Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (35 page)

“I saw him reach down for the ball and I thought, ‘Oh, my God!’ ” Davis said. “I screamed, ‘Rocco, ball’s in play, the ball’s
in play!’ ”

Which it was, the instant it came to rest. “I just blanked on the rule,” Rocco said. “I forgot that the ball just has to
land
in the circle to be in play and for a second thought it had to
end up
in the circle. Thank God Mike screamed at me.”

If Rocco had picked up the ball, the championship would have been over at that instant. He would have been disqualified for
picking up a ball that was in play. Woods would have been required to putt out to make it official, but it would have been
the worst possible ending to one of the great days in the history of golf.

As soon as he heard Davis screaming, Rocco stood up, thanked him, and regrouped. “All I really wanted was to get the ball
somewhere on the green and give myself a putt at it,” he said. “That was my only hope. When the ball bounced out of the circle,
I didn’t have a very good lie at all. I actually hit a hell of a shot from there.”

He lofted the ball onto the green, and it rolled to a halt 18 feet past the pin, just inside the distance Woods had from below
the hole. Woods had 20 feet for birdie to win. If he missed, Rocco would have to make his putt for a tying par.

Woods cozied his putt up close to the hole — no need to take any chances — and tapped in. Rocco took his time over his par
putt, read it a couple of balls outside right, and gave it a good run. “For one second I thought maybe,” he said. “But then
I could see it was going to go above the hole. I knew then it was over.”

If Woods has one bad habit on the golf course — other than the occasional thrown club — it is that he does not first congratulate
his opponent after the final putt has dropped or not dropped. After one of his victories in the U.S. Amateur — also in sudden
death — he ran to his father while his vanquished opponent stood waiting for him to come and shake hands.

This time he went and hugged Williams first. When he got to Rocco, who was standing and waiting for him, he put out his hand.

“No, I don’t think so,” Rocco said. “I think this calls for a hug.”

Woods got it instantly, and the two men hugged. “Great fight,” Woods said in Rocco’s ear above the cheers raining down on
both of them.

“Thanks,” Rocco said. “You too.”

That was a perfect description of the day. It had been a great fight, the two of them repeatedly knocking each other down
and getting up from a punch to deliver another one. Both were exhausted and exhilarated, Woods by the victory, Rocco by the
battle.

It had been a week that would change both their lives for entirely different reasons. And one that those who watched would
remember for a long, long time.

I
N THE HOUR AFTER HE HUGGED
W
OODS
on the seventh green, Rocco had little chance to even begin to grasp what had happened.

As soon as Rocco missed his final putt, Cindi had made a beeline for Matt, in part because she was looking for comfort, but
also to make certain she didn’t get swallowed by the crowds. There had been very little security of any kind on the sudden-death
hole, since the marshals who had worked the hole earlier in the day were long gone. Fans had spilled into the fairway once
Rocco and Woods made their way onto the green.

“I felt so proud of him for the way he played but also sad about it all,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something
so badly for someone in my life. He was
so
close, played
so
well. Tiger has won how many — fourteen majors? For Rocco there may be other chances, but there may not be. He’s forty-five.
It could happen again, but it might not.”

In fact, had Rocco won, he would have been the oldest Open champion in history, a few months older than Hale Irwin was when
he won the Open — on the 91st hole — in 1990.

The notion that his best chance might have just passed hadn’t hit him as he rode on the cart along with Cindi and Matt back
to the 18th green for the awards ceremony. “I was still pumping adrenaline,” he said. “The whole day and week had been such
a high. The cheers were still ringing in my ears at that moment.”

It was during the awards ceremony that the sadness Cindi felt began to hit him. “I always wanted to be part of that awards
ceremony,” he said. “I’d seen it a million times. I remember standing there when Lee won and thinking how cool the whole thing
was. So there I was, finally a part of it, but they gave Tiger the big trophy. I got a silver medal. It wasn’t what I had
been shooting for. I didn’t even want to touch the trophy. It wasn’t mine; it was his. Touching it, even looking at it, would
have made it even harder.”

