Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (6 page)

Then came the epiphany.

“It was late in the semester, sometime in December,” he said. “The golf course was closed, obviously, and so was the driving
range. I would go down to the football field with my clubs and some balls, clear off some snow, and hit balls. It was a wide-open
area, so I could do it. I drove down there with a couple of guys one afternoon. We weren’t out of the car five minutes when
they said, ‘This is ridiculous; it’s way too cold,’ and took off. I stood there hitting balls by myself for a while and finally
said, ‘They’re right; this is crazy. What the hell am I doing here? I have got to get out of this place.’ I called Coach Matlock
the next day.”

Matlock was in the office that morning by happenstance. The semester had just ended and he had gone in to pick up some paperwork
he needed for a recruiting trip to Miami. He was about to walk out when the phone rang.

“Coach Matlock? It’s Rocco Mediate calling.”

“Do I know you?”

“We met at the national championships last spring. I was asking you about Florida Southern, remember?”

Matlock did remember. Rocco told him he had applied to the school for spring admission but would come the next fall if that
didn’t work out. He wanted to know if he could be a part of his team. Matlock told him to come and see him if he got into
the school and they would talk.

“I thought he had potential,” Matlock said. “But I wasn’t going to make any promises.”

Soon after, Rocco got word from Florida Southern that — apparently thanks in large part to Tony’s friend — he had been accepted
for the spring semester. Overjoyed, he drove to Lakeland to register in mid-January and went directly to Matlock’s office.

“He was waiting for me when I got in that morning,” Matlock said. “I said, ‘Rocco, what are you doing here?’ He told me, ‘I
want to play for your golf team.’ ”

Being a transfer, Rocco wasn’t eligible to play for the team for two semesters. But he could practice with them. Matlock told
him he would be allowed to play in a 10-round — nine holes a day — event. If he was among the top ten finishers, he could
practice with the team. If not, he would be on his own.

“The first day I played with Marco Dawson and Jeff Schmucker. I shot 35, which wasn’t bad. Marco shot 30, Jeff shot 31. Coach
Matlock came up to me afterward and said, ‘So, what do you think of my boys?’ I said to him, ‘I want to be one of them.’ ”

He ended up making the cut — finishing 10th. The good news was he was part of the team; the bad news was… he was part of the
team.

Matlock had been a college football player at East Tennessee State and had coached football until he arrived at Florida Southern
in 1972 and was asked to add coaching the golf team to his other coaching and teaching duties. “I didn’t start playing until
late,” he said. “But I got to be a pretty good player.”

He was good enough to beat Andy Bean, who would go on to be a ten-time winner on the tour, in his club championship in 1970,
and he threw himself into coaching the golf team with great zeal. By the time Rocco arrived, Matlock had worked out a finely
tuned practice system that included what he called “boot camp.” Players were expected to report to the coach at 6:21 A.M.
three days a week — “I always thought if you give them an unusual time, they’ll remember it,” he said — to run three miles
and then follow that with a workout.

“I always told the guys that when they were running they should picture themselves playing 15, 16, 17, and 18 on a hot day,”
Maltock said. “Because that’s what this was about — making sure they still had their legs for the last few holes.”

Rocco wasn’t thrilled initially with the predawn wake-ups or the early-morning runs, but soon after embraced the Matlock work
ethic. It fit in with his obsessive-compulsive approach to golf.

“I would get up in the morning and run, then go hit some balls before class started,” he said. “Coach Matlock always told
us not to schedule a first-period class so we had time to hit some balls in the morning or chip or putt. I would go to class
from eight thirty to one and be at the golf course at one twenty. Then I’d spend the rest of the day playing or practicing
or both. After a while, I went into Coach and said, ‘Well, I’m playing from sunup to sundown, what do you think?’ He looked
at me and said, ‘Can’t you work a little harder?’ Maybe he was joking, but I went out and found a driving range with lights
so I could hit balls after dark. Nothing was going to stop me.”

No one, including Rocco, is sure when he found time to get schoolwork done, but he did — barely. Matlock had a rule that players
had to maintain a C average to play, and Rocco did that — barely. Matlock only had four players fail to graduate in twenty-three
years at Florida Southern, and Rocco was one of them. “He was only ten credits short,” he said, laughing twenty-four years
after Rocco finished his senior season of golf. “I guess he’s not going to go back and get them at this point.”

