Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (20 page)

“You’re going to be just fine,” Cindi told him when it became apparent he was going to be part of a playoff.

“I was exhausted at that point and angry with myself for putting myself in such a hole in the morning,” Rocco said. “It was
eight o’clock by the time we teed off [since Ohio is on the western edge of the eastern time zone, there is light in early
June until after nine o’clock], and when I looked around I realized I was ten years older than everyone else in the playoff
except for Tom Pernice.

“They put me in the second group — five guys went off first, and then the six of us went off after them. After we’d hit our
tee shots, I waved at the other guys as we walked off the tee and said, ‘Come on, children, let’s see if we can get this thing
finished before your bedtimes.’ ”

As the six-some headed down the 10th fairway at the Scarlet, word filtered back from the green that no one in the first group
had made a birdie. That meant anyone who birdied in the second group would be in the Open.

“I had hit a good drive,” Rocco said. “There was a big bunker about 290 yards out on the left side of the fairway. The young
guys just blasted their drivers right over it. I had no chance to do that, so I just played away from the bunker and kept
my ball in the fairway. The other guys were so far ahead of me I could barely see them when I got to my ball.”

Even though Rocco’s ball was well back from the others, he actually had an advantage because he was on flat ground. “Over
the bunker the fairway dips down and then goes back up to the green,” he said. “From where I was, I had a flat lie
and
I could see the flag. A lot of them were on downhill lies or sidehill lies and they were so far below the green they couldn’t
see the target nearly as well as I could.

“I just checked it off to the wisdom of age.”

Regardless of the reason, Rocco found himself with a nine-iron in his hands and a shot he felt very comfortable trying to
hit. “I said to Matt, ‘Boy, are these guys in for a shock when I knock this to three feet,’ ” he said. “I hit a nice little
cut and it felt absolutely perfect coming off my club.”

He was a foot off on his prediction — the ball settled four feet from the flag. No one else in the group got to inside twenty-five
feet. One of the five, Justin Hicks, holed his birdie putt, meaning he was going to San Diego. By the time Rocco got over
his putt, it looked more like forty feet than four. “It occurred to me that I’d played 37 holes and worked my ass off all
day to get to this moment and I better not blow it,” he said. “I hadn’t been in position to make a putt that was that important
in a long time. My heart rate was definitely up. I could feel it. My hands may have been shaking; I’m not sure. Fortunately,
I didn’t overthink it; I just told myself it was going in and it did.”

It was 8:30 in the evening, and the shadows were getting longer by the minute. There were maybe fifty people standing around
the green watching, and for a moment, Rocco couldn’t find Cindi, who had been hanging back, too nervous to get close at that
moment. When he did spot her, he felt as if he had won the Open rather than simply qualifying to play in it.

“She had this huge smile of satisfaction on her face,” he said. “I walked over to her and said, ‘You were right.’

“She just said, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of you right now.’ I told her she should be proud of
us
. It was one of the cooler moments I can remember having in a long time.”

Rocco’s qualifying to play in his thirteenth Open hardly drew any notice in the golf world. The USGA puts out a blog each
year chronicling interesting stories about those who come through qualifying to make the Open. There are stories about the
youngest player to qualify, the oldest player to qualify, relatives of famous players who qualify, amateurs who qualify, and
occasionally about women who try to qualify, like Michelle Wie in 2006. There was no mention at all of a sore-backed forty-five
year old who had made his first Open as a twenty-one-year-old amateur in 1984 returning twenty-four years later after failing
to make the field the previous year.

Qualifiers are often a factor at the Open, since very good players often have to go through them. Previous Open champions
frequently have to qualify because the Open only gives champions a ten-year exemption. Arnold Palmer played in Open qualifying
seven times late in his career. The other three majors are far more generous: British Open and PGA champions are exempt until
they are sixty-five, and Masters champions are exempt for life.