He and Woods again went through the gauntlet of media interviews: TV, the interview room, then one-on-one with various national
TV outlets.

Woods was a gracious winner. When he was asked again about struggling through the week on his surgical knee, he talked about
Rocco’s struggles with injuries throughout his career. “I think we saw what kind of player and competitor Rocc is this week,”
he said. “When he’s healthy, he’s a great player.”

Woods was his usual circumspect self when the subject of his immediate future came up. He said he was going to “shut it down
for a while,” adding that he had no idea when he would play again.

British Open? “I hope so,” he said. Had he hurt the knee more by playing? “Maybe,” he said.

He called it his greatest victory ever, which took in a lot of territory. Dealing with the injury, having to make birdie twice
on 18 to stay alive, and the way Rocco had competed combined to make it number one on his lengthy list.

In a sense it was Rocco’s greatest victory too. “If you think about where I was going into the Memorial and where I was when
that day ended, it was pretty amazing,” he said. “I had made no money before Memorial; in fact I was hurting financially with
everything that was going on in my life, and I didn’t know when or if I would find my game again.

“Then I finish sixth at Memorial, make it through the playoff to get into the Open, and go 91 holes head-to-head with the
greatest player alive. I’d say it was a pretty good couple of weeks.”

In truth, he had no idea how good those couple of weeks had been. As he left his golf outing in Michigan, Frank Zoracki’s
cell phone began exploding. People had been calling his office in Greensburg and had gotten his cell number.

“One minute there was a call from Leno’s show, the next Letterman. Then the
Today
show,” he said. “It seemed as if every news outlet in the country was calling. There was no way I could return all the calls
in any kind of timely way. I just did the best I could.”

As he was leaving the interview tent, Rocco was unaware of all this. He knew he had played well, knew how close he had come,
but he didn’t really understand that most of the country had been riveted by the playoff or that the prime-time ratings for
NBC on Sunday had been off the charts. He had no idea that people who knew nothing or almost nothing about golf now knew his
name.

When he had finally done the last of the interviews, he and Cindi drove to the hotel to pack for the trip back to Los Angeles.
The lobby was jammed with people who had watched the playoff, then walked over for a drink or to get something to eat.

“When we walked in the door, someone spotted me and yelled my name,” Rocco said. “Then a few more people. Then it became completely
insane, like I had walked into a pep rally or something. People were just going nuts, clapping and screaming and patting me
on the back. That was when I first realized what was going on. I’d never seen anything quite like that.”

The realization began to hit home even more when he finally had a chance to call Zoracki, who began ticking off the media
requests. “I only gave him the highlights,” Zoracki said. “There wasn’t time to go through all of them and there was no way
he was going to be able to do all of them, even though I knew he’d be willing to try.”

Doing the network morning shows would mean getting up at 3 A.M. on the West Coast, but Rocco knew he couldn’t afford to say
no. Leno wanted him to come on the next night as a surprise guest. That sounded like fun. In fact, a lot of it sounded like
fun.

“I enjoy all of that,” he said. “I like performing and I like talking and I like people, so I’m fine with it most of the time.
Plus, to be honest, I knew there was an opportunity here. I hadn’t exactly been on the front burner in the public’s mind for
a while. I knew that even if I didn’t want to do all of this, I would need to do it. Fortunately, even though I was exhausted,
almost all of it was fun.”

Rocco continued to charm America in all his interviews. He joked about how ridiculously good Woods was, about how amazed he
was that he’d had a chance to beat him. He kept saying the whole thing was “a blast, the most fun I’ve had in my life.”

Woods was long gone from the public eye by Tuesday. Once he finished his interviews on Monday afternoon, he headed straight
to a private plane to go home to Florida. He would not be doing any morning shows or making surprise appearances on Leno.
In fact, the day after the playoff, it was announced that he was going to be “shutting down” for a long time — the rest of
the year.

