“He was a good Monday guy,” Zoracki said. “Outings are held on Mondays, and Rocco’s reputation was as a guy you wanted at your outing. He learned a lot from Arnold about making people feel comfortable when he was with them.”
That year also produced one of the bigger thrills of his career even though it came at an event watched by almost no one that meant almost nothing. Having turned forty at the end of 2002, he was invited to play in something called the UBS Cup — a corporate-run Ryder Cup–copycat event that matched players over the age of forty from the U.S. against a “Rest of the World” team of players over forty.
The event was staged by IMG, the management giant that represents, among many others, Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer, and it was held in Sea Island, Georgia — one of the more scenic places on earth.
Palmer was the U.S. captain. Getting to play on a team headed by Palmer was a big deal in itself for Rocco. Getting to represent the United States in an event that wasn’t the Ryder Cup or even the Presidents Cup was also exciting. But the best part of the weekend was getting to be Tom Watson’s teammate for one of the matches.
“I actually went to Arnold and said to him, ‘Can I please play with Tom one day,’ ” Rocco said, laughing. “I was like a little kid. All the years I’d been on tour I had never even been paired with him. The thought of being his teammate was almost more than I could handle. In fact, it was more than I could handle. I played terribly. I was so nervous.”
That weekend was a tough one for Watson. His close friend and caddy Bruce Edwards was in the latter stages of ALS and was caddying for him (in a cart) for what he knew would be the last time. “If anyone could have cheered me up under those circumstances, it would have been Rocco,” Watson said. “He certainly tried. The problem was, neither one of us played very well.”
“Yeah, let’s blame the loss on him,” Rocco said. “But in truth, that isn’t fair. I was so nervous I could barely swing a club.”
A couple of weeks after the UBS Cup, Rocco was at home playing with Mark Murphy, a friend he had met in Ireland while playing at Waterville in 2000. Murphy was a pro who played on the European Futures Tour — the equivalent of the U.S. Nationwide Tour.
“I went down again while we were playing,” Rocco said. “It didn’t seem to be that bad at first, but by the time we got off the course and got home, Murph practically had to carry me into the house. It got better after I rested it, but I wondered if I was in trouble again.”
The trouble wasn’t as bad as it had been ten years earlier. He hadn’t ruptured anything, and Dr. Day told him he didn’t think he needed any more surgery or, for that matter, that surgery would do any good. “He just said the same thing to me again: You have a bad back — period. When you cut on one part, even after it gets strong again, there’s always going to be extra pressure on other places in the back. Sometimes it will feel okay. Other times it won’t. Basically he said I had to live with it — keep doing what I was doing with my exercises, keep my weight down because that was always going to be a factor — and hope that I could play pain-free more often than not.
“I’d had a good run with only occasional flare-ups of pain — seven years. But I wasn’t getting any younger — I was forty-one, and that’s a time in life when guys who have played a lot of golf and have good backs sometimes run into trouble. In a way, it was almost predictable.”
So were his struggles in 2004. He was on and off the tour throughout the year, and even when he played, he didn’t play well. He got to play in only 19 tournaments and made only eight cuts all year — his lowest total since 1995, when he had sat out the second half of the year. He only finished in the top 20 twice — a tie for 16th in his first tournament of the year, the Bob Hope, and a tie for 15th at the International, in August.
In many ways, ’04 was like ’94 and ’95 had been. Week to week he didn’t know if his back was going to allow him to play. He had to withdraw from Bay Hill when the back went on him during a practice round. He only got to play in two of the four majors — the Masters and the PGA. By autumn he knew he was in serious danger of falling out of the top 125 on the money list for the first time since his rookie year.
“I tried to play the last four [tournaments] that year because it was a matter of pride for me to try to get into the top 125,” he said. “I knew I had the top 50 list to fall back on, but I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to save it in case I needed it for later.”
The top 50 list is the tour’s list of all-time-leading money winners. It is, needless to say, top-heavy with today’s players, since purses today completely dwarf those of the past. To get a sense of how ridiculous today’s money is compared to that of the past — even the recent past — consider the career money totals of three of the greatest players of all time: Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus.
Snead won 82 times on tour — still the all-time record — and won a total of $487,000 in prize money for his career — which is less money than a player receives these days for a second-place finish in one tournament. Palmer, fifteen years younger than Snead, won 62 times during his career, good for $1,861,857. That haul — he teed it up in 734 tournaments — would have placed him 45th on the money list for the 2008 season. Nicklaus, ten years younger than Palmer, had the most dominant career in history until Woods came along. He played in 594 tournaments and won 73 times. His earnings were $5,734, 322 — meaning his career earnings would have placed him third on the 2008 money list.
Through 2004, Rocco had earned a little more than $11.3 million in his career. That put him in 47th place on the all-time money list, largely on the strength of that five-year period from 1999 through 2003 when his lowest money total for a year was $963,075. The tour allows any player who is in the top 50 on the career money list a one-year exemption if he finishes out of the top 125 at the end of a year. Most players who are in the top 50 like to hold on to that exemption to use when they get close to age fifty and their game falls off a bit and they are waiting to be eligible for the Champions Tour.
