The time at home was enjoyable in one sense — he got to spend some extended time with his family. By then, Nico, a second son, had been born, and Rocco Jr. was old enough (almost four) to really enjoy seeing his father for weeks at a time instead of days at a time.
“In truth, that was probably the best year of our marriage,” Linda said. “That’s not to say it wasn’t stressful; it was. I had to be the positive one all the time even though I was just as scared as he was about whether he was going to be able to come back or not. I watched him go through that rehab and put in the hours and hours of work, and I was truly amazed. He knew he had to get in shape, he knew he had to lose weight, and he knew he had to do the rehab on the back. Once he made up his mind to do it, there wasn’t anything that was going to stop him from doing it.
“The best part, though, was that he was there. I think he really enjoyed having that time with his children and I think it strengthened our relationship, because he wasn’t living out of a suitcase — there one week, gone the next. In many ways, it was a wonderful time in our lives.”
But there was also a good deal of fear. On the day of the surgery, Rocco woke up convinced he would never play again. It took him a while to get past that feeling.
“I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d be able to play again,” he said. “I don’t mean play as in go out and swing a golf club, I mean play at the level I’d been at before I got hurt. The margin for error on the PGA Tour is so tiny. I had to deal with the idea that I might not make it all the way back. When I thought about that, I’d catch myself thinking, ‘I’m thirty-one years old; I’m married with two young children. If I can’t play golf, what will I do?’ ”
Just as when he finished college and went to Q-School, there was no backup plan.
But he smiled. “Whenever I got to that point, I’d just tell myself, ‘That’s it. Stop thinking that way. You’re going to make it back. There’s no other option.’ ”
By December he felt good enough to play in a team event in California with Lee Janzen. “We even played okay,” he said. “Won a couple matches. I still wasn’t 100 percent, but I felt good. I had lost a bunch of weight and I felt stronger. I started the next year thinking I was just going to keep getting better.
“Except I didn’t.”
The 1995 season was probably the most difficult of Rocco’s career. At times, the back felt okay. At other times, it hurt and he had a hard time playing at all, much less playing well. It was one step forward, two steps back. He made the cut at the Players Championship — finishing 55th — but had to take a few weeks off afterward.
“Every time I got to a point where I thought I was turning a corner, the pain would come back,” he said. “It wasn’t anything as dramatic as when I first hurt it, but it was really hard to play golf. It was frustrating as hell. I called Dr. Day and said, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing; these things take time.’ But it wasn’t working. I knew I had to take a break and rest it again. Playing wasn’t doing it any good.”
Since he had won a tournament in 1993, Rocco was exempt through the end of 1995 but not beyond. He had played in only six tournaments in 1994 and he had played in eighteen in 1995 before deciding he had to stop. The combined twenty-four starts were fewer than he typically played in a year. Since his Doral victory had earned him a two-year exemption, Rocco thought he should be entitled to extend his exemption through 1996, making that, in essence, his second year. He decided to take his case to the tour’s policy board.
“Before they met, I talked to the players on the board and they all told me they thought I was right, that I had a good case,” he said. “I met with the board at the Western Open [in late June] and explained that my injury had basically cost me a year of my two-year exemption. They listened and said they would let me know.”
The policy board has nine members — four players, four businessmen who are tour sponsors in some way and are handpicked by the commissioner, and the president of the PGA of America. Many players don’t like this system because it means if there is an issue in which the players oppose the commissioner, the four players can be outvoted by the five nonplayers.
This wasn’t one of those issues. The vote was unanimous — to deny Rocco’s request for an extension. The board’s reasoning was simple: There were rules in place that allowed an injured player to receive a medical exemption, but not for an entire year — unless he didn’t play at all for an entire year. Rocco had played in eighteen tournaments in 1995. Since he had played in twenty-four tournaments in 1993, his last healthy year, he would be given a six-tournament exemption at the start of 1996.
