Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open
Authors: Rocco Mediate,John Feinstein
Tags: #United States, #History, #Sports & Recreation, #Golfers, #Golf, #U.S. Open (Golf tournament), #Golfers - United States, #Woods; Tiger, #Mediate; Rocco, #(2008
Copyright © 2009 by Imediate Balance and John Feinstein
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
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First eBook Edition: May 2009
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The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07374-5
Contents
A
LSO BY
J
OHN
F
EINSTEIN
Living on the Black
Tales from Q School
Last Dance
Next Man Up
Let Me Tell You a Story
Caddy for Life
Open
The Punch
The Last Amateurs
The Majors
A March to Madness
A Civil War
A Good Walk Spoiled
Play Ball
Hard Courts
Forever’s Team
A Season Inside
A Season on the Brink
Last Shot (
A Final Four Mystery
)
Vanishing Act: Mystery at the U.S. Open
Cover-up: Mystery at the Super Bowl
Running Mates (
A Mystery
)
Winter Games (
A Mystery
)
For my boys… Rocco, Marco, and Nico
— R.M.
For the Rules Guys: Mark Russell, John Brendle, Slugger White, and Steve Rintoul, who are always there day and night
— J.F.
N
EVER IN MY WILDEST DREAMS
did I ever think I’d be involved in a book like this one. Or any book, for that matter. Winning the United States Open, I
could imagine. A book? No way.
But after my near miss at Torrey Pines in the Open last June, I started hearing from people that I should do a book, that
I should tell my story — not only about my duel with Tiger Woods, but about all that led up to it. Literary agents were coming
at me with offers and writers, saying they knew just how to tell my story.
I was certainly intrigued, but also a little bit skeptical. Mine is not — as you will learn — a simple story. If it was going
to be told, I wanted it told right. One writer showed me a proposal he had put together in which he had me talking to God
during the Open playoff. I don’t talk to God. I think He has enough on his plate without golfers asking him for an extra birdie
or two. Maybe the guy got confused when he saw me talking to Tiger. A lot of people make that mistake.
So there I was in early July with these offers, and I still wasn’t sure what to do. That was when Cindi Hilfman (who played
a major role in my being able to accomplish what I accomplished at the Open) brought up John Feinstein.
“Do you know him?” she asked me.
Sure, I knew John. I’d known him for years. I’d always enjoyed talking to him, whether it was in the locker room or on the
driving range, and I knew that Lee Janzen, probably my best friend on tour, had worked with him on a couple of his books and
liked and trusted him.
Cindi, it turns out, is also a fan. Maybe it’s the whole Duke thing (she did her postgraduate work in physical therapy there),
but she says she’s read all twenty-three of his previous books. I haven’t. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve read twenty-three
books period.
Cindi suggested I call John to see if he’d be interested in doing a book. Kelly Tilghman (another Dukie: I think there’s a
pattern here), who had done some work with me at the Golf Channel, had John’s contact information, so I tracked him down during,
ironically enough, Tiger’s tournament at Congressional.
John asked me a lot of questions, one of which was if I was absolutely sure I wanted to do a book. I remember what he said
to me: “These things don’t happen by magic. It’s work. It will take time, and I may ask you some difficult questions. If you
understand that and still want to do it, I’m in.”
To be honest, I don’t think I completely understood what he was talking about. Now I do. It was a lot of work, but also a
lot of fun. I thought there was a story to be told — one that goes well beyond what happened during those five days at Torrey
Pines — and working with John, I came away even more convinced that was the case.
John made one other suggestion when we first talked: “Let’s not write this in the first person,” he said. He thought that
writing in the third person (I didn’t even know what the hell writing in the third person was until he explained it to me)
would give him more freedom to say things about me and tell the story in a kind of detailed way that first person doesn’t
allow.
Reading the book, I realized he was completely right. A lot of first-person athlete’s books (okay, I
have
read a few books) leave me wanting to know more, because the athlete doesn’t want to tell you what he thinks about someone
or about how difficult something was to achieve. John did a
lot
of reporting. He talked to all the key people in my life and to people I hadn’t even thought about. In some cases, people
told him things I didn’t even know.
Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to pull a Charles Barkley and claim I was misquoted in a book my name is on. I’ve read
it carefully, and everything that comes out of my mouth in the book came out of my mouth when John had his tape recorder on.
I think it’s a pretty good story, one that I’ve enjoyed living — for the most part — and one that I hope you’ll enjoy reading.
Overall, the experience was a fascinating one. I learned a lot about myself, my friends, and what goes into creating a book.
I have only one regret: I heard a
lot
more about Coach K than I thought anyone could ever want to know.
I mean, the guy doesn’t even play golf.
Oh, one more thing: The story John tells in the introduction about the title is true. Don’t tell my kids.
Enjoy the book.
