“We’d gotten up early to drive back to school,” Janzen remembered. “We were about halfway back, when all of a sudden it seemed the car wanted to head to Greenlefe. We decided we could miss a day of class to go out there and show some support for Rocc and Tom.”
Rocco hit a perfect drive on the first hole and had a six-iron left from the middle of the fairway. “I hit it to two feet,” he said. “For a second I thought it was going to go in. That would have been too weird.”
He was delighted to start with a birdie and played steadily all day. The only unnerving moment came at the 16th, a long, narrow par-three with out-of-bounds left of the green. Dave Rummels, one of the other players in the group who was also comfortably inside the qualifying number at that moment, hit a three-iron off the tee, hooked it, and watched it hop out of bounds.
As soon as he saw Rummels’s ball bounce past the white stakes, Rocco turned to his caddy and said, “Give me a five-iron.”
“But you can’t possibly reach the green with a five-iron.”
“I know that. Give me the f —— five iron.”
For all intents and purposes, he laid up to a par-three. “I hit it short of the bunkers, away from any trouble,” he said. “I would have been happy to make bogey. The one thing I didn’t want to do was hit it OB and make six or something. I ended up pitching it close and making par.”
Standing on the 18th tee, Rocco knew all he really had to do was finish the hole and he would get his card. “I was shaking,” he said, laughing at the memory. “I mean, that hole has about the widest fairway in golf and I wasn’t sure I could hit it. Once I got the ball on the green I relaxed a little, because at that point I think I could have six-putted and still made it. When I holed out, the relief was unbelievable. I was on the tour — and I didn’t have to go back to college.”
At that moment, he didn’t need a backup plan.
4
Back to the Drawing Board
THOSE WHO HAVE PLAYED for a long time on the PGA Tour will tell you that there are few experiences in golf more bittersweet than the first time they successfully climb the Q-School mountain.
At the finish there is elation, exhaustion, and relief. Then comes the understanding that getting to the tour is only a small first step, that there are many golf miles to be traveled before one is considered successful on the tour.
“At some point, no matter who you are, the thought crosses your mind, ‘Okay, I’m on the tour, but am I good enough to stay there?’ ” Rocco has said often. “If you know anything about Q-School, it is that more than half the guys who make it through in a given year are right back there the next year.”
Rocco’s elation on the last day at Greenlefe lasted a few hours — at most. He received congratulatory hugs from Janzen and Dawson and joined Gleaton, who had also earned his card, for a brief post-round celebration. He called his parents and tearfully told them he was on the tour. Soon after that he was in his car on his way back home to Greensburg — still thrilled but with no one to talk to about what he had accomplished.
“It was a strange trip home,” he said. “On the one hand, I found myself thinking about how amazing it was that I was going where I was going. I thought about the fact that six years earlier, I couldn’t break 80 and now I was on the PGA Tour. That part was great.
“But it was also kind of scary, realizing how much work I had already done, but that I had that much more to do to try to compete once I got out there. I wasn’t a college kid anymore; I was a professional golfer. It was what I wanted to be, but I knew it wasn’t going to be at all easy. I really wanted to talk to people the whole way home, but there were no cell phones and it was the middle of the night anyway. It was just me and all my thoughts.”
He didn’t stay home for long, heading down to Florida right after Christmas to find some warm weather so he could prepare for his tour debut, which would come in early January at Pebble Beach. This was before the tour began its season with two tournaments in Hawaii the way it does now.
He spent a fair amount of his time in Florida working with Rick Smith. He had met Smith through Janzen, who had grown up playing at Imperial Lakes, the golf course where Smith’s older brother was the pro. After Rick left East Tennessee State, he had come home to work for his brother as a jack-of-all-trades around the golf course. He had spotted Janzen, then in the seventh grade, hitting golf balls one day and made a suggestion to him about his setup.
“He told me that I had no chance to hit the ball well setting up the way I was,” Janzen said. “I figured I had nothing to lose by making the change he was suggesting. I felt more comfortable over the ball right away. I wasn’t very good at that point, so I figured almost anything might help. In almost no time I went from struggling to break 100 to shooting in the low 80s. I was completely hooked. After that, every time I saw Rick, I said to him, ‘Give me something to work on.’ He always did, and we became good friends and he became my teacher even though I wasn’t formally taking lessons from him.”
When Janzen and Rocco became friends, Janzen introduced Rocco to Smith. Although Rocco had continued to take lessons from Jim Ferree while in college, he enjoyed working with Smith too. In Smith, he found someone young enough to be a friend and someone as obsessed with the technique of the golf swing as he was. Plus, his teaching methods were not all that different from Ferree’s, since a lot of Smith’s understanding of the swing came from Ferree. By the time he finished at Florida Southern, Rocco was spending a good deal of time on the practice tee with Smith.
Nervous but excited, Rocco flew to Pebble Beach for his first tournament as a full-fledged member of the PGA Tour. In those days, Pebble Beach was one of the more glamorous events on the tour and drew a stellar field. Rocco walked onto the driving range on Tuesday morning and spent a solid hour just watching other players hit range balls.
