Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (5 page)

When he isn’t insisting that his handicap was a thousand, Rocco will concede that he was probably a five or a six by the time
he was a senior. Even so, he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do when he graduated from high school. His grades
were uniformly mediocre: He was the classic student who was smart enough to do well in school but never cared enough to do
more than get by, and he wasn’t a good enough golfer to turn the heads of college recruiters.

Cutrell was the best player in the Greensburg group, and he decided to go to Wake Forest, which had one of the top college
golf teams in the country. Lucas was two years younger than the others, so he didn’t need to make a decision on his future
in the spring of 1980. He would end up playing golf at Penn State two years later and going on to law school.

At some point during his last semester of high school in 1980, Rocco decided the best thing for him to do was to attend college
someplace and try to walk onto the golf team. His mother began to research schools and finally came up with California University,
a small school in California, Pennsylvania, about an hour west of Greensburg. As an in-state student who had been the number
one player on his high school golf team, Rocco was able to get in.

“They actually had a pretty decent golf team,” he said. “One of the guys on the team was Todd Silvis, who was the son of the
first pro [Bill Silvis] I had taken lessons from as a kid. So I knew they had some good players, which meant that I probably
wouldn’t be good enough to make the team. That was the reason I wanted to go to college — to play golf. I knew I had to get
better if I wanted to do that.”

As he often did, Rocco turned to his father for help. The relationship between Tony and Donna Mediate and their oldest son
is often volatile. All three are emotional people who do not hold back their opinions on any issue. They get angry with one
another often, but there isn’t any doubt about how much they love one another. Rocco often says he gets his athletic competitiveness
from his dad and his toughness from his mom, and they both appreciated his work ethic.

“Rocco wanted to get better,” Tony Mediate said. “He had certainly proven his desire with the time he had put in. I had heard
about Bob Toski’s golf schools in North Carolina, so I called down there to see if I could get him in. They were completely
full, not a spot to be had. I can’t remember who I talked to on the phone, but when I said I was calling from Greensburg,
Pennsylvania, whoever it was said to me, ‘There’s a very good teacher not far from you named Jim Ferree. You might give him
a call.’ ”

Ferree had learned the game from his dad, who had been a teaching pro, first at Pinehurst, later at Old Town Country Club
in Winston-Salem. He had played college golf at the University of North Carolina and had gone on to a very solid pro career,
spending eleven years on the PGA Tour — winning once at the Vancouver Open. Like a lot of pros in the ’60s, he tired of traveling
all the time while playing for relatively small purses. When he was offered a job at Westmoreland Country Club in Export,
Pennsylvania, in 1970, he accepted it.

“I was lucky because when I was in college I had gotten to know Jim Flick — he was at Wake while I was at Carolina,” Ferree
said. “Jim was working with Bob Toski in North Carolina at the Golf Digest teaching schools and they invited me down. Most
of what I learned about teaching the golf swing came from them.”

It was the Toski-Flick connection that recommended Ferree to Tony Mediate. Westmoreland was only about twenty minutes from
Greensburg. By then Ferree had enough of a reputation as a teacher that he was able to charge $50 an hour. That sounded like
a fortune to Tony, but he knew it was what his son wanted. So, as a graduation present, he told Rocco he was taking him to
Ferree and they would see how it went.

Rocco and Tony have different memories of that first lesson. Tony and Ferree stood behind Rocco while he hit some balls for
his new teacher. “I remember Jim didn’t say a word for about twenty minutes,” Tony said. “Rocco just hit one ball after another.
I was standing there thinking, ‘Well, that’s fifty bucks wasted; he’s never going to say a word.’ ”

Rocco thinks it just felt that long to his dad because he could hear the meter running inside his head. “I don’t think I hit
ten balls before Mr. Ferree said something. I remember exactly what he said: ‘Son, the first thing we’re going to work on
is that grip.’ ”

Ferree remembers that part vividly. “I told him his grip looked like two crabs fighting on a stick,” he said, laughing. “It
was amazing he could hit the ball at all with that grip. I spent the rest of that lesson just trying to get his hands on the
club in the proper way. I told him for the next week he shouldn’t hit anything longer than a chip shot, because I knew, with
the new grip, if he tried to hit anything involving any distance he wouldn’t like what he saw and he’d revert to the old grip.”

