Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (33 page)

Woods had the honor on the first hole, and for the first time in five tries, his drive found the fairway. He was so happy
to be in the short grass that he threw his arms into the air in (semi) mock celebration. Rocco may have felt a bit tight starting
out, but he split the fairway with his drive. From there, he missed the green with a slightly nervous five-iron and ended
up making a two-putt bogey. Woods found the center of the green and made a routine par. On the hole that had been his Achilles’
heel all week, Woods had quickly taken a one-shot lead.

“Not the start you want, but it’s just that — a start,” Rocco said. “At that moment I was awfully glad we weren’t playing
sudden death. I’d have been down the road in a hurry.”

He settled down on number two, making a par. Even that was a little bit disappointing, since he had birdied the hole three
days out of four, but this was all different and new. The par gave him a chance to catch his breath. Woods, off to a much
steadier start than on Sunday, made another routine par.

The third hole was playing fairly short, but not as short as it had on the weekend. Rocco hit a six-iron that he thought for
an instant might go into the hole. It landed just in front of the pin and rolled right past it before settling 18 inches from
the cup. Woods missed the green, hit a poor chip, and two-putted for bogey. When Rocco’s tap-in birdie putt went in, he had
suddenly gone from a one-shot deficit to a one-shot lead.

“At that point I knew I was okay, that I had come to play,” he said. “I thought before the round that would be the case, but
when I started with the bogey, it shook me just a little. The birdie brought me back to where I wanted to be. The nerves were
almost completely gone after that. I was playing golf.”

Rocco may have been calm, but Cindi was not. “I was trying
so
hard to keep myself together,” she said. “I just couldn’t do it. It was so tense inside the ropes, so many people. We got
to the third hole and I just started to lose it. I went outside the ropes and found Sticky [Puertas] and said, ‘I’m losing
it.’ I was crying, couldn’t stop myself. He said, ‘My God, Cindi, it’s the third hole. You can’t start breaking down on the
third hole.’ I said I’d try. But it was really, really hard.”

The rest of the front nine didn’t make Cindi feel any better. Both players parred the fourth hole, then Rocco bogeyed the
fifth after missing the green and hitting a mediocre bunker shot. Woods made par and they were all even. Woods had not yet
made a birdie. That changed on the sixth hole, when he rolled in a 15-foot birdie putt. He followed that with another birdie
at the seventh, and just like that he had a two-shot lead.

“For some reason I wasn’t panicked,” Rocco said. “Look, it’s Tiger Woods. He isn’t going to go 18 holes and not make some
birdies. But the way the weekend had gone, I had to figure he wasn’t going to play a perfect round either. His knee was hurting;
I could see that. I didn’t expect him to fall over or anything like that, but I thought there was still a lot of golf left
to be played if I could just get something going on my side of it.”

Woods did make a mistake on the eighth, finding the rough off the tee and making his second bogey of the day from there. Rocco’s
par brought him to within one again.

But then it was Rocco’s turn to make a mistake. On the ninth, his third-shot wedge went 18 feet past the hole, leaving him
with a longer birdie putt than he wanted. Trying too hard to make it, he watched it roll five feet past the hole. Then he
missed coming back. Woods made a par, and they turned with Rocco two shots behind.

Around the country, as NBC took over the telecast from ESPN at two o’clock eastern time, most people who hadn’t been paying
attention until the network telecast began shook their heads knowingly when the nine-hole scores went up: Woods — 35; Mediate
— 37. Rocco certainly wasn’t embarrassing himself, but Tiger — as usual — appeared to be firmly in control.

As the players made their way to the 10th tee, Cindi was receiving almost constant text messages from friends around the country.
They all said basically the same thing: “Tell him to slow down!”

“When I get my adrenaline pumping, I can get too fast at times,” Rocco said. “I’m too fast getting ready to hit the ball,
too fast with my swing — everything. I’d done a very good job for four days not letting that happen, even under the gun on
Sunday. I was very calm, going at a very good pace for me the entire time. I guess for a while there on Monday, I got a little
too wound up after he made those two birdies and got a little bit fast.”

With the text messages flying at her, Cindi knew she needed to find a moment to get close enough to Rocco to look him in the
eye and remind him to slow down. The problem was she had gone back outside the ropes, in part because crouching and kneeling
and lying down on her stomach to stay out of the way of the fans screaming, ‘Get down!’ at all those inside the ropes was
starting to wear her out, and in part to calm herself down again.

