Copyright © 2009 by Imediate Balance and John Feinstein
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: May 2009
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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ISBN: 978-0-316-07374-5
Contents
Copyright Page
Rocco’s Foreword
Introduction
1: The Dream
2: 508 Crestview Drive
3: No Backup Plan
4: Back to the Drawing Board
5: Down for the Count
6: The Good Life
7: The Slide
8: Cindi
9: Not So Special
10: Welcome to Torrey Pines
11: A Good Beginning…
12: Tiger Shows Up
13: Serious Stuff
14: One Inch Away
15: A Great Fight
16: Suddenly Famous
Photographs
Acknowledgments
ALSO BY JOHN FEINSTEIN
Living on the Black
Tales from Q School
Last Dance
Next Man Up
Let Me Tell You a Story
Caddy for Life
Open
The Punch
The Last Amateurs
The Majors
A March to Madness
A Civil War
A Good Walk Spoiled
Play Ball
Hard Courts
Forever’s Team
A Season Inside
A Season on the Brink
Last Shot (A Final Four Mystery)
Vanishing Act: Mystery at the U.S. Open
Cover-up: Mystery at the Super Bowl
Running Mates (A Mystery)
Winter Games (A Mystery)
For my boys… Rocco, Marco, and Nico
— R.M.
For the Rules Guys: Mark Russell, John Brendle, Slugger White, and Steve Rintoul, who are always there day and night
— J.F.
Rocco’s Foreword
NEVER IN MY WILDEST DREAMS did I ever think I’d be involved in a book like this one. Or any book, for that matter. Winning the United States Open, I could imagine. A book? No way.
But after my near miss at Torrey Pines in the Open last June, I started hearing from people that I should do a book, that I should tell my story — not only about my duel with Tiger Woods, but about all that led up to it. Literary agents were coming at me with offers and writers, saying they knew just how to tell my story.
I was certainly intrigued, but also a little bit skeptical. Mine is not — as you will learn — a simple story. If it was going to be told, I wanted it told right. One writer showed me a proposal he had put together in which he had me talking to God during the Open playoff. I don’t talk to God. I think He has enough on his plate without golfers asking him for an extra birdie or two. Maybe the guy got confused when he saw me talking to Tiger. A lot of people make that mistake.
So there I was in early July with these offers, and I still wasn’t sure what to do. That was when Cindi Hilfman (who played a major role in my being able to accomplish what I accomplished at the Open) brought up John Feinstein.
“Do you know him?” she asked me.
Sure, I knew John. I’d known him for years. I’d always enjoyed talking to him, whether it was in the locker room or on the driving range, and I knew that Lee Janzen, probably my best friend on tour, had worked with him on a couple of his books and liked and trusted him.
Cindi, it turns out, is also a fan. Maybe it’s the whole Duke thing (she did her postgraduate work in physical therapy there), but she says she’s read all twenty-three of his previous books. I haven’t. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve read twenty-three books period.
Cindi suggested I call John to see if he’d be interested in doing a book. Kelly Tilghman (another Dukie: I think there’s a pattern here), who had done some work with me at the Golf Channel, had John’s contact information, so I tracked him down during, ironically enough, Tiger’s tournament at Congressional.
John asked me a lot of questions, one of which was if I was absolutely sure I wanted to do a book. I remember what he said to me: “These things don’t happen by magic. It’s work. It will take time, and I may ask you some difficult questions. If you understand that and still want to do it, I’m in.”
To be honest, I don’t think I completely understood what he was talking about. Now I do. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. I thought there was a story to be told — one that goes well beyond what happened during those five days at Torrey Pines — and working with John, I came away even more convinced that was the case.
John made one other suggestion when we first talked: “Let’s not write this in the first person,” he said. He thought that writing in the third person (I didn’t even know what the hell writing in the third person was until he explained it to me) would give him more freedom to say things about me and tell the story in a kind of detailed way that first person doesn’t allow.
Reading the book, I realized he was completely right. A lot of first-person athlete’s books (okay, I have read a few books) leave me wanting to know more, because the athlete doesn’t want to tell you what he thinks about someone or about how difficult something was to achieve. John did a lot of reporting. He talked to all the key people in my life and to people I hadn’t even thought about. In some cases, people told him things I didn’t even know.
Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to pull a Charles Barkley and claim I was misquoted in a book my name is on. I’ve read it carefully, and everything that comes out of my mouth in the book came out of my mouth when John had his tape recorder on.
I think it’s a pretty good story, one that I’ve enjoyed living — for the most part — and one that I hope you’ll enjoy reading.
Overall, the experience was a fascinating one. I learned a lot about myself, my friends, and what goes into creating a book. I have only one regret: I heard a lot more about Coach K than I thought anyone could ever want to know.