When the lesson was over, Rocco’s first question to his father was “When can I go back?” Tony told him he could go once a
week if he wanted to for the rest of the summer. Rocco loved the idea, and he spent the next week working on nothing but the
grip.

“When he sat down to watch TV, he took a club and sat there with his hands on it in the proper position,” Tony said. “He was
going to get it right.”

A week later, they returned to Ferree. “I figured he’d be back to the old grip or something like it,” Ferree said. “Usually,
you show a kid something new like that, it’s going to take them a while to get it. Rocco walked on the range and he had the
grip
down
. I mean, it was perfect. Every shot, every swing. I was impressed. That told me two things: He was really serious about working
on his game, and he had a knack for it.”

Ferree was teaching some very good players at the time. John Aber, a friend of Rocco’s from Greensburg who is now the pro
at Allegheny Country Club, was working with him and so was Missie Berteotti, who went on to play on the LPGA Tour. There were
other top junior players too.

“Rocco was well behind them when he started,” Ferree said. “But it wasn’t long before he started to catch up. He had excellent
hands and a very good eye. When I showed him something, he could pretty much imitate what I was doing right away. That’s what
we did a lot: I swung the club the way I wanted him to swing it, and then he swung the club. He got better very fast.”

Within two weeks of starting with Ferree, Rocco decided once a week wasn’t enough. He wanted to go twice a week. Then three
times a week and finally, by summer’s end, he was making the drive four days a week.

“The way I looked at it was it would have cost me a thousand dollars for a week if he had gone to Toski’s camp,” Tony said.
“He probably took about twenty lessons that summer, so I pretty much broke even.”

By the time he went off to college, Rocco felt like a completely different player. He had seen a noticeable change in the
way he hit the ball and he felt a lot more confident in his ability to create shots on the course. Rocco arrived at California
University, which was a small teachers’ college, with one goal: to make the golf team. He tried out for the team that fall
and was clearly one of the better players. Coach Floyd Shuler gave him a spot on the team and told him he would be playing
someplace in the middle of the lineup. “I was maybe number three or number four,” he said. “Nothing special, but good enough
as far as I was concerned. I was happy.”

He became less happy after an incident that took place one night during the winter of his first year. He was sound asleep
in his dorm room at about two o’clock in the morning, when he heard what he initially thought was some kind of explosion.
“It was the door being kicked open and broken off the hinges,” he said. “I thought I was dreaming or something.”

He wasn’t. Into the room came four of his teammates, including his boyhood buddy from Greensburg, Todd Silvis. They told him
he was about to be put through his official hazing as a new member of the golf team. “I was sleeping in a T-shirt and sweats,”
he said. “At first they were going to drag me out of there dressed like that. They finally let me put some Docksiders on my
feet.”

He was dragged into a frigid night, tied up, blindfolded, and tossed in the backseat of a car. “The blindfold was kind of
pointless: I knew who they all were,” he said. “One of the guys had some kind of knife. It was in a sheath, but he kept poking
me in the ribs with it just for yuks. We probably drove for twenty or thirty minutes. It felt like four or five hours to me.
Finally, they just stopped, took the blindfold off, kicked me out of the car, and left me standing there in the middle of
nowhere. It was twenty-five degrees — at most — and I’m wearing a T-shirt.

“I just started walking. I came up a hill and I saw some lights and I figured that was the town of California, so I started
walking in that direction. At one point I came to a farmhouse with a light and I thought maybe someone might let me in to
warm up or call someone to come and get me. I got about a hundred yards from the house and this huge dog came charging at
me. I ran as fast as I could and had to jump a fence to get away from him. I made it, but I cut myself as I was going over
and I tore off this necklace my mom had given me when I graduated from high school that said ‘Golf Nut’ on it. When I realized
I’d lost it, I spent a while crawling around in the mud and the dark trying to find it, while the dog kept barking at me from
the other side of the fence.

