Not long after Marco’s birth, Rocco and Linda built a very big house at the TPC Sawgrass. It was, as his friends would say, “typical Rocco.”
“The in-home theater was like nothing you’d ever seen in your life,” Lee Janzen said. “It was amazing.”
Life was good during this period. The arrival of Tiger Woods on tour had sent purses skyrocketing and it coincided with Rocco playing the best — and healthiest — golf of his life. The difference in purses can be seen in microcosm through Rocco’s annual earnings. In 1996, the year that Woods joined the tour in August but had no influence on purses, Rocco finished 40th on the money list and earned $475,940 for the year.
Three years later, after the tour had renegotiated its TV contracts in the first year A.T. — After Tiger — and demanded that title sponsors increase their purses to reflect the sport’s newfound popularity, Rocco finished two places higher on the money list — 38th — and made more than double the money he had made in 1996, finishing with $963,075 in earnings.
Everyone on tour recognized that Woods was making them all into wealthy men. Even so, there was some initial resentment among many players about Woods’s transcendent fame and the tour’s willingness to do backflips to keep the new star happy. Some players half-jokingly began referring to their workplace as the TGA Tour — Tiger Golf Association Tour — and wondered if all of those flocking to pay homage to Woods had ever heard of Hogan, Palmer, or Nicklaus.
Woods and his entourage were demanding and, at times, arrogant — especially early on. Woods turned pro after winning his third straight U.S. Amateur title. Like any rookie pro, he was entitled to up to seven sponsor exemptions for the rest of 1996. Unlike many rookies, he quickly found there wasn’t a tournament on earth that didn’t want to give him an exemption, since he was the biggest draw in golf the instant he turned pro. Woods’s initial goal was to avoid going to Qualifying School, which a handful of players had been able to do in the past. He needed to win as much money as the 125th-ranked player on the money list in his seven tournaments to avoid Q-School.
The suspense didn’t last long. After finishing in a tie for 60th place in his debut in Milwaukee, Woods went on to win in Las Vegas and at Walt Disney World. The first victory guaranteed him a two-year exemption and eliminated any thoughts of having to go to Q-School. A few days later, having accepted a sponsor’s exemption to the Buick Challenge in Callaway Gardens, Georgia, Woods withdrew, saying he was exhausted. He also skipped a dinner honoring him as the college player of the year that had been scheduled in Callaway Gardens for the night prior to the first round, specifically because he had planned to play that week.
Two weeks later, after his win at Disney, Woods told the locker room security guards to keep the media outside while he was cleaning out his locker. PGA Tour rules are very specific about media access to locker rooms, and a tour official, Wes Seeley, stepped in and told the guards that the media should be allowed inside.
“The tour makes the rules for everybody,” he said. “The locker room is open when Palmer’s in there, when Nicklaus is in there, when Watson is in there, and when Tiger Woods is in there too. The kid isn’t the fifth Beatle.”
Seeley’s approach was both correct and admirable. Of course, years later friends couldn’t resist pointing out to him that he had been right: Woods wasn’t the fifth Beatle. He was John Lennon.
These incidents were simply part of Woods’s celebrity learning curve. There were others: After winning the Masters by 12 shots in April of 1997, he turned down an invitation to join President Bill Clinton and Rachel Robinson at a ceremony in New York marking the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color line. Although he defended the decision for a while afterward, Woods later wrote a letter to Mrs. Robinson, apologizing for not being there.
While some players snickered at Woods’s occasional off-the-golf-course errors — there wasn’t much they could criticize on the golf course — Rocco never went that route. He understood from the beginning what Woods was going to mean to golf and to all those who played the game. Plus, as he put it, “I liked the kid.”
Woods was initially shy around his peers, in part because most were older than he was, in part because he understood the resentment some of them felt. But the more he got to know other players, the more comfortable he became. And the more comfortable he became, the more they found that they liked him.
