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, blindfold
ed, 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.”
3
No Backup Plan
IF 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.
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 h
e 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.”
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 4