“The whole thing was surreal.”

He finally made it back to campus at about 7:30 in the morning, bleeding and freezing and scared, but more than anything angry
— angrier than he had ever been in his life. He went directly to Coach Shuler’s office and waited for him to come in to work.

“When he walked in, he looked at me and said, ‘What in the world happened to you?’ I said, ‘I’m going to tell you and then
you’re going to get those sons of bitches over here right now,’ I was
so
angry. I told him if he didn’t do something about it I was going to call my uncle Joe back home and he’d do something about
it. Uncle Joe isn’t Mafia or anything crazy like that, but if he and my dad had heard about it back then there would have
been hell to pay. I made sure Coach Shuler understood that.”

Whatever Shuler understood, he called the four players into his office. Apologies were made. It was agreed they had gone much
too far with the hazing and they promised never to bother Rocco again. But there was nothing they could say that was going
to change the way Rocco felt about them from that point on.

“I was done with them and really done with the school from that day forward,” he said. “I couldn’t get past what they’d done
to me. To this day, I’m not sure why they did it. They never did anything like that to any of the other freshmen. Maybe it
was because I’d walked on the team and they felt like I was taking somebody’s spot. I’m really not sure.

“But I knew I couldn’t stay there. I just had to find a way to get out. And a place to go. I was looking for someplace to
go from that day forward. I wanted out. I just had to find the right exit door.”

I
F THE HAZING INCIDENT WAS
the beginning of the end for Rocco at California University, his new beginning came that spring at the NCAA Division 2 national
championships.

Even though he wasn’t happy with his teammates, Rocco played well enough to qualify for the 1981 nationals, which were held
that year outside Hartford, Connecticut. As luck would have it, he was paired with a player named Tom Patri, who was the number
one player for Florida Southern College. Patri would go on to win the individual title that year, and Florida Southern ran
away with the team title.

Rocco was impressed — with Patri and with the way Coach Charlie Matlock’s team approached the tournament. “They were so locked
in on what they were doing and what they wanted to accomplish. They were so much better than everyone else it was a joke.
We were just happy to be playing. We’d go out every night, have a big dinner, and have a good time. They were there to compete
and to win. Plus, they all seemed like good guys.”

Most of the time, athletes are recruited by colleges. In the case of Rocco and Florida Southern, it was the other way around.

“He walked up to me on the range, introduced himself, and just started talking,” Matlock said. “I knew who he was because
he’d been playing with Tom. I thought he had a lot of potential — even then he was a very good ball-striker.”

Even so, Matlock didn’t want to talk to Rocco. “He told me how impressed he was with our team and our approach,” Matlock remembered.
“He said, ‘We’re just here to have fun. You guys are here to win.’ I told him to me fun was working hard to achieve a goal
and then enjoying the satisfaction of achieving it. He told me he wanted to transfer and come play for us and could I send
him some literature. I told him, ‘No, absolutely not. I don’t want to get in trouble with the NCAA, and in truth, I shouldn’t
even be talking to you right now.’ ”

The NCAA frowns on coaches recruiting players from other schools. Matlock didn’t want any appearance of impropriety, even
if the player in question had approached him rather than the other way around. He wished Rocco luck and completely forgot
about the conversation with the eager young kid from Pennsylvania.

Rocco didn’t forget Matlock, though, or Florida Southern. When he got home at the end of the semester, he told his parents
he wanted to transfer to Florida Southern. He wanted to leave California University and he wanted to go someplace warm where
he could play golf all year round. It was too late to think about transferring for the fall semester, but Tony Mediate remembered
a friend whose son was at Florida Southern. He contacted him to get some information about the school and to see if Rocco
would have a chance of getting in.

Rocco returned to Cal U in the fall and wasn’t any happier, even though he was convinced he would play number one on the team
the following spring. He had filled out the application forms for Florida Southern and sent them in. Tony’s friend had made
a call to the admissions department on his behalf, and Rocco was waiting to hear if he had been accepted. He was thinking
that, best-case scenario, he might get in the following fall, and he was mentally preparing himself to finish the year at
Cal U.