was no post-victory TV interview, and the awards ceremony was all but held in private.
Still, after five years, the feeling was overwhelming.

“When he called he was just about crying,” Tony Mediate said. “Remember, it was Monday morning, so there was no TV and there
was no Internet back then. We were just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. As soon as I heard his voice, I knew
he had won.”

The win was worth $252,000, which was just $10,000 less than he had made total in the 91 tournaments he had played in during
his first three years on tour. It also meant that he was exempt from having to qualify through the end of 1993 and it gave
him a huge boost of confidence.

“There’s a difference between staying on tour and winning on tour,” he said. “My first five years I was good enough to stay
on tour. I played okay and I was always aware of how much money I needed to make to keep my card for the next year. That’s
what it was about — staying on tour.

“Winning makes you feel completely different. For one thing, you get the two-year exemption, so for the rest of that year
and the entire next year you don’t have to even think about the money list — you just play. Beyond that, though, you feel
like you really belong. You’re playing with better players on Thursday and Friday [tournament winners are paired together
the first two rounds at each tournament], and guys look at you differently in the locker room, on the range.”

Or, as Loren Roberts put it after his first tour win in his tenth year on tour: “Until you win, you feel like you’re a day
worker out here. Once you win, you feel like you really belong.”

Rocco was in his sixth year on tour when he won at Doral. He probably had as many friends among the other players as anyone
out there and he had become quite popular with the fans. But he had never felt as if he really belonged.

“I always felt like an outsider in my early years on tour,” he said. “It wasn’t because I didn’t have friends — I did. It
wasn’t because a lot of the older guys weren’t great to me — they were. I just felt as if I wasn’t normal. Maybe it was because
I didn’t have any pedigree as a junior golfer. I never really did anything until college, and then it wasn’t until I was a
senior.

“I remember Davis [Love] saying to me once, ‘You went from nowhere at fifteen to the tour at twenty-two — you realize, don’t
you, that nobody does that?’ He said it to make me feel good, and I get how amazing it was that I was able to do what I did.
A lot of guys go back to Q-School multiple times when they’re young. I went back once and that was it.

“I still remember watching those guys on the range at Pebble and being awed. Even later, when I’d established myself on tour,
there were times when I would watch the other guys and say, ‘Can I possibly play well enough to compete with them?’ There
was always doubt in my mind, even after I’d been out there four or five years. I wondered if I would ever play well enough
to get noticed. I’ve always liked to perform, to show off. I didn’t know if I’d ever get to a stage like that where I’d have
that chance.”

Winning a tournament — and beating Strange, a two-time U.S. Open champion and a former number one player in the world, to
do it — was certainly a step in that direction. Stardom appeared to be looming on Rocco’s horizon. Unfortunately, it wasn’t
the only thing heading his way.

A
FTER THE WIN AT
D
ORAL
, Rocco became a second-tier star on tour. He wasn’t in the same category with Greg Norman or Nick Faldo or Fred Couples or
Nick Price, who had supplanted Norman by then as the world’s number one player. But he was one level down, a solid player
who had won on tour and was well-liked by golf fans and other players.

He signed a lucrative contract with Titleist in 1990 and became a media favorite. Buoyed by his victory, he gained more confidence
when talking to the media and in his interactions with fans.