Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (11 page)

As soon as he heard who he was paired with, Rocco was going to play if he had to be pushed around the golf course in a wheel-chair.
“I had to try to play,” he said. “I mean, Arnold’s last Open, being paired with him? Come on. There was no choice.”

For 27 holes, the back held up and Rocco was on the leader board, only a couple of shots behind leaders Ernie Els and Colin
Montgomerie. But on a steamy, humid day — the temperatures reached record highs that week in Pittsburgh — Rocco felt the back
go again as he, Palmer, and Mahaffey walked to the 10th tee.

The two days had been remarkably emotional. Palmer was cheered every step of the way, every swing, every putt, every tipped
cap. Rocco could see how emotional Palmer was getting as the day wore on and he told himself he had to hang in and at least
finish the round. He wanted to walk up the 18th fairway with Palmer, to be on the green to hear the cheers, and to give him
a hug when he finished. What’s more, he didn’t want to take away from Palmer’s moment by having to leave him to finish in
a twosome with Mahaffey.

So he fought his way through the last nine holes. At the 17th, a short par-four that some players can drive or at least come
very close to the green off the tee, he hit a five-iron.

“Why’d you hit an iron there?” Palmer asked, as they walked down the fairway.

“Because I can’t make a full swing,” Rocco answered through gritted teeth. “I’m just trying to finish.”

Fortunately the 18th hole was playing downwind, and Rocco was able to half-swing a driver and get a five-iron onto the green.
The hole was playing so short that day that Palmer, who had been hitting fairway woods well short of most of the par-fours
all day, was able to reach the green in two.

As the three players began their walk up to the green, Rocco and Mahaffey hung back for a long moment to allow Palmer to walk
onto the green alone. The cheers were absolutely deafening. It seemed as if all thirty thousand spectators on the grounds
were ringing the 18th green. On the 10th tee, a few yards from the green, Strange and the other players in his group stopped
to applaud and to watch as Palmer walked onto the green. He was crying by then, the tears streaming down his face.

Mahaffey and Rocco made sure Palmer was the last one to putt out. “Can you imagine what it would have been like, putting after
Arnold had finished?” Rocco said. “I mean, are you kidding? No way.”

After Palmer holed his last putt, Rocco wrapped his arms around him. Both men were crying by that point. “All of this,” Rocco
said to Palmer, gesturing in the direction of the thousands of people around the green, “is because of you.”

Years later, Palmer remembered that moment and that comment. “I think I said something like, ‘I hope just a little bit of
that is true,’ ” he said. “That was one of my more special moments because of where it was and the way the fans acted, but
also because of what Rocco said on the green after my last putt.”

Rocco was talking about Palmer’s importance to the growth of the game and the fact that his popularity and charisma had taken
the tour from being a minor league sport to a major league sport. Tiger Woods would arrive in 1996 to take golf to another
level, but Palmer had been the Man long before anyone used the phrase.

As he walked off the green, trailing Palmer and the myriad cameras following him, Rocco’s back was killing him. He had managed
to hang on and make the cut, but he wasn’t certain he would be able to play on Saturday, much as he wanted to.

“It was the U.S. Open, for God’s sake,” he said. “You don’t WD [withdraw] from the Open if you can walk. I could walk — it
just hurt like hell when I did.”

He managed to make it around the golf course Saturday but shot 77, feeling pain every time he swung the club. “At best I was
taking a half-swing most of the time. The doctor had told me I wouldn’t make it any worse by playing, but I was beginning
to wonder.”

After he had signed his scorecard, he walked very slowly up the steps to the locker room. There was no air-conditioning in
the Oakmont clubhouse except for one area off the locker room, which had been air-conditioned for the week. It was supposed
to be the players’ dining area, but it had become, for the most part, the players’ cooling-off area, since the rest of the
locker room was as steamy as it was outside.

Rocco walked in, collapsed in a chair, and saw his friend Fuzzy Zoeller sitting a few feet away, also recovering from 18 holes
in the brutal heat. Zoeller, who had been through back surgery several years earlier, looked at the younger man sympathetically.

