Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (34 page)

Which was good, because Rocco was so stunned, he let loose with “Oh, my f —— God” after dropping his head in disbelief when
the putt went in.

As tense as the situation had just become for him, even Woods couldn’t suppress a small smile. “I couldn’t believe it when
it went in,” he said. “Neither could he. I can’t repeat here what he said when he realized he’d made it.”

Now, suddenly, Woods had to make his putt to stay even. He went for it just as Rocco had, but it veered inches wide of the
hole and didn’t stop until it had rolled a good four feet past the hole. Shockingly, Woods had to make a true “throw-up zone”
putt (as in, when a player sees he has that much left he wants to throw up) or he would be two shots down with three holes
to play.

“I looked at it and said, ‘Well, here’s the tournament. If I miss this putt, the tournament is over. I make this putt, I can
still win in regulation. Here we go. Get it done.’ ”

And, as he always seems to do when there’s no choice in the matter, Woods made the putt. Even so, Rocco led by one. He had
birdied three holes in a row under the most incredible pressure imaginable. He had gone from three strokes down on the 11th
tee to one up on the 16th tee.

Even Woods, who has done just about everything that can be done on a golf course, said, “That hat trick [the three birdies]
was one of the more impressive things I’ve ever seen on a golf course. For all of his talking, Rocc gets himself into a nice
little zone when it’s time to get over the ball. He talks and talks and then he goes into that zone, hits his shot, and then
it’s blah-blah-blah all over again. It’s actually kind of cool to see.” Or, as Paul Azinger had said in a text to Cindi earlier
in the day, “The world is about to learn our little secret; the boy can play!”

The tension was now officially unbearable. The crowd had been riding along, perfectly happy to see Woods win, but when Rocco
turned things around so emphatically and so quickly, they began to sense that they were witnessing one of the great golf duels
— and perhaps one of the great golf upsets — in history.

“You could tell,” Cindi said later. “It wasn’t that anyone was rooting against Tiger. It was that Rocco had won them over.”

That was exactly right. The great TV director Frank Chirkinian, who produced Masters telecasts for CBS for almost forty years,
once made the point that golf may be the only sport on earth where neutral fans root for the stars and against the underdogs.

“They don’t mind seeing the little guy compete with their heroes,” he said. “But in the end, they want their hero to win.”

That had almost always been the case with Woods. Most fans liked to see him win, liked to see him pull off unthinkable shots
and comebacks. Now, though, it was Rocco who was trying to pull off the unthinkable, and many, if not most, who were watching
wanted to see it happen. Early in the day the roars had been equally loud for both players. By the time they walked to the
16th tee, the Rocco roars were almost drowning out the Tiger roars.

Both players made par on the par-three 16th. For a split second it looked as if Woods’s 30-foot birdie putt was going to go
in, but it stopped a couple of rolls short of the hole. “Thought I’d made it,” he said.

Rocco was now two holes from winning the U.S. Open. In the back of his mind was the memory of Sunday, especially knowing that
Woods would have the advantage again on the par-five 18th. “I had almost birdied seventeen on Sunday,” he said. “The thought
occurred to me that if I could birdie it now, it would be almost impossible for him to beat me.”

That thought occurred to Woods too. He hit a solid second shot to inside 20 feet, and after Rocco’s 35-footer had gone wide,
he again hit a near-perfect putt. But it came up just short. Both players tapped in for par.

They were now exactly where they had been a day earlier: one hole to play, Rocco leading by one. The only difference was that
they were playing together rather than one group apart.

In Rocco’s mind, he needed a birdie to win the championship. He knew that if Woods found the fairway with his drive, he would
probably have an iron in his hands for his second shot. Rocco had been able to go for the green only once all week — on Friday
— and that had been with a three-wood after he had crushed his drive. For the week, Woods was driving the ball almost exactly
40 yards past him on the holes where the USGA measured for length off the tee.