“I would have preferred to never need it,” Rocco said. “If I was going to need it, I’d rather have needed it when I was forty-nine. I was forty-two. But I had no choice. I knew I couldn’t get any kind of medical, especially since I had played the last four tournaments of the year, even if my total starts had been six less than my usual number. I had to use the top 50 exemption and hope I was healthy enough to play well the next year. If I couldn’t do it, then it would be time to start thinking about alternatives.”
He smiled. “I told my mom that at least if I needed a fallback plan it would come twenty years later than she had thought it would.”
Donna Mediate laughed when the subject of Rocco’s fallback plan came up late in 2008. “I still like to think he’s going to finish college,” she said. “But I think I know better by now.”
7
The Slide
LOOKING BACK NOW, ROCCO CAN SEE that his life was not in especially good shape in 2004, 2005, and 2006.
The back pain had become more persistent, and he was worried about his golf career. The move to Naples had been expensive and had not gone terribly well in any sense: The kids had struggled with the move and with their new schools. Linda wasn’t happy because they weren’t happy and because she could see that Rocco wasn’t happy. Rocco was also drinking more than he could remember drinking in the past.
“I didn’t like taking too many painkillers,” he said. “I mean, I tried all different kinds of prescriptions and they helped at times, not so much at others. After a while, when I was home and the pain was bad, scotch became my painkiller. It masked a lot of the pain, but, looking back now, I realize it was masking more than just back pain.”
The Mediates had been married for almost twenty years. They had worked hard to raise their three boys, but the combination of Rocco’s travel and his back woes had caused them to drift apart. To say that this happens often to players on the PGA Tour is a little like saying that 2008 was not an especially good ye
ar for the economy.
Golf is probably tougher on marriages than any other professional sport. In team sports, players are home for half the season and there is usually an off-season that lasts at least four months. It can still be tough, but there are long stretches built in where players are home, and even in-season, they are never away for more than two weeks at any one time — usually less than that. Football players have by far the best life in that sense. Other than three weeks of training camp, they make no more than a dozen road trips — all of them, with the exception of a Super Bowl, overnight.
Golfers might get one or two home games in a year if they happen to live in a city that hosts one or, in the case of a couple of Florida cities, two PGA Tour events. The tour season begins in early January and stretches for most players into early November. Some players in need of extra cash will then play “Silly Season” events — unofficial late-year tournaments where the money doesn’t count toward the official money list but does count toward paying bills.
Because golfers tend to have their peak years later than most athletes, they are often away playing while their families are growing up. Team sport athletes are frequently retired by thirty-five — if not sooner — and thus home in most cases by the time their kids are old enough to go to school. Tennis players, the only other major sport athletes who don’t have a home-and-away schedule, are usually retired by thirty.
“It’s a good news, bad news story,” said Davis Love III, who was a comeback story in 2008 when he won a tournament for the first time in two years after suffering a serious ankle injury at the end of 2007. “On the one hand, it’s great that I can still realistically be out here competing when I’m forty-four years old. On the other hand, I have a daughter who is now in college and a son who is in high school, and I’ve spent long chunks of time away from home working at my job while they’ve been growing up.”
It takes a strong marriage to survive all that time away, especially when the wife is left home alone for lengthy stretches to take care of school-age children. “Even in the summertime, when in theory your family can be out on tour with you, they really don’t want to be there,” Rocco said. “Why should they? They have friends at home and activities and it’s a lot more fun than schlepping around from one hotel to another. Even if you have enough money to rent a house at times or stay in a really nice hotel suite, it isn’t the same as being at home and being with your friends. If I were them, I’d rather be home too.”
Some players travel the tour in RV’s to try to make it easier for their families to come with them. Others, as Rocco says, spend the money to rent houses for a week at tour stops rather than putting their families through life in a hotel. But most understand that, in the end, they are going to have to spend long periods of time on the road without their families.
Family life for those who play on the tour was best described years ago by 1992 U.S. Open champion Tom Kite. “When you’re at home,” he said, “you feel like you’re missing something by not being out on tour. When you’re out on tour, you know you’re missing something by not being at home.”
What makes those gaps in family life bearable for those who play the tour is the fact that they are being paid — quite handsomely when they play well — to play a game they love. They enjoy the camaraderie of the locker room and they revel in the competition and the chance to test themselves from week to week.
“It’s like anything else,” Rocco said. “When you’re playing well, the weeks fly by. You look up in September and say, ‘Where did the year go?’ But when you’re struggling or when you’re hurt or — God forbid — you’re hurt and you’re struggling, every week feels like a month out there.”
That’s the way it was for Rocco for most of three years. What made it worse was that he understood that he wasn’t doing all that good a job at home either. “I was so focused on the idea of getting better, of figuring out a way to be healthy and to play good golf again, that I probably wasn’t paying as much attention to the kids when I was home as I should have been. And I know for sure that I wasn’t paying enough attention to my marriage.”