“I knew I needed to get someplace where he would see me,” she said. “The problem was the crowds were so huge I couldn’t get
back inside the ropes on 10.”

In fact, at one point she got trapped when security decided to hold the portion of the crowd she was in to try to spread people
out a little bit. “I was waving my media credential, saying, ‘I’m with the media,’ ” she said, laughing later. “To say that
no one cared is putting it mildly.”

She finally managed to wedge her way back inside as the players reached the 10th green. By then, Rocco was in more trouble,
having missed yet another green. Woods made par, but Rocco couldn’t get up and down for par. He had made back-to-back bogeys
on two of the easier holes on the golf course and hadn’t made a birdie since the third. Woods led by three strokes with eight
holes to play.

“Now or never,” Cindi thought.

As the players walked onto the 11th tee, she got Rocco’s attention and waved him over close to her. “Slow down!” she hissed.

“What?” he said, initially unsure of what she was saying.

“I said, slow the f —— down!” she said emphatically.

This time Rocco got it. “Okay,” he said, returning to the tee as Woods went through his pre-shot routine.

If there was ever a moment when TVs around the country were going to be turned off, this was it. Tiger Woods with a three-shot
lead on the back nine is about as close to a lock as anything on earth short of the sun rising in the east or the New York
Jets collapsing in December.

In Greensburg, Tony Mediate paced around and told his wife, “He’s in trouble.”

“Calm down,” Donna said. “I think he’s going to be okay. It’s not even close to over.”

A few miles away, Dave Lucas, Rocco’s childhood buddy, felt the same way as Donna, even though he knew there was no logic
to it. “It’s just always been Rocco’s way that when he gets to a point where his back is against the wall and there’s absolutely
no reason to believe he can succeed, he figures something out,” he said. “It gets back to the self-confidence he always had
that always seemed so misplaced. Put him in a spot where he has no chance, and he’s really dangerous. What could be more of
a no-chance than three down to Tiger?”

Rocco’s family and close friends often saw him as Han Solo in the famous
Star Wars
scene in which Solo is trying to maneuver his spaceship through an asteroid field. “Sir,” shrieks C-3PO, “the odds of successfully
navigating an asteroid field are 3,720 to 1!”

To which Solo replies, “Never tell me the odds.”

Rocco never wanted to know the odds. They simply didn’t matter as far as he was concerned.

With Cindi’s “slow down” mantra echoing in his head, Rocco watched Woods miss the 11th green. The hole was playing 221 yards,
so he needed a three-iron. Taking his time, Rocco put a perfect swing on the ball and found the green. When Woods couldn’t
get up and down, and Rocco two-putted for par, the margin was back to two.

“Two shots is nothing,” Rocco said. “You can make up two shots on one hole on a golf course like that. I realized I still
had a great chance to win the thing. A thousand things could happen over seven holes.”

What happened next was that Woods bogeyed the 12th. He would talk later about how the Monday round was a microcosm of his
week: “A little of everything. I made eagles, birdies, hit great shots, hit terrible shots. I’d birdie two in a row, then
bogey two in a row. I never knew exactly what was going to happen next.”

Neither did anyone else.

On 13, Woods missed the fairway to the right. Rocco was down the middle, but had to lay up.

Woods found the green — again — from the rough, missed the eagle putt but tapped in for birdie. He didn’t gain any ground
on Rocco, though, because he had hit his third-shot wedge — after laying up — to five feet and made his putt for birdie. The
margin stayed at one with only one par-five left to play.

The tee was up again at 14, the USGA having decided that playing the hole short on Sunday had added a lot of suspense and
decision making to the round. The hole was playing a little bit longer than Sunday, though, because the teeing area was on
the back portion of the tee rather than on the front of it, and the players had a little bit of a wind in their faces.

That made the clubbing decision easy for both: driver for Rocco, three-wood for Woods.

“Playing it longer helped me,” Woods said later. “I wasn’t between clubs the way I was on Sunday. I actually hit the ball
in a good spot and had what should have been an easy pitch. But the lie was just a little bit funky.”