“Tiger is a guy’s guy,” Rocco said. “He likes to tell bad jokes and talk about ball games and give everyone a hard time. Plus, he can take it when he gets it back. Once people got the chance to know him, they liked him.”
Not surprisingly, Rocco was one of the players who went out of his way to make Woods feel comfortable early on. “To be honest, I try to do that with all the young players,” he said. “I remember how intimidated I felt when I first came out and how much it meant to me when guys like [Raymond] Floyd and [Tom] Weiskopf and Curtis [Strange] went out of their way to try to help me out. I try to encourage guys, point them in the right direction when I can.
“With Tiger it was different. He had all sorts of people giving him advice, whether it was his dad or his agents or his swing coach — whoever. He didn’t need me or anyone for any of that. But I tried to make him feel like he was one of the guys. The way you do that is you give someone a hard time, joke around with them. I think he always appreciated that about me.”
Woods always enjoyed the handful of people on tour not intimidated by him. Rocco was one of those people — along with good friends like Mark O’Meara and John Cook — and Tiger felt comfortable with him, on the golf course and off it.
“We were friends almost from the beginning,” Woods said during the 2008 Open. “Rocc was always a guy who was easy to be around. He’s been a good friend, a real friend almost since the day I got out here.”
While Woods’s career was skyrocketing, Rocco’s was doing just fine. His victory at the Buick Open in 2000 helped him win more than $1 million in a season for the first time: $1,320,278. He made even more than that over the next three years, peaking in 2002, when he made $2,040,676. Those winnings were once again a reflection of the post-Tiger boom in purses. Just eleven years earlier, Rocco had made just under $600,000 for the year and had finished 16th on the money list. The $2 million–plus he made in ’02 landed him 21st on the money list.
In 2001, Rocco seriously contended in a major for the first time. As consistently as he had played for most of his career, he had never been able to play well in the majors. During his first fifteen years on tour, he had played in twenty-five majors and had only finished in the top 20 twice: a tie for 16th place in the 1991 PGA Championship and a tie for 18th in the 1996 British Open.
“I actually had a chance for three rounds at the [U.S.] Open at Pebble in ’92,” he said. “But then, that last day when the wind blew so bad, I shot 80-something [84] and dropped way back. I think I finished a millionth.” Close — he was tied for 44th after a day in which more than half the field shot higher than 80 in gale-force winds.
It always bothered Rocco that he hadn’t played better in the majors. Like every golfer, he cherished the majors and had grown up dreaming about playing in them and playing well in them.
“I love them all for different reasons,” he said. “I mean, the Masters is great — the golf course, all the traditions, the green jacket — I love going there. The British Open is so different than anything we see all year long. I love the golf courses and the wind and the way you have to play the ball on the ground. The PGA is probably the fairest test of the four — the golf course is always hard but never brutal.
“But the [U.S.] Open has always been my favorite tournament. It’s our national championship, and that means a lot to me. I still remember watching Watson chip in at Pebble Beach [in 1982] to beat Nicklaus and jumping out of my chair screaming. That was so exciting, I almost felt like I’d chipped the damn ball in.
“I’ve always liked the fact that when you go to the Open you kno
w, you just know, it’s going to be ridiculously hard. I don’t mean that to sound like it’s unfair. Sometimes, yes, they’ve let it go too far. That’s the tough thing about what they do. You can push the golf course right to the brink and it’s absolutely great, or you can go over that brink by just a little bit and then people start screaming.
“I thought Tom Meeks did a really good job when he was setting up the golf courses for the USGA. Wonderful man. I really like him. But I also like — no, I love — what Mike Davis has done since he took over the last few years. When I go to the Open I always feel like a little kid because I’m so excited to be there.”
The 2001 majors season got off to a great start for Rocco when he finished 15th at the Masters. He actually got to within four shots of the lead, held (surprise) by Tiger Woods, on Saturday after shooting a 66. That put him in one of the late groups on Sunday afternoon and gave him an outside chance — really outside — to win. He shot 73: disappointing but not devastating.