— Rocco Mediate
I
N THE
108
YEARS THAT
the United States Open golf championship has existed, there has never been an Open like the one that took place at Torrey
Pines Country Club in June of 2008. This was an Open so remarkable it even made the United States Golf Association’s stubborn
insistence on continuing to stage an 18-hole Monday playoff look smart.
The golf world has become accustomed to Tiger Woods doing things that no one else has ever done before. He won the Masters
at the age of twenty-one — by 12 shots. He won four major championships in a row. He changed his golf swing when he was the
number one player in the world — and got better. Then he changed it again and, after going 10 straight majors without a win,
won five of the next 12. Midway through 2008, he had won 65 times on the PGA Tour — 17 short of the all-time record — and
he was only thirty-two years old.
But his victory at Torrey Pines was spectacular — even by his own spectacular standards. He had undergone knee surgery on
April 15, two days after finishing second at the Masters and fifty-eight days before the start of the Open — and hadn’t walked
a single 18-hole round of golf before he teed it up on day one of the Open. He was clearly still in pain throughout the tournament.
Just finishing 18 holes, let alone 72 holes, would have been an accomplishment. To finish 72 holes tied for first place and
then play 19 more the next day to win the championship was almost beyond belief.
“I would have to say this is my greatest victory,” he said when it was finally over.
And yet, extraordinary as it was, Woods’s victory wasn’t what made this Open unique. Had he won it in 72 holes by a shot or
by two or three shots, it would have simply been another example of just how much better he is than every other golfer on
the planet and would have set off another round of “Tiger is the most dominant athlete in the world” stories. All of which
would have been correct and appropriate.
What made this Open as thrilling as it was, a golf event watched and remembered by millions of non–golf fans, wasn’t Tiger
Woods.
It was Rocco Mediate.
The notion of the greatest player in history proving once again how great he is — even doing it on one leg — fits handily
into Woods’s lore. The notion of the 158th player in the world, a motor-mouthed forty-five-year-old whose career has been
plagued by back problems, standing toe-to-toe with the greatest player in history for 91 holes is the kind of stuff that can
bring Wall Street to a virtual halt.
And it actually did. According to market analysts, during the four and a half hours that Woods and Mediate were on the golf
course on Monday, June 16, trading volume on the stock exchange dropped 10 percent. During the last few holes, according to
estimates, it dropped double that amount.
There were all sorts of stories like that one on that Monday. Joan Fay, the wife of USGA executive director David Fay, wanted
to stay in San Diego on Monday for the playoff. But she had commitments back home in New York on Tuesday and, as her husband
pointed out, changing her flight would have cost an arm and a leg. She arrived at the airport Monday morning comforted by
the fact that Jet Blue provides TV service on coast-to-coast flights, so she would at least be able to watch.
While waiting for her plane, she ran into several NBC executives, also flying home because of commitments and the expense
of changing a flight. They were completely glum because the airline they were on had no TV service.
“I think there are seats on the Jet Blue flight,” Joan Fay said. “I’ll bet they’d change your tickets for nothing.”
A mad scramble followed and the NBC execs all ended up on Jet Blue. As luck would have it, the plane landed in New York just
as Woods and Mediate were playing the 18th hole. It taxied to the gate, the Jetway pulled up, and no one got off the plane.
“No one would get off,” Joan Fay said. “I mean no one.”
One hundred miles to the north and east, another plane had just landed in Hartford, Connecticut. It was carrying golfers and
their families from the Open to the next tour stop, which would take place that week outside Hartford. Everyone on the charter
flight had been glued to the playoff, and when the plane landed, it pulled up to a private hangar where tournament officials
and volunteers were waiting to help with luggage and courtesy cars and directions, and to make sure hotel reservations were
in place.
But no one got off the plane.
“They couldn’t have gotten me or anyone else off with a court order at that point,” said Lee Janzen, a longtime friend of
Mediate’s. “We just told the flight attendants to go inside and let the tournament people know we’d deplane as soon as it
was over.”
All over the country, people who couldn’t have cared less about golf were tuned to television sets or computers, putting work
and life aside to see how the playoff would be resolved. The notion that the wisecracking everyman from Greensburg, Pennsylvania,
could somehow beat the world’s best-known athlete was instant must-see TV. It was Johnny Miller, the longtime NBC analyst,
who accidentally summed it up on Sunday afternoon when he said, “Can someone named Rocco actually beat Tiger Woods to win
the U.S. Open? I mean, he looks more like he should be taking care of Tiger’s pool than competing with him in the Open.”
Miller caught a lot of flak for that comment — Italian American groups got upset and he had to publicly apologize — but the
point he was making (which had nothing to do with Mediate’s heritage) was an accurate one. Like everyone else who couldn’t
take their eyes off what they were watching, Miller simply couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
In the end, someone named Rocco came up one shot short — just inches short — of beating Tiger Woods to win the U.S. Open.
But the story he wrote during those five days — and what led to it — was once-in-a-lifetime stuff. No one understood that
better than Rocco.