“You look awful,” he said. “You look worse than I do, and I can barely stand up I’m so tired.”

“I’m in pain, serious pain,” Rocco said. “I can’t play golf like this.”

“You’re right, you can’t,” Zoeller said. “And it isn’t going to get better on its own. It’s going to get worse.”

“What do I do?”

Zoeller shrugged. “You get the surgery done as soon as possible. Get it over with. The sooner you get it done, the sooner
you start getting better.”

Rocco knew he was right. He withdrew from the Open, flew home, and called Dr. Day, asking him how soon he could have surgery
done to repair his bulging disk.

The date for the surgery was July 12, 1994. “Eight o’clock in the morning,” Rocco remembered. “It took about four hours. When
it was over, the doctor came in and said, ‘Now the work begins.’ ”

The immediate aftermath of the surgery was extraordinarily painful. “It took me two days to get out of bed to go to the bathroom,”
he remembered. “I finally got up when the doctor came in and threatened to put a catheter in me if I didn’t get up in the
next five minutes.”

Five days after the surgery, Rocco went home. Then, as the doctor had explained, the work began. “I became a rehab junkie,”
Rocco said, laughing. “As soon as I was able, I was in rehab every morning. I worked for hours and hours. It was a little
bit like when I was a kid and all I did from sunup to sundown was play golf or practice golf. Now, all I did was exercises
to strengthen my back and workouts so I could lose weight. If I wasn’t working out, I was resting to get ready for my next
workout.”

His goal was to come back and play golf at the start of 1995. In September, two months after the surgery, he walked onto his
back porch with a wedge in his hand and decided to try to hit a couple of balls and see what happened.

“First one, I went down,” he said. “I mean, went down. Fortunately I didn’t hurt myself. I really think it was just my balance
— or lack of it. I got up, took a couple more swings, half-swings, really, and I was okay. It was a step. It really felt good
just to have a club in my hand again and hit a golf ball.”

The time at home was enjoyable in one sense — he got to spend some extended time with his family. By then, Nico, a second
son, had been born, and Rocco Jr. was old enough (almost four) to really enjoy seeing his father for weeks at a time instead
of days at a time.

“In truth, that was probably the best year of our marriage,” Linda said. “That’s not to say it wasn’t stressful; it was. I
had to be the positive one all the time even though I was just as scared as he was about whether he was going to be able to
come back or not. I watched him go through that rehab and put in the hours and hours of work, and I was truly amazed. He knew
he had to get in shape, he knew he had to lose weight, and he knew he had to do the rehab on the back. Once he made up his
mind to do it, there wasn’t anything that was going to stop him from doing it.

“The best part, though, was that he was
there
. I think he really enjoyed having that time with his children and I think it strengthened our relationship, because he wasn’t
living out of a suitcase — there one week, gone the next. In many ways, it was a wonderful time in our lives.”

But there was also a good deal of fear. On the day of the surgery, Rocco woke up convinced he would never play again. It took
him a while to get past that feeling.

“I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d be able to play again,” he said. “I don’t mean play as in go out and swing a golf club,
I mean play at the level I’d been at before I got hurt. The margin for error on the PGA Tour is so tiny. I had to deal with
the idea that I might not make it all the way back. When I thought about that, I’d catch myself thinking, ‘I’m thirty-one
years old; I’m married with two young children. If I can’t play golf, what will I do?’ ”

Just as when he finished college and went to Q-School, there was no backup plan.

But he smiled. “Whenever I got to that point, I’d just tell myself, ‘That’s it. Stop thinking that way. You’re going to make
it back. There’s no other option.’ ”

By December he felt good enough to play in a team event in California with Lee Janzen. “We even played okay,” he said. “Won
a couple matches. I still wasn’t 100 percent, but I felt good. I had lost a bunch of weight and I felt stronger. I started
the next year thinking I was just going to keep getting better.

“Except I didn’t.”

The 1995 season was probably the most difficult of Rocco’s career. At times, the back felt okay. At other times, it hurt and
he had a hard time playing at all, much less playing well. It was one step forward, two steps back. He made the cut at the
Players Championship — finishing 55th — but had to take a few weeks off afterward.