“Watson was there and [Jack] Nicklaus and [Greg] Norman and just about anyone else you could possibly name who played golf at the time,” he said. “I went up and down the range watching them hit balls — not just the big names, but everyone. I still like to do that to this day, watch other guys hit balls, because I really think I can learn a lot doing that.
“That day, though, I wasn’t really learning. I was simply in awe. I watched their swings, watched them hit shots, and walked straight back into the clubhouse without hitting a ball. I called Rick Smith on the phone and said, ‘We need to get together again as soon as possible and really get to work, because I have no chance — I mean no chance — to keep my card out here this year. There’s just no way I’m good enough to play with these guys.’
“I wasn’t exaggerating,” he said years later. “And it wasn’t that I lacked confidence. I was just being a realist. I meant what I was saying. I could just see that these guys were on a different level than I was. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try as hard as I possibly could. I just think I had a very clear idea of what I was up against.”
Much to his surprise and delight he made the cut that first week, cashing a check for $1,512. He didn’t make another cut until May. But he didn’t get discouraged, because he wasn’t surprised to find himself struggling. He started to play better during the summer and began to see some progress. He made the cut in Canada and found himself paired in the third round with Greg Norman, who had just won the British Open two weeks earlier.
“That was an experience,” he said. “People forget that Greg was Tiger before Tiger, if not in terms of dominance, in terms of charisma and aura. Believe me, back then he had it. I was really pleased with the way I played that day. I think I shot 72. He shot 64 and made it look easy. I’ll never forget, though, how nice he was to me. Encouraged me all day and told me he thought I was going in the right direction when we finished. I mean, the guy just completely dusted me and he was telling me how impressed he was with my game.”
By then Rocco’s game and swing had both measurably improved. He had spent long hours on the practice tee with Smith, working on making his
swing more side to side than straight up and down. “Straight up and down, I could only hit the ball one way,” he said. “When I changed my swing I was able to shape my shots. Hit a draw, a fade, choose what I wanted to do.”
By year’s end, he had made 10 cuts in 27 tournaments, had one top-ten finish — a fifth in Jackson, Mississippi, in an event the same week as the British Open, when most of the top players were overseas — and had earned $20,174, which left him 174th on the money list. And just as he had predicted at Pebble Beach, he found himself going back to Q-School.
“It didn’t really bother me, because I had seen it coming right from the beginning,” he said. “Plus, by the end of the year I felt I was a much better player than I had been a year earlier. I figured if that player could make it through Q-School, this player should breeze. I went in there with lots of confidence. I knew the guys I was up against just weren’t as good as the ones I’d been playing against all year. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been at Q-School.”
The finals that year were on the West Coast, at PGA West in Palm Springs. Rocco was never in trouble the entire week, always in the top ten, never really having a nervous moment, even on the last day. “I was in third place going into the last day,” he remembered. “I figured out if I shot 80 I was still going to make it, and I knew I wasn’t going to shoot 80.”
He shot 69 and ended up in third place behind Steve Jones and Steve Elkington — both future major champions. That sent him back to the tour in 1987, but this time he went with a completely different attitude. The scared rookie had become a confident veteran.
“You learn so much your first year out there about everything,” he said. “You learn how to travel, you learn about the golf courses, you learn how to live out of a suitcase, and you learn how not to be intimidated. That was my biggest challenge. When I went out there the second year, I had a lot more confidence in my golf swing and in my ability to compete. I didn’t think I was as good as Greg Norman or Tom Watson, but I didn’t think I had to be.”
During that second year, in 1987, he started to find a comfort zone on the tour. He became close friends with Jim Carter, who was two years older than he was and had made it to the tour for the first time at the 1986 Q-School. Because their caddies were good friends, Carter asked Rocco if he would like to play with him in the team championships, a late-season unofficial event in California. Mediate said yes, and a friendship was born.
“In those days Rocc was a lot quieter than he is now,” Carter remembered. “I think when he talks about wondering if he belonged — that’s something we all feel when we’re first out there and don’t know if we’re going to be good enough to stay out there. We spent a lot of time together with our wives until kids came along and they stopped coming out as much. Back then, Linda was a lot more outgoing than Rocco was.”
Linda Newell had come into Rocco’s life in the summer of 1986. He had taken a break from the grind of the tour and come home for a week to visit his family. He had walked into his dad’s salon and instantly noticed that there was a new nail technician at work. She was a junior at the University of Pittsburgh– Greensburg and was paying her way through school by working at Anthony’s.
“Rocco took one look at her and said, ‘Dad, is it okay if I ask her out?’ ” Tony Mediate said. “I told him it was up to her, not me. He asked, she went, and by the end of the year she was long gone from the salon. They were a couple from that day on.”
Rocco hadn’t had much time for a social life once he’d gotten hooked on golf in high school. His mother remembers begging him to go to the movies with friends or to a dance and being told there just wasn’t time. In college he had a girlfriend for a while, but, according to Janzen, that had ended when the girlfriend had said something along the lines of ‘If you want to keep dating me, you have to spend less time at the golf course and more time with me.’
“She had no shot to win that battle,” Janzen said. “It was pretty much over after that.”
