“It was pretty apparent right away this [Linda] was going to be it,” Ferree remembered. “If Linda wasn’t out, Rocco would finish up in a tournament and jump in the car to drive back to Greensburg to see her for a couple of days before the next tournament. I understood what he was feeling, but I did finally sit him down and say to him, ‘You know, Larry’s put some serious money into helping you play. You really shouldn’t be spending all your free time in the car driving back to Pennsylvania to see a girl.’ Naturally he ignored me. And naturally it all worked out.”
Linda may not have been a golf fan, but she was willing to put up with golf to be with Rocco. She went with him to both stages of Q-School that fall. After he had made it back to the finals, they were in a hotel in Jacksonville Beach. Rocco was going to get ready to play the finals, and Linda was flying north to go back to school and to work.
“The morning I was leaving, he said to me, ‘Look, I’m only going to ask this once, but please don’t go back to school next semester. Come out and travel with me full-time. If it doesn’t work out, you can go back to school in a year.’ I knew perfectly well if I dropped out of school I wasn’t going back. But I said yes anyway.”
After Rocco made it through the finals, he and Linda were a couple on the tour in 1987. The plan was for them to get engaged once he made enough money to clinch his card for 1988. That moment came when Rocco finished second to John Inman in the Provident Classic in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By then, everyone on tour knew what the plan was.
“The guys who did the scoreboard drew wedding bells next to Rocco’s name after they posted the final scores,” Linda remembered. “That was a fun time to be on tour. It was much smaller and everyone knew everyone — players, officials, everyone. It was before people traveled everywhere on their private jets.”
They were married the following spring. By then, Rocco was playing well enough on tour and making enough of a living that they were able to buy a house in Ponte Vedra, Florida, right near the tour’s headquarters at the TPC Sawgrass.
All the work with Rick Smith and the year of experience on tour had started to pay off during 1987, that second year on tour. Rocco began to make cuts on a more consistent basis (19 of 32) and found himself playing later and later on Saturdays and Sundays. The second-place finish behind Inman at the Provident Classic in July — he lost by a shot — was worth $62,000, more than triple what he had made in all of 1986. He finished the year with $112,099 in earnings, which was good for 91st place on the money list.
“It was such a great time in my life,” he said. “Every day was a learning experience on the golf course, on the practice tee, in the locker room, away from the golf course. I was just a kid trying to figure things out. For me, the PGA Tour those first few years was like going to golf college. A lot of guys went out of their way to help me, which I’ve tried never to forget. Now when I see young guys out here with that wide-eyed look I’m sure I had twenty years ago, I try to help them whenever I can.”
And it wasn’t just his golf swing that needed refining. One morning Rocco walked into the locker room at Muirfield Village Golf Club, the site of Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial Tournament. It was pro-am day, and he was wearing a pullover sweater and comfortable pants. “They were kind of puffy,” he said. “Not all that sloppy, not like painter’s pants or anything, but not exactly dressy.”
“Hey, kid, come over here,” he heard a voice say, and looked up to see 1973 British Open champion Tom Weiskopf waving at him.
Dutifully, Rocco made his way over to Weiskopf’s locker.
“Do you think the people who paid money to play with you today want to see you looking like that?” Weiskopf said. “You want to be a pro, you have to look like one. You need new pants — real pants.”
He handed Rocco a card. “Call this guy. Tell him I told you to call. Get him to make some good pants for you.”
Rocco did what he was told. Since then he has worn nothing but tailor-made pants on days when he goes to the golf course on tour. In fact, he’s become a serious clotheshorse. He has a huge collection of belt buckles and gets his belts made too.
Other more experienced players also took him under their wing. Curtis Strange was the number one player in the world when Rocco arrived on tour and didn’t play with him much, since they were in different categories when pairings were made, but Strange remembers frequently running into Rocco early on.
“You may not play with a guy, but you do run into people on the practice tee and in the locker room,” Strange said. “Rocco was quieter then, but you could just tell he was a good kid. A lot of young guys show up on tour and act like the world is supposed to be at their feet. Rocco was never that way. You could tell he thought he was lucky to be doing what he was doing, and he loved a good story — whether he was listening to one or telling one. The Rocco people see now was always there; it was just a matter of him getting the confidence to show it.”
Arnold Palmer was seeing a lot of Rocco too. He wasn’t playing very much in those days, but whenever Rocco went home, he would go over to Latrobe and play with him.
“I probably lectured him too much,” Palmer said, smiling, years later. “I saw so much potential in him. By the time he had been on tour for a couple of years, he had a very good golf swing and had become one of the best ball-strikers I’d seen in a long time. Plus, I knew he had the kind of personality that would make him a star and someone who would be very good for golf if he started to win with some consistency.”
But Palmer had concerns too. “I worried about him. I saw his weight going up at a young age and didn’t think that was a good thing. I thought he needed to spend more time on the putting green because at times he putted very well but at other times not as well. With the way he hit the ball, I thought he should be scoring better.”
