“I know enough about bad backs to know that it’s tough to get out of bed in the morning when your back hurts, much less try to swing a golf club and walk 18 holes,” Strange said.
Carter could often see that his friend was in pain even when he didn’t talk about it. “Sometimes you could just tell by the look on his face,” he said. “Later in my career, I tried to play through shoulder problems and I know how awful that was, so I think I have a sense of what he was going through back then.”
Back miseries are commonplace on tour. Today, most players go into a fitness trailer that travels from tournament to tournament to be stretched at length before they hit a single practice ball. Many work with back specialists and chiropractors to try to ward off back pain. Players like Fuzzy Zoeller, Fred Couples, and Davis Love III — among others — have been forced to change their practice patterns and have missed considerable playing time because of back troubles.
For years now, Couples has rarely practiced for very long because he doesn’t want to risk his back. In 1994, he was in contention on the last day at Doral when his back went into spasm on the driving range while he was warming up. He collapsed, screaming in agony, and had to be carried into the fitness trailer. Players who were on the range that day still vividly remember Couples crying out in pain and the sight of him on the ground.
“Worst pain I’ve ever felt,” Couples said years later. “When it happens that way, it’s as if someone has stuck a knife in your back. You’re on the ground before you know it.”
It didn’t happen exactly that way to Rocco, but it wasn’t all that different. His victory at Doral in March of 1991 spring-boarded him to his best season yet on tour. He finished the season with $597,438 in earnings, having finished in the top ten seven times and the top 25 fourteen times in 25 events. For the first time in his career, he qualified for the season-ending Tour Championship (only the top 30 players on the money list get to play), and he finished fifteenth on the final money list.
His life had changed completely since he first arrived on tour and either drove from tournament to tournament or searched out the cheapest airfare he could find when he had to fly. He and Linda had moved into a new house in Ponte Vedra, and his friends joked about how fast he spent money.
“We used to say that Rocco’s money must be on fire because he had to spend it before it burned up,” Lee Janzen said. “I can remember him telling Linda she needed to spend more than she was spending. How often does a husband tell a wife that? She was always very careful about money. Rocco wasn’t. It just wasn’t his way.”
A year later, Rocco didn’t play as well as he had in 1991, but he still had a solid year, finishing 49th on the money list. Not happy that he hadn’t finished higher than third in a tournament and that he had not played nearly as well as he expected to, he rededicated himself to the practice tee in 1993, and the work paid off.
In March, he finished tied for second at Bay Hill behind Ben Crenshaw, which was a thrill because it was Palmer’s tournament. In 1985, during Rocco’s senior year at Florida Southern, Palmer had given him a sponsor’s exemption into the tournament. Rocco had shown up with a Florida Southern bag and no caddy, and when Palmer spotted him playing a practice round carrying his bag (college players almost always carry their own bags in tournaments), he sent one of his caddies out with a Bay Hill bag and instructions to carry that bag for the youngster for the rest of the week.
Having a chance to win Palmer’s event meant a lot to Rocco. A month later at Greensboro, he won his second tournament, again in a playoff. This time it took four holes and his victim was Steve Elkington, one of his good friends on tour. Rocco finally birdied the fourth hole of the playoff to win.
By the time the tour got to Las Vegas, the last full-field tournament of 1993, Rocco had made more than $600,000 and was comfortably qualified for the next week’s Tour Championship, which was being held at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.
Since he was one of the bigger names in the Vegas field, he was asked to participate in that week’s Merrill Lynch shootout. The shootouts were held on Tuesdays to try to entice bigger crowds to come to the golf course on practice days. Ten players participated over nine holes, with the high score on each hole being eliminated until two players were left to play the last hole. Ties were broken by chip-offs or shots from a bunker — anything to entertain the crowd. They were lighthearted games, with CBS’s Gary McCord usually playing the role of MC and a couple of players wearing microphones so they could interact with McCord or chime in with wisecracks. Naturally, Rocco was one of the miked players.