It turned out that he had been playing on a knee that needed more surgery. He had a torn ACL in his knee and two stress fractures
in his leg. The doctors had told him he could play in the Open but that he might damage the knee further. Regardless, he was
going to need the surgery.

Knowing he was going to be out for a while and knowing he probably had as good a chance to win another Open at Torrey Pines
as any place on earth, Woods had gambled that he could get through 72 holes — or 91 holes, as it turned out — and had won
the gamble. He had hobbled away with the Open trophy, a feeling of amazing satisfaction, and a knee that he hoped surgery
would repair once and for all.

The news that Woods had a torn ACL made his victory even more legendary in the minds of the golfing public. But it would not
have been as special to most had he not been pushed so hard for so long by Rocco.

“If he had won going away, the way he does so often, a lot of people would have said, ‘He’s just that much better than everyone
else that he can still whip everyone even when he’s hurt,’ ” Lee Janzen said. “But the fact that he had to fight his way through
it, play another round even though he was clearly in pain, and battle Rocco right to the finish, well, that just made it an
even bigger deal. It’s hard to imagine that Tiger could become even more larger-than-life than he already was, but this did
it for him. And Rocco was a big part of it.”

All the buzz about Woods and his impending surgery only made people want to hear more from Rocco. His appearance on
The Tonight Show
was a huge highlight. After Leno had gone down the guest list for the evening, he said he had one more guest, a surprise
guest, someone the entire country had been watching over the past several days. When he introduced Rocco, the entire audience
was on its feet, giving Rocco a standing ovation.

“Insane,” he said, repeating his favorite word. “It was completely insane — just like the whole week.”

He did one interview after another, spending the entire day Wednesday in a Los Angeles studio cranking them out, somehow sounding
cheerful and enthusiastic throughout, even though he was hitting a wall.

There was more, though, than just media. Before Rocco and Cindi left the grounds on Monday, Cindi had received a text message
from Tony Renaud, the Skins Game promoter she had talked to at the Memorial. “Where do I send a contract?” the text said.
All of a sudden, Rocco had gone from a likable journeyman to a star who could perhaps save the Skins Game.

Offers to do outings were also pouring in. Because of his personality, Rocco had always done well as a golf celebrity at corporate
outings. Outings are the unseen financial perk that golf pros enjoy. Fees can range from $1,000 a day for someone on the Nationwide
Tour to $5,000 for tour rookies to $250,000 for a Phil Mickelson to well over $1 million on those rare occasions when Woods
might do an outing.

Rocco’s fee was in the $25,000 range, and if he did more than one Monday — outings are almost always on Mondays because pros
are available on most Mondays — in a month, that was a very good month. After the Open, his fee doubled — and occasionally
went higher — and he had offers stacked up well into 2009 and even 2010.

All of that was important because Rocco’s finances had been in tough shape prior to the Open thanks to the divorce, the fact
that the house in Naples still hadn’t sold, and his poor play the first half of the year.

After taking the week off — from golf but not from off-course work — following the Open, Rocco went to Flint, Michigan, to
play in the Buick Open. More insanity.

“I couldn’t move most of the time,” he said. “I did a Tuesday press conference, but everyone in the media wanted their own
‘five minutes’ with me. I had never said no to any of those guys before; I didn’t want to start now. I didn’t want people
to think because I had one great week I was a different guy. So I tried to do everything.”

He had always been popular with golf fans, but now he had gone to a whole new level. No one in the field drew bigger galleries
during the week. No one had more people waiting for autographs when he walked out of the locker room, off the driving range,
or out of the scorer’s tent.

“It just never stopped,” he said. “By the end of the week, for the first time I was starting to feel a little bit tired.”

He played reasonably well, especially given the circumstances, finishing in a tie for 28th place. From there, it was on to
Washington — specifically Congressional Country Club in Bethesda — for what is formally known as the AT&T National Pro-Am
but is called by everyone on tour “the Tiger.”