Weight was starting to become an issue as Rocco became established on tour. “People look at him now and they forget there was a time when his shoulders were wider than his hips,” Janzen joked.
Of course Rocco knew that putting on weight wasn’t a good idea for any golfer. He had been in good shape at Florida Southern because of Matlock’s boot camps, but living on the road, especially after he started to make some money, he found it tough to keep weight off.
“I was probably like any guy in his twenties who was making money for the first time,” he said. “Plus, I was away a lot. Linda was there some of the time, but not all the time. It wasn’t as if I was out partying all night; if I had been I wouldn’t have been able to play. But I definitely liked to eat. After a while I got to be a pretty big boy.”
At six-foot-one and 190 pounds in college, Rocco was in good shape. By the time his first son, Rocco Vincent Mediate, was born late in 1990, his weight had ballooned to close to 250 pounds and his waist size was a forty-two. The extra weight didn’t affect his stamina, but it did start to affect his back.
He had played steadily in 1988 and 1989, still not winning but maintaining his playing privileges without any problem. In 1990, he began to turn a corner and become a player people noticed.
“I think at that point it was just experience kicking in,” he said. “I knew the golf courses, I knew which hotels to stay in, I knew how to get the best fares and upgrades on planes. [These days the tour has a travel office and a travel specialist who works out of the locker room, booking flights and hotels for players; back then they were on their own.] I was completely comfortable. Plus, my swing was really good. When I putted well, I could really score.”
That has always been the book on Rocco: excellent ball-striker, streaky putter. “He always hit the ball very high and he always had that draw,” Carter said. “He never lacked confidence with a driver or an iron in his hands. It was the putter that kept him from winning those first few years.”
In his fifth year on tour, he became a consistent contender. He finished second at the Greater Hartford Open and had a third and a seventh. By the time the year was over, he had made a career high $240,625 and was 62nd on
the money list. He still hadn’t won, but he felt he was getting very close to that breakthrough.
Late that year, back pain prompted Rocco to begin using a long putter. Only a handful of players — most of them on the Senior Tour — were using a long putter at that point, but Rocco decided to try it for two reasons: He thought it might help him putt better and he hoped it might take some pressure off his back.
“My back wasn’t bad at that point, but I had put on some weight,” he said. “If I had been a great putter I never would have changed, but I wasn’t a great putter so I thought it was worth a try. As soon as I picked it up I felt comfortable with it, so I just kept on using it.”
In the early 1990s, a long putter on the regular tour was usually a sign of trouble. “Old guys were supposed to use them, not young guys,” Strange said. “If you saw a guy with a long putter or putting cross-handed or doing anything that wasn’t conventional, the first thing you thought was, ‘This guy has issues.’ Rocco was probably the first guy on the regular tour to use the long putter and actually have serious success with it.”
Rocco was using the long putter at Doral the following March when he made back-to-back birdie putts on the last two holes to get into a playoff with Strange. “I guess that was a pretty good clue that he was putting well,” Strange said, laughing, years later. “I remember I had finished ahead of him and had played well down the stretch. I thought I was in pretty good shape even when he made the birdie at 17, because birdieing the 18th at Doral to get into a playoff is a pretty tall order. But he hit a great second shot (to about 10 feet) and made the putt, and my thought was ‘Good for you.’ ”
Because of a rain delay, the playoff was held the following morning, meaning Rocco had to sleep knowing he would need to come out firing the next morning, since the playoff was sudden death. On paper, the advantage had to belong to Strange, who had won 17 times on tour — including back-to-back U.S. Open victories in 1988 and 1989.
“I felt pretty good about it, to tell the truth,” Strange said. “On the other hand, Rocco had finished hot by making the two birdies to tie me. In sudden death, it’s really a matter of who comes up with a shot first. We both came up short of the green in two because it was playing dead into the wind, and we both hit good chips to set up makeable birdie putts.”
The first playoff hole on tour is almost always the 18th. TV likes it that way, and it is easier on fans who don’t have to go sprinting to another hole to get into position for a playoff. Even the Masters, which for years started playoffs on the 10th hole, now sends the players back to the 18th tee.
But this was 1990 on a Monday morning, and neither TV nor fans were a factor. So Strange and Rocco played Doral’s par-five first hole. Rocco’s wedge shot was just inside Strange’s, so Strange putted first — and missed. That left Rocco with an eight-footer for his first win. He drained it.
“I still remember him dropping the putter before the ball got to the hole,” Strange said, laughing. “I thought, ‘Okay, that’s inexperience tempting fate like that.’ To be completely honest, I was disappointed not to win, the way you’re always disappointed when you have a chance like that and don’t win, but I was really happy for Rocco. I’d seen how much time he spent on the practice tee and how hard he worked at his game. Plus, I liked him. There are guys I could lose a playoff to and walk away really angry about it. Not Rocco. He earned it too — it wasn’t like I just gave it to him. He birdied the last three holes he played. That’s good golf.”