I mean, the guy doesn’t even play golf.
Oh, one more thing: The story John tells in the introduction about the title is true. Don’t tell my kids.
Enjoy the book.
— Rocco Mediate
Introduction
IN THE 108 YEARS THAT the United States Open golf championship has existed, there has never been an Open like the one that took place at Torrey Pines Country Club in June of 2008. This was an Open so remarkable it even made the United States Golf Association’s stubborn insistence on continuing to stage an 18-hole Monday playoff look smart.
The golf world has become accustomed to Tiger Woods doing things that no one else has ever done before. He won the Masters at the age of twenty-one — by 12 shots. He won four major championships in a row. He changed his golf swing when he was the number one player in the world — and got better. Then
he changed it again and, after going 10 straight majors without a win, won five of the next 12. Midway through 2008, he had won 65 times on the PGA Tour — 17 short of the all-time record — and he was only thirty-two years old.
But his victory at Torrey Pines was spectacular — even by his own spectacular standards. He had undergone knee surgery on April 15, two days after finishing second at the Masters and fifty-eight days before the start of the Open — and hadn’t walked a single 18-hole round of golf before he teed it up on day one of the Open. He was clearly still in pain throughout the tournament. Just finishing 18 holes, let alone 72 holes, would have been an accomplishment. To finish 72 holes tied for first place and then play 19 more the next day to win the championship was almost beyond belief.
“I would have to say this is my greatest victory,” he said when it was finally over.
And yet, extraordinary as it was, Woods’s victory wasn’t what made this Open unique. Had he won it in 72 holes by a shot or by two or three shots, it would have simply been another example of just how much better he is than every other golfer on the planet and would have set off another round of “Tiger is the most dominant athlete in the world” stories. All of which would have been correct and appropriate.
What made this Open as thrilling as it was, a golf event watched and remembered by millions of non–golf fans, wasn’t Tiger Woods.
It was Rocco Mediate.
The notion of the greatest player in history proving once again how great he is — even doing it on one leg — fits handily into Woods’s lore. The notion of the 158th player in the world, a motor-mouthed forty-five-year-old whose career has been plagued by back problems, standing toe-to-toe with the greatest player in history for 91 holes is the kind of stuff that can bring Wall Street to a virtual halt.
And it actually did. According to market analysts, during the four and a half hours that Woods and Mediate were on the golf course on Monday, June 16, trading volume on the stock exchange dropped 10 percent. During the last few holes, according to estimates, it dropped double that amount.
There were all sorts of stories like that one on that Monday. Joan Fay, the wife of USGA executive director David Fay, wanted to stay in San Diego on Monday for the playoff. But she had commitments back home in New York on Tuesday and, as her husband pointed out, changing her flight would have cost an arm and a leg. She arrived at the airport Monday morning comforted by the fact that Jet Blue provides TV service on coast-to-coast flights, so she would at least be able to watch.
While waiting for her plane, she ran into several NBC executives, also flying home because of commitments and the expense of changing a flight. They were completely glum because the airline they were on had no TV service.
“I think there are seats on the Jet Blue flight,” Joan Fay said. “I’ll bet they’d change your tickets for nothing.”
A mad scramble followed and the NBC execs all ended up on Jet Blue. As luck would have it, the plane landed in New York just as Woods and Mediate were playing the 18th hole. It taxied to the gate, the Jetway pulled up, and no one got off the plane.
“No one would get off,” Joan Fay said. “I mean no one.”
One hundred miles to the north and east, another plane had just landed in Hartford, Connecticut. It was carrying golfers and their families from the Open to the next tour stop, which would take place that week outside Hartford. Everyone on the charter flight had been glued to the playoff, and when the plane landed, it pulled up to a private hangar where tournament officials and volunteers were waiting to help with luggage and courtesy cars and directions, and to make sure hotel reservations were in place.
But no one got off the plane.
“They couldn’t have gotten me or anyone else off with a court order at that point,” said Lee Janzen, a longtime friend of Mediate’s. “We just told the flight attendants to go inside and let the tournament people know we’d deplane as soon as it was over.”
All over the country, people who couldn’t have cared less about golf were tuned to television sets or computers, putting work and life aside to see how the playoff would be resolved. The notion that the wisecracking everyman from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, could somehow beat the world’s best-known athlete was instant must-see TV. It was Johnny Miller, the longtime NBC analyst, who accidentally summed it up on Sunday afternoon when he said, “Can someone named Rocco actually beat Tiger Woods to win the U.S. Open? I mean, he looks more like he should be taking care of Tiger’s pool than competing with him in the Open.”