The last qualifier to win the Open was Michael Campbell in 2005. Campbell almost overslept on the morning of his qualifier
but was rousted out of bed by his wife. Two weeks later, he out-dueled Tiger Woods down the stretch at Pinehurst to win the
Open. In 1996, Steve Jones survived a playoff at his qualifier and then beat Tom Lehman and Davis Love III over the last few
holes at Oakland Hills to become an Open champion.

Rocco was well aware of both Jones and Campbell. But he wasn’t really thinking in those terms as he left the golf course on
the night of June 2.

“After I hurt my back in ’94 and had to withdraw, I didn’t make the Open the next four years,” Rocco said. “That really hurt
because I love the event so much. With all the talk from Cindi and Frank and others about how I was going to qualify, it occurred
to me that, at forty-five, I might not have that many chances left to play in the Open. It certainly doesn’t get any easier
as you get older. I was thrilled to be back. Torrey Pines had never been my favorite golf course, but that didn’t matter.
I was in the Open. At that moment when the birdie putt went in, that was as good a feeling as I’d had in the game in years.

“I was psyched to get out there and to play. I couldn’t wait. I had a feeling it was going to be a fun week.”

T
ORREY
P
INES
C
OUNTRY
C
LUB IS IN
L
A
J
OLLA
, California, several miles north of downtown San Diego, a few miles off I-5 if you are driving north to Los Angeles or south
into San Diego.

It has hosted what was initially known as the San Diego Open since 1968. The event was first played in 1952 and had six different
homes before it settled at Torrey Pines. By then it was known as the Andy Williams–San Diego Invitational. In those days,
the tour frequently asked celebrities to lend their name to tournaments to add glamour to them. Bing Crosby created the first
celebrity tournament in 1937, and Bob Hope added his name to the Palm Springs Golf Classic in 1965.

That opened the celebrity floodgates. Over the next few years, Jackie Gleason, Sammy Davis Jr., Glen Campbell, Danny Thomas,
Ed McMahon, and Williams all lent their names to PGA Tour events. With the corporate takeover of the tour, only Hope’s name
survives on a tournament masthead, and his event is now known as the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. Recently, Justin Timberlake
added his name to the tournament in Las Vegas, bucking the trend of the past thirty years.

San Diego has been through four corporate title sponsors since 1981 and has been known as the Buick Invitational since 1992.
Four corporate sponsors in twenty-eight years is not at all atypical in this day and age. The event now known as the BMW Classic
has had seven different title sponsors since 1987.

Torrey Pines is a municipal facility, owned by San Diego County. It has two golf courses — north and south — but it is the
south that has always been its signature. Both golf courses are used during the Buick Invitational. Players play one round
on the south and one round on the north before playing the weekend rounds on the south after the cut has been made. In 1968,
Torrey Pines South played at 7,021 yards from the back tees. Forty years later, by the time Tiger Woods won the Buick Invitational
for the sixth time in January of 2008, it had been lengthened to 7,568 yards. Its official length for the Open would be 7,643
yards — 379 yards longer than any previous Open course.

Woods, who grew up outside Los Angeles, played Torrey Pines frequently as a kid and played in a number of important amateur
events there as a teenager. His familiarity with the golf course and the deal he had with Buick, which paid him about $7 million
a year until the troubled car manufacturer canceled it in 2009, were the reasons he always played the Buick Invitational.

It wasn’t until 2001 that the idea that Torrey Pines could host a U.S. Open first became a serious notion in anyone’s mind.
After the USGA had awarded the 2002 Open to Bethpage Black, making it the first municipally owned golf course to host an Open,
members of the Century Club, which operates Torrey Pines, began to wonder if they could do the same thing.

“They came to us and said they were going to have Rees [Jones] do a redesign, and they wanted to know if we would consider
awarding them an Open,” said USGA executive director David Fay, who had spearheaded the move to play the Open at Bethpage.
“We told them we would of course consider it, but we didn’t make any guarantees. To their credit, they were willing to go
out and spend the money without being promised anything in return.”