He had made $105,618 in the tournaments he had played in 1995. At year’s end, the 125th-ranked player on the money list would earn slightly more than $142,000. That meant, under the tour’s rules, that Rocco would have six tournaments to earn enough to exceed the difference. If he did, he was exempt for the rest of the year. If not, he would be a nonexempt player who would have to hope tournament directors would give him sponsor exemptions.
It was Commissioner Tim Finchem who walked out to the range, where Rocco was chatting with friends, to give him the news that his request had been turned down. “I knew he wasn’t going to be happy,” he said. “I’m the commissioner. It was my job to tell him and explain to him why we really didn’t have the option to give him anything more than what the rules for medical exemptions allowed.”
He never really got the chance to explain. “He got about as far as ‘The vote was nine-zero against you’ before I exploded,” Rocco remembered, shaking his head at the memory. “I just went nuts, screaming at him, telling him what I thought of the decision and what I thought of him. I was over the line — out of line — but I was really hot. I had no idea what kind of shape my back was going to be in at the start of the next year. To be honest, I was scared because who knew if I would be able to play well at the start of the year? I hadn’t played very much good golf since the surgery, so there wasn’t really reason to have much confidence at that point.
“Even so, the way I spoke to him was wrong. I knew it as soon as he walked away.”
Rocco flew home from Chicago the next morning. A couple of days later, he called Finchem’s office and asked if he could come by to see the commissioner. “I walked in and told him I was sorry for the way I’d behaved on the range,” he said. “I said I still disagreed with the decision, but that was no excuse for my behavior. He was cool about it. He said he understood and there were no hard feelings.”
The rest of the year was spent back at the rehab drawing board. “I really didn’t play at all for months,” Rocco said. “I was just working to try to make the back stronger, doing the exercises the doctor had given me. I was losing weight, getting into really good shape again. It was almost like right after the surgery. I started hitting some balls and playing again a little bit in the fall. I wanted to come out of the box ready to play because I knew I only had six events to make my money.”
He decided to start his season in Phoenix, a tournament he had always liked on a golf course — the TPC of Scottsdale — he liked. “I felt good physically and mentally going in there. The back felt strong. I’d hit a lot of golf balls and felt ready. I knew I had to make, like, $40,000 [actually a little more than $37,000] and I wanted to do it as quickly as I could just to get that pressure off my back — so to speak.”
He was in contention the entire week at Phoenix. There is no tournament on the tour with bigger, louder crowds than Phoenix. Being loud and drunk at Phoenix is considered the right way to behave as opposed to other tournaments, where it is likely to get you removed from the grounds. Some players have trouble dealing with the Phoenix crowd mentality; Rocco — naturally — thrived.
“I love it there, always have,” he said. “Hey, golf is supposed to be fun for everyone — players, fans, all of us. As long as they don’t yell in the middle of my backswing, I’m fine. Hey, if I was watching I’d be yelling too.”
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bsp; With the crowds very much in his corner, Rocco put together four solid rounds, 68–67–70–69, to finish in sixth place. That finish earned him $42,088 — almost five thousand dollars more than he needed to clinch his playing privileges for the entire year. “I felt good all week,” he said. “The 68 the first day was big — gave me a confidence boost. I think the fans knew I’d been hurt. They were great every day.
“What a relief that week was,” he said. “It meant I could make my schedule for the rest of the year, my travel plans — everything. Plus, I didn’t have to worry about asking people for a spot in their events. I’ve had friends who have gone through that, and it’s no fun. You don’t like to be dependent on anyone else to have the chance to do your job. After Phoenix, I felt like I had my job back.”
He did his job extremely well for the rest of that year. At the Players Championship in March, he was having a reasonably good tournament, heading for about a 30th-place finish on Sunday, when he suddenly got hot on the back nine. He birdied the last six holes — the first player ever to accomplish that feat on the TPC Sawgrass — and jumped into a tie for fourth place, three shots behind winner Fred Couples. Since the Players has the biggest full-field purse of the year (in 2008 it was $9 million, with $1,620,000 to the winner), the tie for fourth combined with the sixth at Phoenix meant that Rocco had clinched his card for 1997 before the end of March 1996.