“I knew, just like on the other days, I was going to have to really rip one to get it out there where I could go for the green,”
Rocco said. “So I went for it, swung hard. I hit the ball right on the center of the club, caught it just about perfect. But
I hit it a few yards left of where I was aiming. I was trying to start it out down the right side and have it drift back to
the middle and bounce to the left side of the fairway. I started it out right in the middle; it drifted to the left side and
bounced into the bunker. That eliminated any questions about going for the green.”

Woods, knowing he probably couldn’t afford to miss the fair-way the way he had on Sunday, crushed his drive. “I was actually
thinking eagle to win,” he said. “But I wanted to make sure I at least made four, because after Rocco’s drive I knew there
was a good chance that would at least keep me alive.”

The drive was Woods’s best of the day, one of his best of the week. It flew 320 yards and left him with 217 yards to the hole
— a four-iron shot for him.

Rocco hit a good second shot, laying up to almost exactly 100 yards. The flag was deeper on the green than it had been Sunday,
19 yards from the front edge and six feet from the right edge. That meant he had a little more room to work with.

Woods’s second shot was a dart that landed in the middle of the green and rolled to a stop 35 feet from the hole. Rocco was
now certain he had to make birdie to have a chance to win.

“Even with the flag back a little, I just couldn’t play it too cozy,” he said. “I didn’t hit a bad shot; it just had no chance
to check up.”

The ball hit just below the pin but spun left, leaving him with 18 feet for birdie.

As the two players walked up to the green, the crowd noise was so loud that even walking right next to each other, neither
could hear the other one speak. Rocco was going on about how the whole thing was “insane,” but Woods couldn’t hear a word
he was saying.

“If I had shouted right in his ear at that moment, I don’t think he would have heard me,” Rocco said. “It was that crazy.”

It got quiet again as they lined up their putts. Knowing Woods’s penchant for doing undoable things, Rocco realized that he
might have to make his birdie putt to
tie
. As soon as he saw the ball come off Woods’s putter, he knew that wasn’t going to be the case. It was low all the way and
went about four feet past the hole.

Now Rocco’s birdie putt was to win the U.S. Open championship.

“Every kid who has ever played golf has dreamed that moment,” Rocco said. “Make this putt, win the U.S. Open. I’d dreamed
it a million times. Now it was real, right there. I told myself, ‘Whatever you do, don’t you dare leave it short. Give yourself
a chance.’ ”

He didn’t leave it short. But the putt was left of the hole all the way and didn’t take the break to the right Rocco thought
it might when it got to the hole. When he walked down to mark, he was somewhat stunned to see he had a good three feet left.
“On that green, it was anything but a tap-in,” he said.

Woods’s birdie putt was actually a tad longer. After talking it over at length with Williams, he calmly knocked it into the
center of the hole. “I just couldn’t get a read on it; I couldn’t see anything. I asked Stevie what he thought [unusual; Woods
usually reads his own putts], and he couldn’t see anything either. So I played it dead straight and put a little bit more
on it to make sure it didn’t take some kind of break.”

It hit the back of the hole solidly, never straying an inch.

Now Rocco had to make his putt for par to keep the match going. A miss, and Woods would win by a shot.

“I said to Matt, ‘I’m not even going to read anything into this putt; I just have to make it,’ ” he said. “It was really a
matter of making sure I didn’t baby it and put break into it. I was probably more nervous over that putt than any I had all
week. Three-putting the last green for bogey would have been a horrible way to lose. I just had to get that putt in the hole.”

He did, looking calm, even if he wasn’t. After 18 holes, they were still tied: Both men had shot even-par 71. After 90 holes,
they were also tied, each of them still one under par. For all the USGA’s talk about the fairness of an 18-hole playoff and
the unfairness — “flukiness,” as Fay called it — of sudden death, the championship would be decided in sudden death.

Before that, though, there were a couple of things that had to be done. For one, both players had to sign their scorecards.
“It was a stroke play round, so they had to add up their scores and sign their cards to make it official,” Mike Davis said.
“We hadn’t really thought about what would happen if they tied.”

The scoring area was a long way off, in the clubhouse. What’s more, there was no one there. So the two players sat down on
the fringe of the green, added up their scores, and signed their cards.