“I would like to have played better, obviously,” he said. “But it was really the first time I’d played late there on Sunday, so it was a new experience — a good one, but a new one for sure. Plus, I think I’d have had to shoot 59 to catch Tiger, so it wasn’t like I blew a chance to win by not playing well.”
Actually, a 64 would have caught Woods, but no one else in the field came close to that score — one shot higher than the course record — that afternoon. So Rocco walked away feeling pretty good about his performance. Not only was that his highest finish ever in a major, but it guaranteed him a spot in the Masters in 2002 regardless of how he played for the rest of the year, since the top 16 finishers in each Masters are guaranteed a spot in the tournament a year later.
He arrived in Tulsa for the 2001 U.S. Open at Southern Hills feeling good about his game. He liked the golf course and he liked the setup. He didn’t even mind the hot weather. “Could have been worse,” he said. “It was hot, but not crazy hot.”
There was just one problem: his back. “It would still hurt me periodically,” he said. “It hadn’t gotten to the point where I fell down or couldn’t play at all for a good long while, but some days it would just be cranky.”
On Wednesday, as Rocco was hitting balls on the range with Rick Smith watching, the back was very cranky. “I told him he should withdraw,” Smith said. “I mean, he was in real pain. The first couple of days he was practically chipping the ball around the golf course. How he did what he did I’ll never know.”
Unable to take a full swing, he still played solid golf for two days. By Friday night, after a lot of Advil and time in the fitness trailer, he felt better. The hot weather no doubt helped too. On Saturday — just as at Augusta — he really got rolling, shooting a three-under-par 67 to pull within one shot of coleaders Retief Goosen and Stewart Cink going into the final round. That put him in the second-to-last group on Sunday, and he went to bed Saturday night knowing he had a legitimate chance to win the U.S. Open. Not only was he one shot out of the lead, but Woods — having one of his rare off weeks — was nowhere in sight of the leader board. Rocco would be competing against other mortals on Sunday.
“I loved the way it felt to know I had a real chance to win,” he said. “A lot of times you go to bed on Saturday night at a tournament thinking, ‘If I can go real low on Sunday I have a chance.’ And there are times when that happens, but it doesn’t happen very often. To go to bed knowing you can just go out and keep playing the way you’ve been playing and it can be good enough to win is exciting.”
He played well again on Sunday, continuing to find fair-ways and greens consistently. But his putter failed him in the clutch. Two three-putts on the back nine doomed his chances. He ended the day shooting a respectable 72. That left him alone in fourth place, two shots behind Goosen and Mark Brooks, who played off the next day for the championship, and one shot behind Cink.
“Obviously I’d have loved to have had those three-putts back, but I wasn’t exactly the Lone Ranger that day,” Rocco said, referencing the fact that Goosen and Cink both three-putted the 18th green, Goosen from five feet to create the playoff with Brooks. “I was happy with myself in that my swing held up in the heat and I hung in there and had a chance. Most of all I came away feeling like I wanted to be there again — to have that chance to win, at any major but especially at an Open.”
Even though he continued to play well the rest of the year, the back still flared up periodically, getting stiff and tight and making it hard to take a full swing. Four times he was forced to withdraw from tournaments — including the British Open — after the first round. “That was a huge disappointment,” he said. “To go over there, to be playing in a major and not be able to tee it up, to be honest, it just sucked.”
But he had reached the point where he accepted the fact that his back was going to give him trouble at times. He had a surgically repaired back, he was in a constant battle to keep his weight down, and he played golf for a living. That was his life.
“Do I wonder at times what kind of career I might have had if I hadn’t had the back problems?” he said. “Occasionally. But not too often. For one thing, there’s no point; it doesn’t change things. For another, I know I’m lucky to have played as much as I’ve played for as long as I’ve played and to play as well as I’ve played.”