The shootout was being staged on the back nine that day, and there were four players left — including Rocco — when they got to the 16th hole, which is a reachable par-five over water.
“I hit a three-wood for my second shot and got it onto the green,” Rocco remembered. “I handed the club to my caddy, took about two steps, and felt this spasm of pain like nothing else I had ever felt. It wasn’t the first time I’d had back pain, but nothing, I mean nothing, like this had happened before.
“I’m not quite sure how I walked onto the green, but I remember saying to my caddy, ‘I can’t move.’ I had to quit right there, couldn’t even think of putting. They took me straight to the fitness trailer, and the guys worked on me and gave me a lot of Advil. It loosened up that night, and I was able to play the first three days even though it was still pretty sore.”
In those days, Vegas was a 90-hole event with the cut coming after 54 holes. Rocco somehow made the cut. But on Saturday, playing the 12th hole, he felt the pain again. Not wanting to miss playing in San Francisco, he withdrew immediately and went back to the trailer for more work. Again, the boys in the trailer and lots of Advil helped. He took a couple of days off and then tried to play a practice round at Olympic the day before the Tour Championship started.
“I was out there early by myself and it felt okay for a while,” he said. “But then it went again. I was on the 15th hole, which is a par-three, and I tried to hit a seven-iron. There’s a bunker in front of that green that’s about 120 yards from the tee. I couldn’t reach it with my seven-iron.
“There was no one around, so I started to walk in because we weren’t that far from the clubhouse. There’s a big hill that leads up to the 18th green, and I couldn’t get up it. I kept going down, getting up, and going down again. Finally I ended up crawling up the hill to get to the clubhouse. I probably should have sent my caddy in to get a cart for me, but I was being stubborn. It probably took me an hour to go the last 300 yards.”
He was determined not to withdraw. For one thing, it was a prestigious event that he had worked hard to qualify to play in. For another, since there were no alternates, Steve Elkington, whom he was scheduled to play with on Thursday, would be left to play alone. And for another, there was no cut in the tournament, and if he finished 72 holes, the worst he could do was cash a check for $48,000 — which was not exactly money to be laughed off.
Rocco’s most vivid memory of the next day is Elkington. “He picked my ball up out of every single hole,” he said. “He figured my caddy had enough to do trying to get me around.”
He somehow managed to play all 72 holes — “and didn’t finish last” — but he flew home very concerned about the state of his back. “I was hoping, to be honest, that a good long rest would be all I needed,” he said. “The guys in the trailer had given me some rehab exercises to do during the off-season and they politely suggested I try to lose a little weight. I worked hard on the rehab and came out for ’94 hoping the rest and rehab would be enough. They weren’t.”
Rocco was not the only member of his family dealing with health issues — in fact, his problems were relatively minor compared to what his mother had gone through during 1993. Donna Mediate had been diagnosed that summer with multiple myeloma, cancer in her bone marrow. The prognosis was, in a word, terrible.
“I still remember everyone who knew my mom going on about how awful it was and wailing and crying,” he said
. “I understood all that, but I honestly didn’t believe that was the best way to help her. My mom is a strong woman. A lot of my toughness comes from her.
“When I found out what was going on, I sat down with her and told her, ‘Look, I know this is rough and it’s unfair. But you’re going to get better. You are going to deal with the treatments and whatever else you have to deal with, but I know you can handle it. I honestly believed that if all she heard from people was how terrible it was and that she was going to die, she would die. I told her she wasn’t going to die and she needed to look at this as a fight and just go and win the damn fight.
“I upset some people by saying all that, because they thought I was being cavalier about it. I wasn’t being cavalier. I thought if I told her she should feel sorry for herself, she would. If I told her to go get better, she would.”
Donna ended up going to the University of Arkansas for a bone marrow transplant and treatment. She and Tony made the trip more times than either can remember, but a year later she was cancer free.