A struggling player can easily find his life becoming a vicious circle: He is miserable on tour because he’s playing poorly; then he’s miserable at home because he’s brooding about his play and he finds no solace in his family, which is a lot more interested in his role as husband and dad than golfer. It is a large part of the reason why the divorce rate on the PGA Tour is extremely high. Second marriages are so frequent that players often refer to their second wives as “mulligans.”
“I don’t think I was brooding during that period so much as I just wasn’t there emotionally,” Rocco said. “I was usually doing one of two things: trying to find a way to get the pain to go away or, if I couldn’t do that, drinking scotch to mask the pain. Either way, it wasn’t exactly ideal.”
He was also playing a lot of online poker. He had started playing when he was at home and couldn’t do anything except sit around the house and hope the pain would go away. “There were days when I was home where I had nothing to do for seven, eight hours because if I tried to walk down the hall, I risked falling down,” he said. “I was bored, so I started playing. For a few years I was hooked on it, playing it for hours and hours. After a while I realized I needed to stop. It was like anything you get addicted to — it was something I needed to stop. But it took me a while to get to that point.”
Life was equally difficult for Linda. She understood that Rocco was in pain and that he was upset about his golf. But the drinking, understandably, bothered her. So did the obsession with poker.
“If he wasn’t playing with people in the house, he was playing online,” she said. “It was as if he needed that, since he couldn’t compete the way he wanted to compete on the golf course.”
Discovering poker as an outlet wasn’t all that different for Rocco than discovering golf as a teenager had been. He wanted to play all the time, compete all the time, and try to get better. In 2005, he made it to the World Series of Poker’s Main Event — held in Las Vegas — and finished 600th out of 5,619 players. That was the good news. The bad news was that the time spent playing poker was more time away from the family and, unlike golf, was not exactly a moneymaker for him.
By the end of 2004, Rocco was in a state of near panic about his golf future. At the urging of Leonard Thompson, one of his tour buddies, he went to see Jimmy Ballard in Miami. Ballard has a reputation not only as one of the top teachers around — he has worked with, among others, Curtis Strange, Steve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Peter Jacobsen, and Hal Sutton — but as someone who teaches a swing that relieves pressure on the back. That’s why Thompson recommended that Rocco go see him.
“It was one of the better moves I’ve ever made,” Rocco said. “Rick [Smith] understood. A lot of what Jimmy does is similar to what Rick and Jim Ferree teach, but he has this ‘connection’ theory that relieves pressure on the back.”
Ballard believes that if Rocco had come to him early in his career, he never would have had back problems. “First time I saw him was when he won at Doral in ’91,” he said. “He had a very good golf swing, but I could see it was putting pressure on his back that was going to cause problems.”
Ballard learned his theory of the golf swing from Sam Byrd, who was once Babe Ruth’s backup on the New York Yankees. Byrd is still the only man to play Major League baseball and win a tournament on the PGA Tour, and he lost to Byron Nelson in the final of the PGA Championship (it was a match play event then) in 1945.
“Sam got the yips that day,” Ballard said. “Otherwise he’d have won.”
The Byrd-Ballard swing does take pressure off the back. Rocco adjusted his swing and it helped his back. “Didn’t cure me, because I was already hurt,” he said. “But if I hadn’t gone to Jimmy and hadn’t changed my swing when I did, I probably would have been done by the end of the next year, because it was getting nothing but worse. He saved my career.”
He still goes to se
e Ballard and in 2008 took Paul Azinger to see him when Azinger’s back problems flared again. “Because of the guys I’ve worked with — Ferree, Smith, Ballard — and because of how much I’ve studied the swing through the years, I know a lot about the golf swing,” he said. “Usually I would tell you that any player on tour who goes to another pro [which happens frequently] for help with his swing is crazy — but I knew Jimmy could help Zinger.
Listening to Rocco and Ballard discuss the Sam Byrd theory of the golf swing is a little bit like listening to Swahili. They are speaking another language, but it is one they are both quite comfortable speaking.
Playing on his one-time top 50 exemption in 2005, Rocco continued to struggle the first half of the year, with the exception of a good week in Los Angeles, when the back held up and he managed to tie for 13th place. Everything else was either bad or worse. He had to withdraw two weeks in a row in May, first in New Orleans and then in Charlotte. His spring résumé looked like this: WD–WD–Cut–Cut–T65.
The T65 in Washington was the first time he had played on a weekend since March. “Believe it or not, it gave me some confidence,” he said. “It wasn’t so much that I played well as I played four straight rounds of golf on a good golf course [Congressional] without any serious pain.”
That brief feel-good moment took him to Pinehurst for the U.S. Open. He opened there with a 67, which was good enough to tie him with John Daly for the lead. He played solidly the last three rounds and even though he was never in serious contention to win, he was thrilled to finish tied for sixth place. It was good for his confidence and it was good for his bank account. Unlike the previous year, he had no fallback if he didn’t finish in the top 125. The thought of going back to Q-School a few weeks before turning forty-three didn’t thrill him.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 11