“Every time I got to a point where I thought I was turning a corner, the pain would come back,” he said. “It wasn’t anything
as dramatic as when I first hurt it, but it was really hard to play golf. It was frustrating as hell. I called Dr. Day and
said, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing; these things take time.’ But it wasn’t working. I knew I
had to take a break and rest it again. Playing wasn’t doing it any good.”

Since he had won a tournament in 1993, Rocco was exempt through the end of 1995 but not beyond. He had played in only six
tournaments in 1994 and he had played in eighteen in 1995 before deciding he had to stop. The combined twenty-four starts
were fewer than he typically played in a year. Since his Doral victory had earned him a two-year exemption, Rocco thought
he should be entitled to extend his exemption through 1996, making that, in essence, his second year. He decided to take his
case to the tour’s policy board.

“Before they met, I talked to the players on the board and they all told me they thought I was right, that I had a good case,”
he said. “I met with the board at the Western Open [in late June] and explained that my injury had basically cost me a year
of my two-year exemption. They listened and said they would let me know.”

The policy board has nine members — four players, four businessmen who are tour sponsors in some way and are handpicked by
the commissioner, and the president of the PGA of America. Many players don’t like this system because it means if there is
an issue in which the players oppose the commissioner, the four players can be outvoted by the five nonplayers.

This wasn’t one of those issues. The vote was unanimous — to deny Rocco’s request for an extension. The board’s reasoning
was simple: There were rules in place that allowed an injured player to receive a medical exemption, but not for an entire
year — unless he didn’t play at all for an entire year. Rocco had played in eighteen tournaments in 1995. Since he had played
in twenty-four tournaments in 1993, his last healthy year, he would be given a six-tournament exemption at the start of 1996.

He had made $105,618 in the tournaments he had played in 1995. At year’s end, the 125th-ranked player on the money list would
earn slightly more than $142,000. That meant, under the tour’s rules, that Rocco would have six tournaments to earn enough
to exceed the difference. If he did, he was exempt for the rest of the year. If not, he would be a nonexempt player who would
have to hope tournament directors would give him sponsor exemptions.

It was Commissioner Tim Finchem who walked out to the range, where Rocco was chatting with friends, to give him the news that
his request had been turned down. “I knew he wasn’t going to be happy,” he said. “I’m the commissioner. It was my job to tell
him and explain to him why we really didn’t have the option to give him anything more than what the rules for medical exemptions
allowed.”

He never really got the chance to explain. “He got about as far as ‘The vote was nine-zero against you’ before I exploded,”
Rocco remembered, shaking his head at the memory. “I just went nuts, screaming at him, telling him what I thought of the decision
and what I thought of him. I was over the line — out of line — but I was really hot. I had no idea what kind of shape my back
was going to be in at the start of the next year. To be honest, I was scared because who knew if I would be able to play well
at the start of the year? I hadn’t played very much good golf since the surgery, so there wasn’t really reason to have much
confidence at that point.

“Even so, the way I spoke to him was wrong. I knew it as soon as he walked away.”

Rocco flew home from Chicago the next morning. A couple of days later, he called Finchem’s office and asked if he could come
by to see the commissioner. “I walked in and told him I was sorry for the way I’d behaved on the range,” he said. “I said
I still disagreed with the decision, but that was no excuse for my behavior. He was cool about it. He said he understood and
there were no hard feelings.”

The rest of the year was spent back at the rehab drawing board. “I really didn’t play at all for months,” Rocco said. “I was
just working to try to make the back stronger, doing the exercises the doctor had given me. I was losing weight, getting into
really good shape again. It was almost like right after the surgery. I started hitting some balls and playing again a little
bit in the fall. I wanted to come out of the box ready to play because I knew I only had six events to make my money.”

He decided to start his season in Phoenix, a tournament he had always liked on a golf course — the TPC of Scottsdale — he
liked. “I felt good physically and mentally going in there. The back felt strong. I’d hit a lot of golf balls and felt ready.
I knew I had to make, like, $40,000 [actually a little more than $37,000] and I wanted to do it as quickly as I could just
to get that pressure off my back — so to speak.”