“Rocco was tough on me,” she said years later. “The things he was saying weren’t necessarily easy to hear, but they were probably good for me to hear.” She smiled. “The bottom line is I’m still here.”
Eight years later, Donna had a second bout with cancer. This time it was lymphoma. There was no surgery, but there was more chemo and more radiation. Once again, her son more or less ordered her to get through it. Once again, she did.
“If only,” he said years later, “I was as good at ordering myself to get healthy. I might have won four or five majors by now.”
ROCCO BEGAN 1994 BY PLAYING in five early-season tournaments. Even though he was still hurting, he managed to make four cuts. By spring, the pain was so bad that after being forced to skip the Masters, he went to see Dr. Arthur Day, a noted back specialist, in Gainesville.
“He told me I had a choice: I could do surgery right away to repair my disk or I could do surgery later to repair my disk. ‘You’re going to have to have surgery, especially if you want to keep playing golf for a living,’ he told me. ‘It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.’ ”
Rocco knew that surgery would means months of rehab and time away from golf and the tour. He also knew that the U.S. Open was only a few weeks away and it was at Oakmont — the golf course where he had first started to wonder how good he might become after playing there following the last round of the ’83 Open.
“Plus, it was a home game for me, and I knew it was going to be Arnold’s last Open and I might get paired with him because the USGA does stuff like that,” he said. “I decided to wait at least until the Open pairings came out.”
David Fay, the executive director of the USGA, still did the pairings in those days. He always liked to put together three-somes for the first two days that made sense for one reason or another: It could be three past U.S. Amateur champions or two players who had once met in an Open playoff.
In this case, Fay wanted to put together a threesome for Palmer that would be meaningful, since it would be his last U.S. Open. He chose John Mahaffey to be one member of Palmer’s group because Mahaffey had won the PGA Championship at Oakmont in 1978 and thus had history with the golf course, just as Palmer did.
Then, looking through the names in front of him, Fay came to Rocco’s. “It was a natural,” he said. “Pennsylvania kid, grew up near Oakmont, plus I knew that Arnold had been one of his mentors.”
As soon as he heard who he was paired with, Rocco was going to play if he had to be pushed around the golf course in a wheel-chair. “I had to try to play,” he said. “I mean, Arnold’s last Open, being paired with him? Come on. There was no choice.”
For 27 holes, the back held up and Rocco was on the leader board, only a couple of shots behind leaders Ernie Els and Colin Montgomerie. But on a steamy, humid day — the temperatures reached record highs that week in Pittsburgh — Rocco felt the back go again as he, Palmer, and Mahaffey walked to the 10th tee.
The two days had been remarkably emotional. Palmer was cheered every step of the way, every swing, every putt, every tipped cap. Rocco could see how emotional Palmer was getting as the day wore on and he told himself he had to hang in and at least finish the round. He wanted to walk up the 18th fairway with Palmer, to be on the green to hear the cheers, and to give him a hug when he finished. What’s more, he didn’t want to take away from Palmer’s moment by having to leave him to finish in a twosome with Mahaffey.
So he fought his way through the last nine holes. At the 17th, a short par-four that some players can drive or at least come very close to the green off the tee, he hit a five-iron.
“Why’d you hit an iron there?” Palmer asked, as they walked down the fairway.
“Because I can’t make a full swing,” Rocco answered through gritted teeth. “I’m just trying to finish.”
Fortunately the 18th hole was playing downwind, and Rocco was able to half-swing a driver and get a five-iron onto the green. The hole was playing so short that day that Palmer, who had been hitting fairway woods well short of most of the par-fours all day, was able to reach the green in two.
As the three players began their walk up to the green, Rocco and Mahaffey hung back for a long moment to allow Palmer to walk onto the green alone. The cheers were absolutely deafening. It seemed as if all thirty thousand spectators on the grounds were ringing the 18th green. On the 10th tee, a few yards from the green, Strange and the other players in his group stopped to applaud and to watch as Palmer walked onto the green. He was crying by then, the tears streaming down his face.