The rest of that year went about as well as Rocco could have hoped — except for the fact that he didn’t win again. He played twenty-one times — dropping a few tournaments from his normal schedule to rest his back — and was in the top ten almost half the time (10). He earned a little more than $475,000 for the year, which put him a very solid 40th on the money list. The sleepless nights wondering if his back would ever be strong enough for him to compete on tour again were in the past. He and Linda had had their third son, Marco, in 1995, and all was well in Mediate Nation.
6
The Good Life
ROCCO’S COMEBACK YEAR, 1996, was his eleventh on the PGA Tour, although almost two years had been lost because of his back troubles.
“Even when I played in ’94 and ’95, I couldn’t really play,” he said. “I was just trying to get through tournaments without falling flat on my face — literally.”
He had made a total of 12 cuts during those two years and finished in the top ten three times, never coming close to contending. He had gone from a hot young player to a player whose future appeared to be in doubt. He had gone from averaging just under $500,000 a year in on-course earnings from 1990 to 1993 to making about $150,000 combined during those two injury-plagued years.
“Money became a concern during that time,” he said. “Really, what saved me was that Titleist stuck with me. They kept paying me even when I couldn’t play and certainly couldn’t do anything to promote their product. That and the fact that Frank had talked me into getting disability insurance.”
Frank was Frank Zoracki, who had become both a friend and a business adviser to Rocco through the years. Zoracki was a couple of years older than Rocco and they had met quite by accident one afternoon at Greensburg Country Club.
Zoracki had joined Greensburg for two reasons: He had gotten hooked on golf even though he hadn’t played it much as a kid, and he thought it was a good place to network. He had graduated from the University of Pittsburgh as an aspiring dentist, but when he didn’t get into Pitt dental school he had gone to work for Prudential Insurance.
“I’d become a decent player,” he said. “And the golf course, specifically the country club, was a good place to meet people who had money and needed insurance.”
Zoracki was playing with some friends in the fall of 1986, when he encountered Rocco and his friends on the golf course.
“It wasn’t long after Rocco had gotten his card for the first time,” Zoracki remembered. “I was out playing with some friends and I think I had missed a putt on the 15th hole — a par-three — which had put my partner and me down in the match we were playing. I guess I was a little bit annoyed and I was a tad slow walking off the green. As I was about to leave, a ball lands on the green a couple yards away from me.
“I wasn’t in the best mood as it was, so I looked back at the tee and yelled something like ‘Hey, watch what you’re doing.’ I remember I got some attitude back, something along the lines of I should be clearing the green faster. I walked off kind of angry, and when I got to the next tee, one of my buddies said, ‘Hey, that was Rocco Mediate you were yelling at just now.’
“I knew the name. I’d seen stories in the local paper about him when he was in college and when he got his card. Plus, I had sold some insurance to his parents, so I was familiar with the name. But at that moment, I really didn’t care. I was like, ‘I don’t care who the guy is, he just hit into me.’ ”
By the time Zoracki had finished his round, he had cooled off. When Rocco and his friends walked into the grill room after they had finished their round, Zoracki went over and introduced himself. There were no hard feelings on either side. A couple of days later, Zoracki was in Tony Mediate’s salon getting a haircut, when Rocco walked in.
“I asked him if he had any insurance,” Zoracki said. “He said he didn’t, and I told him it would be a good idea if he got some.”
Out of a shouting match on the golf course and a brief discussion about insurance, a friendship was born. A couple of months after buying life insurance through Zoracki, Rocco ran into him in West Palm Beach, when he was getting ready to start the new PGA Tour season.