Rocco had met someone earlier that summer at the Canadian Open, but once he met Linda, things happened very fast — for both of them.
“To be honest, I wasn’t very interested in meeting him,” Linda said. “I had started working at Anthony’s in April, and every week starting on Thursday there was, well, hysteria in the place about how Rocco was playing, about whether he could make the cut. If he didn’t make the cut, Tony would be in a terrible mood all weekend. If he did make the cut, that was all anyone at the salon talked about.
“My older brother was a good golfer, he had made the state championships on several occasions, but I was never really into golf or sports. By the time he came into the salon that day, I was pretty sick of hearing ‘Rocco this and Rocco that’ all the time.”
Linda Newell had grown up on a farm in the tiny town of Stahlstown, the youngest of four children. “We had an apple tree in the backyard and lots and lots of wheat growing behind it,” she said. “It was kind of the classic farm upbringing. The thing I loved to do most was read. I would go to the library and find the biggest book I could find. Or I would throw a Nancy Drew into my backpack and go sit at the Salamander River and read. I wanted to write when I grew up.”
Linda’s parents separated when she was eight, and finances were never easy after that. When she went to college, she paid her own way, working forty hours a week in the hardware department at Sears. During her sophomore year, her roommate, who worked in a beauty salon, told her that working at Sears was completely uncool and convinced her to go to beauty school. She did and landed the job at Anthony’s soon thereafter.
“If you were going to work in a salon in Greensburg, Anthony’s was the place to work,” she said. “It was the biggest, it was the best, and it was where everyone in town went.”
On the August day that Rocco walked into Anthony’s — August 21, Linda remembers very specifically — Linda happened to be working on the nails of Susan Lucas, mother of Rocco’s boyhood friend Dave Lucas.
“I always worked with my back to the front door so the person I was working on was facing it,” Linda said. “I heard Susan say, ‘Oh, my God, Rocky’s here,’ and there was this commotion behind me. To be honest, my first reaction was to roll my eyes. But I remember thinking, ‘Okay, let’s see what this guy looks like.’ So I spun my chair around. He was standing at Tony’s station, which is elevated, talking to his dad. I looked at him and, to this day I can’t tell you why, but I heard a voice in my head say, ‘That’s the man you’re going to marry.’ I immediately started arguing with the voice: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’ve never met the guy, he’s a golfer, for crying out loud, just stop it.’
“Susan and I were very friendly; we talked about a lot of things. She didn’t like the guy I was dating, so as soon as I turned around, she started waving at Rocco to come over. She introduced us. I was absolutely convinced that everyone in the place could hear what was going on in my head, so I was completely embarrassed. I tried to be very cool. I just said, ‘Oh, hi,’ and went back to work.
“He went off to talk to a few more people while I finished up with Susan. A little later he was in the back talking to his uncle Joe, and I saw the two of them looking at me and whispering. I loved Uncle Joe; we always kidded around with one another. Now Rocco’s talking and Uncle Joe is nodding his head yes, over and over.
“Finally Rocco came back to talk to the woman I was working on at that point. He sat down and said to me, ‘My sister and I are going to this place called Tingles tonight. If you’re not doing anything, maybe you’d like to come.’ Believe it or not, I was planning on going there with a friend, so I said, sure, why not, we’ll meet you there.”
It all happened very fast after that. Linda remembers being so nervous she spilled three drinks on Rocco’s white pants. “This was after I asked him if he was one of those golfers who wore those awful polyester plaid pants,” she said. “He said he didn’t. We played a video trivia game and we won. He looked at me and said, ‘So, how about a kiss f
or the winners?’
“I said okay and he kissed me. Don’t ask me why, but when he kissed me I remember thinking of the Brady Bunch episode where Peter has his first kiss and fireworks go off. My friend had been in the bathroom, but when she came back we must have had those stupid, giddy grins you get at times like that on our faces, because she just looked at us and said, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
They went to lunch on Saturday and that turned into spending the whole day together, including Rocco taking Linda to his parents’ house for dinner. The next morning, Rocco had to fly out to the next tour stop in Memphis and convinced Linda to ride to the airport with him and his parents.
“The pump in our well in the backyard was broken and we had no water,” Linda said. “I woke up at four thirty in the morning and drove a couple of miles to find a stream so I could wash my hair before I went to the house. I guess I should have realized I was hooked then.
“I do remember Donna being less than thrilled. Rocco had just broken up with someone and had missed six cuts in a row, and she thought he needed to concentrate on golf.”
On Monday morning, Linda walked into the salon and found a dozen roses and a card at her chair. There was also a plane ticket — to Memphis. “Of course I went,” she said.
She was on and off the tour the rest of the year. Donna’s concerns abated when Rocco began making cuts on a regular basis after he and Linda started dating. “We would write to each other when I wasn’t out there,” she said. “I still have a letter he wrote me two weeks after we started dating in which we began naming our kids. At the time, we were planning on having six.”
While Rocco was still in college, Jim Ferree had introduced him to Larry Harrison, a friend of his from Hilton Head. Harrison had liked Rocco enough that he offered to sponsor him on the mini-tours and continued to do so while he struggled to make money that first year on tour.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 6