Mahaffey and Rocco made sure Palmer was the last one to putt out. “Can you imagine what it would have been like, putting after Arnold had finished?” Rocco said. “I mean, are you kidding? No way.”
After Palmer holed his last putt, Rocco wrapped his arms around him. Both men were crying by that point. “All of this,” Rocco said to Palmer, gesturing in the direction of the thousands of people around the green, “is because of you.”
Years later, Palmer remembered that moment and that comment. “I think I said something like, ‘I hope just a little bit of that is true,’ ” he said. “That was one of my more special moments because of where it was and the way the fans acted, but also because of what Rocco said on the green after my last putt.”
Rocco was talking about Palmer’s importance to the growth of the game and the fact that his popularity and charisma had taken the tour from being a minor league sport to a major league sport. Tiger Woods would arrive in 1996 to take golf to another level, but Palmer had been the Man long before anyone used the phrase.
As he walked off the green, trailing Palmer and the myriad cameras following him, Rocco’s back was killing him. He had managed to hang on and make the cut, but he wasn’t certain he would be able to play on Saturday, much as he wanted to.
“It was the U.S. Open, for God’s sake,” he said. “You don’t WD [withdraw] from the Open if you can walk. I could walk — it just hurt like hell when I did.”
He managed to make it around the golf course Saturday but shot 77, feeling pain every time he swung the club. “At best I was taking a half-swing most of the time. The doctor had told me I wouldn’t make it any worse by playing, but I was beginning to wonder.”
After he had signed his scorecard, he walked very slowly up the steps to the locker room. There was no air-conditioning in the Oakmont clubhouse except for one area off the locker room, which had been air-conditioned for the week. It was supposed to be the players’ dining area, but it had become, for the most part, the players’ cooling-off area, since the rest of the locker room was as steamy as it was outside.
Rocco walked in, collapsed in a chair, and saw his friend Fuzzy Zoeller sitting a few feet away, also recovering from 18 holes in the brutal heat. Zoeller, who had been through back surgery several years earlier, looked at the younger man sympathetically.
“You look awful,” he said. “You look worse than I do, and I can ba
rely stand up I’m so tired.”
“I’m in pain, serious pain,” Rocco said. “I can’t play golf like this.”
“You’re right, you can’t,” Zoeller said. “And it isn’t going to get better on its own. It’s going to get worse.”
“What do I do?”
Zoeller shrugged. “You get the surgery done as soon as possible. Get it over with. The sooner you get it done, the sooner you start getting better.”
Rocco knew he was right. He withdrew from the Open, flew home, and called Dr. Day, asking him how soon he could have surgery done to repair his bulging disk.
The date for the surgery was July 12, 1994. “Eight o’clock in the morning,” Rocco remembered. “It took about four hours. When it was over, the doctor came in and said, ‘Now the work begins.’ ”
The immediate aftermath of the surgery was extraordinarily painful. “It took me two days to get out of bed to go to the bathroom,” he remembered. “I finally got up when the doctor came in and threatened to put a catheter in me if I didn’t get up in the next five minutes.”
Five days after the surgery, Rocco went home. Then, as the doctor had explained, the work began. “I became a rehab junkie,” Rocco said, laughing. “As soon as I was able, I was in rehab every morning. I worked for hours and hours. It was a little bit like when I was a kid and all I did from sunup to sundown was play golf or practice golf. Now, all I did was exercises to strengthen my back and workouts so I could lose weight. If I wasn’t working out, I was resting to get ready for my next workout.”
His goal was to come back and play golf at the start of 1995. In September, two months after the surgery, he walked onto his back porch with a wedge in his hand and decided to try to hit a couple of balls and see what happened.
“First one, I went down,” he said. “I mean, went down. Fortunately I didn’t hurt myself. I really think it was just my balance — or lack of it. I got up, took a couple more swings, half-swings, really, and I was okay. It was a step. It really felt good just to have a club in my hand again and hit a golf ball.”
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 8