In the fall of 1983, Rocco’s second semester at Florida Southern, Matlock brought in a late recruit named Lee Janzen. He had
spotted Janzen during a junior tournament that summer and, knowing he was planning to go to Brevard Junior College in the
fall because no four-year school had recruited him, offered him a partial scholarship. Janzen jumped at it because of the
school’s golf pedigree and enrolled two weeks after Matlock offered him the chance to come to school.

Rocco’s roommate that fall was Jim Wilhelm, one of the more popular players on the team. “We used to hang out in Jim’s room
a lot,” Janzen remembered. “When Rocco and I first met, we weren’t exactly best buddies. In fact, I don’t think we liked each
other that much. After a while, though, we started to talk about music and we found we had common ground there. We both loved
Rush, and we both knew a lot about rock-and-roll.”

Rocco and Janzen spent a lot of time listening to music in each other’s rooms, playing a game to see who could identify a
song, the artist, and the year fastest. “It was very competitive because we were both good,” Janzen said. “There weren’t a
lot of songs that we didn’t know.”

They also found in each other a willing practice partner. “Some guys practice because they feel like they have to practice
to get better,” Janzen said. “Some guys do it because their coach makes them do it. Rocco and I both
liked
to practice. We could go out to the practice green at Lone Palm [the club where Florida Southern played and practiced] and
spend three hours practicing shots over a bunker and not even notice how much time had gone by. Then we might go into the
bunker and spend a couple more hours there. I can’t even tell you the number of hours we spent together just trying different
shots and competing, trying to outdo each other.”

Janzen soon figured out that he was dealing with a unique character in Rocco. “There is no such thing as good or bad with
Rocco,” he said, smiling. “Something is either the absolute best or the absolute worst. There’s no in-between. He was playing
Cobra clubs back then and he convinced me I
had
to have Cobras because they were
so
much better than any other golf club I could play with. Finally, I ordered them. They took forever to arrive. Every day Rocco
would call UPS and ask where the clubs were. Finally, one morning they told us they were on their way, should arrive by the
end of the day. That wasn’t good enough. We had to get in the car, drive around, and find the UPS truck with the clubs. We
convinced the guy to give us the clubs and went straight to the course so I could try them out.”

Rocco was so obsessed with the game that he charted every shot he played. “I’m not just talking about tournament rounds, I’m
talking about practice rounds — every shot he hit, he wrote it down,” Janzen said. “There was nothing golf related that was
too small a detail for Rocco.”

By the spring of 1984, Rocco was eligible to play for Florida Southern, and ready to play well. And he had even bigger goals.
Matlock always had his players fill out a form that asked them, among other things, about long-term ambitions. When Rocco
filled his out, he wrote, “Play on the PGA Tour.”

During a large chunk of the ’83–’84 school year, Rocco was making the drive from Lakeland to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina
a couple of times a month to see Jim Ferree and have him check his swing. Ferree, who is now retired and living on Hilton
Head, spent his winters there in those days. Rocco’s going to see him was fine with Matlock, because Matlock respected Ferree
and could see how much confidence Rocco had in him.

“By that time Rocco had met Rick Smith through Lee [Janzen] down at Florida Southern,” Ferree remembered. “I had taught Rick
as a kid, and a lot of what Rick was teaching people were the same things I had taught him. Rick and I used to joke that I
would get Rocco and mess him up so he could fix it, and then he would mess him up so I could fix it.”

Smith had also grown up outside Pittsburgh and had taken lessons from Ferree. After playing at East Tennessee State and realizing
he didn’t have the game to make the tour, he decided to teach. He was only a few years older than Rocco and Janzen, so working
with the two of them was a natural for both the teacher and the pupils.

Matlock had coached plenty of players who wrote “Play on the PGA Tour” as their goal. When Matlock first saw it on Rocco’s
form he almost laughed. But by the end of the 1984 spring season, he didn’t think the notion was laughable at all. “He came
so far so fast it was amazing,” he said. “You could see he had potential, even that first time I saw him when he was playing
for California. But he worked so hard that his game was almost transformed by the time he finished his junior year.”