The Doral victory wasn’t exactly the way Rocco had pictured his first win: Because it was Monday morning, there were only a handful of spectators around. There was no post-victory TV interview, and the awards ceremony was all but held in private. Still, after five years, the feeling was overwhelming.
“When he called he was just about crying,” Tony Mediate said. “Remember, it was Monday morning, so there was no TV and there was no Internet back then. We were just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. As soon as I heard his voice, I knew he had won.”
The win was worth $252,000, which was just $10,000 less than he had made total in the 91 tournaments he had played in during his first three years on tour. It also meant that he was exempt from having to qualify through the end of 1993 and it gave him a huge boost of confidence.
“There’s a difference between staying on tour and winning on tour,” he said. “My first five years I was good enough to stay on tour. I played okay and I was always aware of how much money I needed to make to keep my card for the next year. That’s what it was about — staying on tour.
“Winning makes you feel completely different. For one thing, you get the two-year exemption, so for the rest of that year and the entire next year you don’t have to even think about the money list — you just play. Beyond that, though, you feel like you really belong. You’re playing with better players on Thursday and Friday [tournament winners are paired together the first two rounds at each tournament], and guys look at you differently in the locker room, on the range.”
Or, as Loren Roberts put it after his first tour win in his tenth year on tour: “Until you win, you feel like you’re a day worker out here. Once you win, you feel like you really belong.”
Rocco was in his sixth year on tour when he won at Doral. He probably had as many friends among the other players as anyone out there and he had become quite popular with the fans. But he had never felt as if he really belonged.
“I always felt like an outsider in my early years on tour,” he said. “It wasn’t because I didn’t have friends — I did. It wasn’t because a lot of the older guys weren’t great to me — they were. I just felt as if I wasn’t normal. Maybe it was because I didn’t have any pedigree as a junior golfer. I never really did anything until college, and then it wasn’t until I was a senior.
“I remember Davis [Love] saying to me once, ‘You went from nowhere at fifteen to the tour at twenty-two — you realize, don’t you, that nobody does that?’ He said it to make me feel good, and I get how amazing it was that I was able to do what I did. A lot of guys go back to Q-School multiple times when they’re young. I went back once and that was it.
“I still remember watching those guys on the range at Pebble and being awed. Even later, when I’d established myself on tour, there were times when I would watch the other guys and say, ‘Can I possibly play well enough to compete with them?’ There was always doubt in my mind, even after I’d been out there four or five years. I wondered if I would ever play well enough to get noticed. I’ve always liked to perform, to show off. I didn’t know if I’d ever get to a stage like that where I’d have that chance.”
Winning a tournament — and beating Strange, a two-time U.S. Open champion and a former number one player in the world, to do it — was certainly a step in that direction. Stardom appeared to be looming on Rocco’s horizon. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only thing heading his way.
5
Down for the Count
AFTER THE WIN AT DORAL, Rocco became a second-tier star on tour. He wasn’t in the same category with Greg Norman or Nick Faldo or Fred Couples or Nick Price, who had supplanted Norman by then as the world’s number one player. But he was one level down, a solid player who had won on tour and was well-liked by golf fans and other players.
He signed a lucrative contract with Titleist in 1990 and became a media favorite. Buoyed by his victory, he gained more confidence when talking to the media and in his interactions with fans.
“People just liked him,” Jim Carter said. “He always had time for people — he was that way early on, when there weren’t many demands made on him, and he stayed that way even after he became better known. Rocco was the guy people could always go to for a quote or to help out with a clinic or to spend extra time signing autographs. I think he’s one of the few guys who actually enjoys all that. A lot of players see it as a burden. Rocco saw it as fun.”
He was easily recognizable too, in part because he was always talking and smiling, but
also because of the long putter.
“Long putters had always been thought of as being for old guys,” he said. “I was twenty-eight when I won using it. It definitely got me attention I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. But that wasn’t why I was using it. I felt comfortable with it and I putted better with it. Then, when my back started to bother me, it made my life a lot easier because I didn’t have to bend over to putt.”
As he got older and put on weight, Rocco began to experience occasional back pain, but it wasn’t anything he was that concerned with, because all professional golfers experience soreness in their backs at some point.
“The body just isn’t meant to spend hours and hours making the motion we make when we swing a golf club,” said Raymond Floyd, the four-time major champion who was another of Rocco’s early mentors. “It’s a lot like pitching. The arm and the shoulder just aren’t designed for the kind of pressure pitchers put on them when they throw a baseball, which is why so many pitchers have shoulder problems and elbow problems.
“It’s the same with golfers and their backs. The twist and the torque and the thrust you put into a swing just aren’t good for your back. One of Rocco’s strengths as a young player was always his desire. He loved practicing, loved going out there for hours and hours and hitting balls. It’s why he kept getting better. But it isn’t easy. I’ve always been able to keep my weight at a pretty good place, and my back would hurt anyway after long practice sessions. You throw in the added weight with all the time he spent practicing, it was almost inevitable that he was going to get hurt somewhere along the line.”
Strange and Carter both played with Rocco enough after his back troubles began to know how much pain he was in.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 7