Miller caught a lot of flak for that comment — Italian American groups got upset and he had to publicly apologize — but the point he was making (which had nothing to do with Mediate’s heritage) was an accurate one. Like everyone else who couldn’t take their eyes off what they were watching, Miller simply couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
In the end, someone named Rocco came up one shot short — just inches short — of beating Tiger Woods to win the U.S. Open. But the story he wrote during those five days — and what led to it — was once-in-a-lifetime stuff. No one understood that better than Rocco.
“Johnny called me to apologize about the comment,” he said. “There was nothing to apologize for, and I told him that. I understood what he was saying. If I had been sitting at home, I would have been saying, ‘There’s no way this can happen,’ just like everyone else was saying it.
“What people didn’t understand was I wasn’t afraid of [Woods]. Not because I don’t think he’s great — I do think he’s great. He hasn’t got a bigger fan in the world than me. But why would I be afraid of him? I’m always amazed when I see guys go out and play against him and they’re afraid. Why? No one expects you to win — he’s Tiger Woods and you’re not.
“To be in that arena with the greatest player of all time. If you’re a golfer, why wouldn’t you revel in every second of it? If there’s one thing that makes me happy about it all, it’s that I don’t have to look back and say, ‘Gee, I wish I’d been able to enjoy it and savor it while it was going on.’ I did do that. Every second of it right until I missed the last putt. I loved it all.”
There’s proof that Rocco isn’t just saying that in the aftermath of the event. Mike Davis, the USGA official who directs the U.S. Open, walked every step of the way with Woods and Mediate during the playoff. He was responsible for setting up the golf course each day, for deciding on where tee markers were placed and where the hole was located on each green. During the playoff he was the walking rules official, responsible for letting the players know what to do if they needed any sort of drop or if they weren’t sure about any rule that might come into play during the round.
On the sudden-death playoff hole, number seven at Torrey Pines, Rocco drove his ball well to the left, into an almost unplayable lie in a bunker, meaning he was going to have a difficult time staying alive, since Woods had put his ball in the fairway.
“I was walking off the tee thinking that Rocco was really in trouble and this might be the end of it all,” Davis said. “I was feeling bad for him because he’d been so close to pulling the thing off. All of a sudden, I feel an arm around me and I look up and there’s Rocco with this big grin on his face. He says, ‘I can’t tell you how much fun I’m having out here. In case I forget, I want to make sure you know I think you really nailed the setup, not just today but all week.’
“I couldn’t get over it. Here he is in desperate trouble, probably about to lose, and he’s got this big smile on his face and he’s talking about how much fun he’s having. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone enjoy himself under pressure like that in my life.”
Rocco ended up losing the playoff on that hole. Woods walked up to him, hand out to offer congratulations.
“Sorry pal, this doesn’t call for a handshake,” Rocco said. He wrapped his arms around Woods in a hug, a moment both men were entitled to after what they had gone through.
“Even now, months later, people still act as if I won,” Rocco said after his whirlwin
d second half of 2008. “Sometimes I feel like I have to remind them that I played great, I’m really proud of what I did, but I didn’t win. The other guy won.”
That’s true. Tiger, it seems, always wins. But in this case, there is no doubting the fact that his opponent didn’t lose. He won — not the U.S. Open but the hearts of golf fans everywhere, and the hearts of a lot of people who had never heard of him before that week in San Diego.
Tiger Woods is the 2008 U.S. Open champion. His performance was nothing short of amazing. But Rocco Mediate was the champion of all Americans — a true underdog who captured the sheer joy of playing and competing. Together, Rocco and Tiger created a singular moment in sport, and an indelible memory for millions that isn’t likely to be matched any time soon.
___
THE FIRST TIME I MET Rocco Mediate was more or less an accident. I certainly knew of him, but I didn’t know him personally. He had been on tour for seven years and had just won for the second time in his career, at Greensboro, a few months earlier.
I was researching A Good Walk Spoiled. One of the people I was working with on that book was Lee Janzen. About a month after Janzen won the 1993 U.S. Open at Baltusrol, he and I were supposed to go to dinner and spend the evening discussing the events of that weekend in New Jersey. Janzen had come out of nowhere to beat Payne Stewart and win the Open.
“Mind if I bring a friend to dinner?” Janzen asked when I called to set up a time to meet.
In truth, I wasn’t thrilled. When you are trying to interview someone, a third person is usually a distraction. But Janzen was giving me his time, so if he wanted to bring someone along, I was in no position to object. The third person turned out to be Rocco Mediate.
And his presence made the interview work about twice as well as it would have if he hadn’t been there.
Janzen is what we call in my business a good talker. He’s a nice guy who knows how to tell a story. But with Rocco sitting next to him, he became a great talker. He was loose and comfortable, and Rocco often reminded him of details as Lee walked me through his pre-Open life and the Open. What’s more, Rocco told me exactly where he was and what he was thinking as he watched his friend play the back nine on Sunday.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 1