Both players barely missed the green, Rocco’s ball ending up right in front, Woods’s a little to the right, just in the rough.
For once, Woods got a bit of a bad break: There was a small tuft of grass under his ball, which made it harder for him to
spin the ball the way he normally would. His pitch ended up about 15 feet from the hole. From there, his birdie putt slid
just past the cup. Rocco, with nothing impeding him, hit a pretty shot to about two feet and holed the putt for a birdie.

Tie ball game. Both players were now one over par for the day.

“I got to playing some military golf right there,” Woods said. “You know, ‘ left-right, right-left.’ I was putting so well
I kept thinking if I could just get the ball on the green on each hole, I’d have a chance. I knew three shots up on this golf
course the lead could go away quickly.” He smiled. “I guess I was right.”

There were four holes to play, and they were dead even. By now, most of the country was riveted. Since
NBC.com
was streaming live, a lot of people sitting at desks in their offices were watching on their computers. During the last two
hours of the playoff, trading volume on Wall Street plummeted.

Curtis Strange, who had worked the first two rounds of the tournament for ESPN, was back home, unable to move from his TV.
“I got a call from my son Thomas, who lives in Charlotte,” he said later. “He was in a restaurant watching with some friends
and he said people were just going nuts on every shot.”

Arnold Palmer had watched Sunday’s round at home, surrounded by friends. On Monday, he sat in his office with his friend and
confidant Doc Giffin. “If I’d had people around, it would have been too much,” Palmer said. “I was nervous and proud at the
same time. There were moments when I wanted to say to Rocco on the screen, ‘I
told
you for years that you could do this.’ ”

Rick Smith had completed his outing-related duties in the morning and was back in the locker room at Oakland Hills. “I almost
couldn’t breathe by the time they got to 15,” he said.

Cindi, having done her job by telling Rocco to slow down, was now a complete mess. “The last few holes, no matter how hard
I tried, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “At one point, Sticky had come inside the ropes, and I was about to say to him,
‘Help me calm down here; I need to stop crying.’ Then I looked at him and
he
was crying.”

The calmest person in the storm was Rocco. He hit another perfect drive at 15. Woods, still in the military mode, missed the
fairway dead right. “I was in a zone then,” Rocco said. “I’d hit the ball, look at it in the air, and say, ‘Yup,’ and then
move on to the next shot. If I hit a shot that wasn’t exactly what I wanted, I was surprised.”

Woods would later describe his drive at 15 as a “pitch out.” “Catcher called pitch out, and I hit it over there to the right,”
he said.

He was so far to the right that on the one hole on the golf course that didn’t have a bunker, he had found one — on the adjoining
ninth hole.

He had a difficult lie but a reasonable angle to the green and was 170 yards away — a seven-iron shot for him. “I had to start
the ball at the middle of the right bunker and just rope it in there,” he said. “I hit it so flush it was probably the best
shot I hit all week, feeling-wise. And it hit up right behind the hole.”

“We were so far away we really couldn’t see what Tiger was doing over there on the other side,” Rocco said. “When he finally
got over the ball and hit it, Matt said to me, ‘Where’d it go?’ I said, ‘Just watch the flag.’ Sure enough the ball came from
out of nowhere, landed on the green, and stopped ten feet away.”

It was a superb shot, one of those one-in-a-million shots Woods pulls off. Even though Rocco’s drive had found the fair-way,
he had still been away and hit a solid second shot that had stopped 18 feet above the hole. Woods’s shot rolled inside Rocco’s,
finally stopping no more than 10 feet from the hole.

“Ridiculous,” Rocco said. “I run out of words to use when he hits a shot like that. Think about it: I hit a good second shot,
and he’s inside me hitting his second shot from Pluto.”

Woods was likely to make his putt, so Rocco hit his birdie putt hard, figuring he had to make it to stay even. “When he hit
it,” Woods said, “I thought it was going at least 10 or 12 feet by the hole.”

So did Rocco — until just before the ball got to the hole, when he realized his line was perfect and the ball was headed straight
for the middle of the cup. As the ball got close to the hole, Rocco sensed something special was about to happen. “Oh, wow,”
he said. “Oh, wow. Oh, wow…” The ball hit the hole and almost popped up into the air, but since it had hit the back of the
cup dead center, it stayed in. The roar was, to put it mildly, deafening.