He had another top ten finish in a major in 2002, finishing sixth at the PGA Championship, five shots behind winner Rich Beem. That performance, along with the win at Greensboro, helped him put together his best year on tour, which, as he pointed out, wasn’t a bad thing, with his fortieth birthday falling that year in December.
“Things were good during that period,” he said. “I was healthy, I was playing well, I was able to take enough time off during the year that I had a chance to be with the boys and got to watch them grow up. I never pushed them to get into organized sports. I always thought if you did that it meant they would be running in different directions all the time. If they wanted to play a sport, that was fine. But I didn’t want all our family time spent in cars going to different ball games every weekend when I was home.
“They’re pretty good athletes. They play some golf. But none of them is obsessed with a sport the way I became obsessed with golf. To be honest, I think that’s a good thing.”
Linda was traveling far less now with three children at home, but Rocco still felt as if the marriage was on solid ground. “At the very least, we were both very devoted to raising our children,” he said. “Maybe I was a little selfish at times because I spent time with the boys and with my friends but not as much time as I should have spent with her. But I don’t think it caused any problems back then. She was very patient with me.”
Linda remembers those years — after the birth of Marco, when Rocco was healthy and playing well — as quite happy.
“It’s never easy when your husband is away a lot or when your father is away a lot,” she said. “And I really didn’t travel at all after Marco was born. But Rocco was happy, and that made things better for everyone when he was at home. Plus, I actually had time to get to know people in the community and to feel as if I was a part of it. The first few years we were married I traveled so much all my friends were people on the tour. That changed when I got off the road. I really felt comfortable living where we were living.”
The following year, 2002, was a lot like 2001. Rocco played well, but the back continued to flare up at times. When he asked Dr. Day about it, the doctor told him that was the way it was going to be as long as he played golf. His back was healed, but it was never going to be as strong or pain resistant as it had been before he was hurt — especially playing golf for a living. There was nothing as dramatic as the three-wood at Vegas in ’93, just some nagging pain. He worked on his rehab exercises, made sure he got stretched in the trailer before he played, and felt fine on the golf course more often than not.
It was also that year that he and Linda — “really me, a lot more than her” — decided to move
south to Naples. The winter weather there was warmer than in north Florida, there were more good golf courses, and Rocco had heard the schools were excellent. He bought a piece of property near the water and began building a house almost as big as the one in Ponte Vedra.
“Looking back, it was a mistake,” he said. “I thought the golf would be better, the schools would be better, everything would be better. In the end, the schools were worse — we ended up putting all three boys in private schools for a while — and the hassles involved with moving and building a house and maintaining a house like that weren’t worth it. We had a comfortable, familiar way of life in Ponte Vedra and we left it all behind. If I had thought the thing through more thoroughly, we probably never would have moved.”
Of course, it isn’t Rocco’s way to sit and think things through in great detail. Once he knows an idea makes sense, he acts on it instantly. He is the kind of person who never tells a waiter in a restaurant he needs a few minutes to look at the menu. He walks in knowing exactly what he’s going to order.
Which is why Linda knew it was pointless to argue with him when he started talking excitedly about moving to Naples. “When you are an athlete’s wife, you have to understand that in the end it is all about them,” she said. “I knew that for a long time. When he wanted to go to Naples, it wasn’t something we were going to debate, it was something we were going to do.”
Rocco didn’t win again that year, but he finished second twice — at the season-opening Mercedes Championships and then in September at the Deutsche Bank Championships. He went into the last full-field event of the year needing only to make the cut to qualify for the Tour Championships — and didn’t make the cut. That was a disappointment. Even so, he finished the year with $1,832,656 in earnings — a good thing given the cost of the new house. By then he had signed with Callaway and was making good money off the golf course too, since he was frequently asked to do corporate outings as a well-known player with a reputation for being outgoing and friendly.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 10