Rees Jones, the son of famed golf course designer Robert Trent Jones, has become known in recent years as “the Open Doctor.”
If a golf course wants to apply to host an Open, or if it wants to prepare for an Open after being awarded one, Jones is the
architect usually brought in to do the work. Torrey Pines was the eighth redesign he did with an Open in mind. His first redesign
for an Open course was at the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1988. Fay had asked Jones to do the redesign at
Bethpage Black as part of his plan to bring the Open there.

“Bethpage Black was a different situation, though,” Fay said. “The deal we made with the State of New York was different than
anything we’d ever done before. Bethpage was a great golf course in poor condition. We agreed to pay to both redesign it and
get it into great shape again as the rental fee for 2002. Rees did the redesign of Bethpage for nothing because I told him
it was the right thing to do and because he knew he’d get a lot of positive publicity out of it. In San Diego, they paid Rees
to do the work before we committed to anything.”

What was working in Torrey Pines’s favor was the well-known fact that Fay very much wanted to continue the new trend of awarding
the Open to municipal golf courses. The fact that there was a second golf course on the property that could be used for things
like corporate tents and parking and the USGA’s massive souvenir tent also factored in Torrey Pines’s favor.

Working against it was the fact that it already hosted a PGA Tour event. Generally, in picking golf courses, neither the USGA
nor the PGA likes to go to golf courses that have an annual tour event. “But there was precedent because of Pebble Beach,”
Fay said. “We’d played at Pebble four times in the past after the tour event there. It also helped that the conditions in
June would be very different than in January.”

And so it was that Torrey Pines was awarded the ’08 Open late in 2002. The announcement was greeted with mixed enthusiasm
in the golf world. Everyone understood the idea of going to another municipal course. But Torrey Pines didn’t have the same
cachet as Bethpage Black.

“Most of us had never played Bethpage when it was awarded,” said longtime tour player Paul Goydos, who had grown up playing
on a municipal course in Long Beach, California. “But we knew
of
it. We knew its reputation, and when we got there it more than lived up to that reputation. Torrey Pines is an okay golf
course, but I don’t think anyone would put it in the same category as Bethpage.”

The USGA was well aware of that fact. “We all knew that Torrey Pines didn’t appear on any list of the top hundred golf courses
in the country,” said Mike Davis, who would be responsible for setting up the golf course before the championship began. “But
we also thought it had a lot of things going for it: We need more West Coast venues — among other things it is great for TV
because we can finish so much later. It’s very scenic, with all the water that is around it. And we thought with the Rees
redesign and some time to put our stamp on it, we could make it a golf course the players would enjoy playing an Open on.
At least we hoped so. I’d be lying if I told you any of us thought it was a slam dunk.”

The Jones redesign lengthened the golf course by about four hundred yards and added a number of wrinkles to it. Most players
liked the changes, although some thought the course had been stretched out too much — as is frequently the case these days
with Open layouts.

One person who had never been crazy about Torrey Pines was Rocco. “I had just never played well there,” he said. “I’m not
even sure I can tell you why, but I hadn’t. I was hoping that it would play harder and faster in June than in January and
that the USGA’s setup would benefit me. Their emphasis is always on making guys keep the ball in the fairway, and that usually
works well for me.”

In truth, the USGA’s demand that players keep the ball in the fairway had changed somewhat. Davis had taken over most of the
course setup responsibilities from Tom Meeks in 2005. Meeks, with the approval of Fay and the USGA board, had always taken
the approach that a hazard was a hazard, and that included both the rough and the bunkers.

At most PGA Tour events, if a player barely misses a fairway, he will more often than not have a lie that allows him to get
his club solidly on the ball and, often as not, put spin on it when it lands on the green. At a lot of tour courses, the bunkers
are so smooth and so perfect that players barely notice that they’re dealing with sand at all.

That’s never been so at the Open. Some bunkers provide relatively simple shots; others can be close to impossible. When Tim
Morgahan was the USGA’s agronomist, his answer when players complained to him about the quality of the bunkers was simple:
“If you don’t hit your ball in there, you won’t have a problem. They
are
supposed to be hazards, aren’t they?”