“We played together a couple of times,” Zoracki said. “I was down there on a golf trip, and one of the guys I was with was Arnie Cutrell, who was one of Rocco’s buddies. So we hung out quite a bit.”
Eighteen months later, after Rocco and Linda had gotten married, he asked Zoracki to put together a medical-insurance plan for him. While he was at it, Zoracki suggested he buy disability insurance.
“Waste of money” was Rocco’s first response.
Which made sense. After all, he was a twenty-five-year-old golfer. What was the likelihood that he was going to become disabled and unable to continue playing golf?
Zoracki kept after him. “It wasn’t an easy sell,” he said. “To begin with, the only company that would even write disability insurance for a golfer was Lloyds of London, and it was expensive — several thousand dollars a year. Rocco kept telling me it was crazy, but I kept after him. Athletes get injured. He was planning a family. I thought it made sense. He finally did it, but every year when he had to write the check to pay the premium, he would scream and yell at me about wasting his money.”
There was no more screaming and yelling in 1994 and 1995. It took a while for Lloyds to be satisfied with all the paperwork needed, but once the claim was settled, Rocco got about $25,000 a month in disability insurance while he was off the tour.
“It was a lifesaver,” he said. “Anything else Z does the rest of his life, I’ll be grateful to him for that.”
The two are now close friends and Zoracki, who left Prudential after ten years to go work for Northwestern Mutual Life, is now a money manager, handling all of Rocco’s finances and acting as his agent most of the time in recent years. He has also become Rocco’s bad cop, the guy who delivers the bad news to people when Rocco has to say no — or, worse, has to turn what was a yes into a no.
“I’ve kind of pleaded with him for years to say no first when he’s not sure about something,” Zoracki said. “I’ve told him it’s a lot easier to turn a no into a yes than the other way around. He hates saying no to people, and I get that; it’s part of what makes him who he is. But sometimes because he doesn’t want to say no, he’ll say yes to an outing or a speech and then when he thinks about it and realizes he can’t do it, he’ll just say something like, ‘Z, you gotta get me out of this.’ That isn’t always pleasant for me.”
Zoracki does it because, like most of the people in Rocco’s life, he is intensely loyal to him. “Rocc is Rocc and
that takes in a lot of territory,” Zoracki said, laughing. “He is, first and foremost, a lot of fun to be around. What you see is what you get. He’s not phony at all. The guy people see on TV who they like so much is the same guy you see when you’re with him a lot.
“But he does have an obsessive personality. He’s always been that way from what I can tell. He can’t just have a Mercedes, he has to have the best Mercedes. A restaurant isn’t just good, it is the absolute best, and when you go in there with him he’s going to order for you and you damn well better like it. He never just likes anything. He either loves it or hates it. There’s no in-between. If you ask him about a round of golf, he’ll almost never say he played okay. He’ll tell you, ‘I shot a million,’ or ‘I shot nothing.’ There’s nothing ordinary in his life.”
The years between 1996 and 2002 were better than ordinary for Rocco but short of extraordinary. He won for the third time on tour in 1999 at Phoenix, the place where he had announced his triumphant return to the tour in 1996. One of the players he beat down the stretch on that Sunday was Tiger Woods, who ended finishing third.
“The rest of my life I can tell people I had a chance to beat Tiger on a Sunday and did it,” he said. “What’s more, I did it head-to-head, paired with him Saturday and Sunday. It was nice to do it — at least once.”
He won again the next year at the Buick Open and two years later won Greensboro for the second time. That gave him five wins on tour, and after sixteen solid years — injuries notwithstanding — he had pieced together a very good career.
“Think about what it means to play fifteen years and win five times — especially dealing with coming back after the surgery,” said Curtis Strange. “What that means is that the guy wasn’t just a player who could get hot on occasion and play well. It means he was a very good player — a consistently good player — who, when his putter got going, could play with anybody. Those may not be Hall of Fame numbers, but they’re very good ones.”
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 9