The next step was to get them back to the seventh tee, which was where the playoff to decide the playoff would begin. The
USGA had carts waiting. Rocco was ready first and he hopped into one of them and headed for the seventh tee, which wasn’t
very far from the 18th green, one of the reasons the USGA had selected it as the place to begin sudden death if it was needed.

He was on his way to the tee, when Woods finished his card and said to Mike Davis, “I need to go to the bathroom.”

Uh-oh. The USGA hadn’t really thought about that either. The locker room was a hike from the 18th green. The public porta-johns
nearby would be jammed, and to get Woods to and from one would be chaotic. Davis jumped on his walkie-talkie and, fairly desperately,
said, “Anyone have an idea where I can take Tiger to go to the bathroom?”

David Fay was listening up in the NBC booth. He grabbed his walkie-talkie and responded. “You’re only a few yards from the
NBC tower,” he said. “There’s a porta-john there at the bottom of the stairs. Use that.”

Brilliant solution. Davis had one other concern. The porta-john was convenient and private, since it was inside the ropes,
but it was still, well, a porta-john.

“Tiger,” Davis said gingerly, “are we talking number one or number two?”

Woods laughed. “Number one,” he said.

Davis breathed a sigh of relief and escorted Woods to the NBC tower. Both men were feeling better when Woods and Steve Williams
were carted out to the seventh tee, where Rocco was waiting.

The seventh was not an ideal hole for Rocco to play sudden death. It is a 461-yard dogleg right. Woods could hit a high cut
off the tee, aim at the corner, and shorten the hole considerably. Rocco can play an occasional cut, but his shot is the high
draw, meaning the hole didn’t set up well at all for him.

“I’d been hitting a big hook off the tee all week,” he said. “Start it out right and have it come back to the center of the
fairway as close to the dogleg as possible. I pulled it off a couple days, but I also landed in the first cut a couple times
and in the left-hand bunker. It wasn’t a good driving hole for me.”

So much so that Mike Davis actually got angry e-mails and letters from people claiming the USGA had chosen number seven as
the playoff hole because it wanted Woods to win. But the playoff hole had been decided on the previous Wednesday.

“Our thinking was twofold,” Davis said. “First, it was close to the clubhouse and the 18th green, which would make it easy
to get the players back there and relatively easy for fans to walk over there to watch, since they’d have a few minutes in
between. Second, seven-eight-nine are a par-four, a par-three, and a par-five. We liked having three different pars on the
first three holes if it went that far. The last thing we were thinking when we made the decision was who might be in a sudden-death
playoff.”

Woods, hitting first after his birdie at the 18th, hit a perfect shot, cutting the dogleg, the ball rolling to a halt just
in the fair-way on the right side, leaving him with a relatively simple shot to the green. Rocco tried to hit his high hook
again but — a little bit like at 18 — started it too far left. This time, though, he was way left, and the ball hopped into
a bunker to the left of the fairway.

“Right away,” he said, “I knew I was in trouble.”

He knew he was in bigger trouble when he got to the ball and saw that it was in the front of the bunker, almost up against
the lip, meaning he had virtually no chance to get the ball over the lip and still get it to the green. He had to give it
a try, though, because he knew the likelihood that Woods was going to make anything worse than par was slim.

“I swung really hard and just flipped it,” he said. “That’s why the ball went so far left.”

It was
way
left, up against the grandstand, short and to the left of the green. Woods, seeing where Rocco was, didn’t try anything fancy,
hitting a nine-iron safely onto the front of the green, leaving himself about 20 feet for birdie.

Because the grandstand was an artificial, immovable hazard, Rocco was entitled to relief. The grass in that area was so thick
that the USGA had marked off a drop circle for any player who had to take a drop away from the grandstand. Davis showed Rocco
the drop circle after he had picked up his ball. He walked over to it, held his arm up as the rules prescribe, and dropped
the ball.

It landed in the circle, but the ground was hard enough that it hopped a little bit and rolled outside the circle. Instinctively,
seeing the ball leave the circle, Rocco bent over to pick up the ball and drop again. Fortunately for everyone, Davis had
not turned away but was looking right at Rocco at that moment.