That summer, at Matlock’s urging, Rocco played in every top amateur event he could find. He hadn’t done that the previous
summer because he didn’t think his game was good enough, but two rounds of golf and a talking-to from Matlock changed that
feeling.

The first round of golf took place at Oakmont Country Club on the day the 1983 U.S. Open ended. Rocco had made the short drive
from Greensburg to Pittsburgh to see the Open with Dave Lucas and his dad, Ken Lucas, an equipment representative for Ping
and a friend of Bob Ford, the longtime golf pro at Oakmont. Rocco spent a good portion of the weekend following Tom Watson,
his golf hero, whom he’d had the chance to meet two years earlier during a tournament at Firestone Country Club in Akron,
Ohio.

“I was there with a friend whose dad was a member of the club, and somehow we got in the locker room,” Rocco said. “Tom was
in there, and we walked over and introduced ourselves. I mean, he could not have been nicer. I remember he asked me if I played,
and I said yes. He said, ‘Are you any good?’ And I said, ‘Not yet.’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Keep working; you’ll get
there.’ I was already hooked on him because I loved the way he played and competed, but after that there was no doubt. The
next year when he chipped in to beat Nicklaus and win the Open at Pebble Beach, I think I jumped ten feet into the air.”

A year later, at the ’83 Open, Watson and Steve Ballesteros were in the final group at Oakmont on Sunday. Ballesteros quickly
fell out of contention, and the tournament became a duel between Watson and Larry Nelson, who was one group in front. Late
Sunday afternoon, with Nelson about to line up a 65-foot birdie putt on the 16th hole and Watson finishing up on the 15th,
a thunderstorm rolled in and play was postponed until Monday morning, with Watson and Nelson tied for the lead.

The next morning, Rocco and the Lucases went straight to the 16th green. Watson was waiting to tee off on the par-three and
Nelson was preparing to putt. They watched in amazement as Nelson rolled his putt over hill and dale and into the cup for
a stunning birdie two. That turned out to be the difference; Nelson won by one shot.

Rocco’s disappointment over Watson’s loss didn’t last very long. Shortly after the awards ceremony, he found himself standing
on the first tee with Ken and Dave Lucas. “Because Ken knew Bob Ford, we were actually able to play the course a couple of
hours after the Open ended,” he said. “It was amazing. Because of the rain the course played about 10,000 yards long and,
obviously, it was set up as hard as you can possibly imagine. I shot 72 or 73. Just kept the ball in the fairway all day.
I was amazed.”

To shoot a couple over par on a U.S. Open golf course is no mean feat, even for a good college golfer. At that point, Rocco
wasn’t sure he was a good college golfer, since he was still a semester away from being eligible to play at Florida Southern.

About a month later came the second eye-opening round of golf. Rocco was at Greensburg Country Club doing what he did almost
every day — practicing and getting ready to play with his friends. He got a message to call Danny Bonar, another of his golf
buddies.

“Hey, you need to get over here to Latrobe,” Bonar said. “I’ve got a really good gambling game set up for us.”

Rocco has always loved to gamble. Several years ago he became obsessed with poker, playing it on his computer constantly and
even in the World Poker Championships in 2005. Back then he was always looking for a good “money game,” and had become quite
good at making putts with money on the line. So the idea of a good money game was enough to get him in his car to make the
twenty-minute drive over to Latrobe Country Club.

“When I got there I said to Danny, ‘So who we playing with?’ He just started walking me toward the first tee. That’s when
I saw him standing there.”

“Him” was Arnold Palmer, who owns Latrobe Country Club and lives a few miles down the road during the summer months. As soon
as Mediate saw Palmer standing on the tee, he panicked.

“No way,” he said to Bonar. “I can’t play with him. I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to talk to him, much less swing a club
in front of him. I’m not ready: I can’t do it.”

Bonar ignored the protests and steered the now shaking Rocco onto the first tee.

“The minute we shook hands and he looked me in the eye and gave me that smile of his, I relaxed completely,” Rocco said. “It
was as if I’d known him all my life. That’s Arnold. He has this way of making you feel like he’s been your friend forever.
I was still shaking when I hit my first tee shot because, for crying out loud,
Arnold Palmer
is standing there watching me. Once I got that ball airborne, though, I was okay. It turned out to be one of the greatest
days of my life.”