“All I could do was hope the pain would stay away,” he said. “The Open told me that when I was healthy, or even semi-healthy, I was still plenty good enough to compete. The key was being able to walk 18 holes every day and take a full swing at the golf ball. That doesn’t sound like much to ask, but for me at that point it was everything.”
The 2005 Open turned his year around. He ended up making 12 of his last 14 cuts and had to withdraw only one more time, and that wasn’t until October in Greensboro. As a two-time champion, he felt bad about having to pull out, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. By then, he had made enough money to preserve his spot in the top 125. He finished the year with $696,250, which was good enough for 121st place on the money list. Hardly spectacular, but Rocco wasn’t complaining.
“I had kept my job for another year,” he said. “I understood that given my age and my back, that was no small thing for me.”
Unfortunately, the first half of 2006 didn’t go as well as the second half of 2005 had. The early part of the year was again a struggle. He missed his first three cuts and four of his first five, a tie for 48th place at Doral being the only check he cashed prior to the Players Championship, where he tied for 58th. His goal in the spring was to be healthy for the Masters. Even though he hadn’t been in the top 100 on the money list for two years, he was still exempt into the Masters because of his sixth-place finish at Pinehurst. He arrived at Augusta, having taken the week off prior to the tournament, feeling rested and ready, he hoped, for a good week.
“Other than ’01, I had never really played very well there,” he said. “It wasn’t because I didn’t like the golf course, because I did. It could have been because putting is so important there, and for a long time I wasn’t a great putter. But really, if you think about it, striking the ball there is extremely important because if you don’t drive the ball to the right spots on the fairway, you have almost no chance of getting close to the pins. You have to be in certain places to have a chance. That part of my game has always been a strength.”
He got the week off to a good start on Thursday by shooting a four-under-par 68. The golf course had been lengthened to more than 7,500 yards by the Augusta National membership as part of a redesign that began soon after Tiger Woods shot an 18-under-par 270 there in 1997, so any under-par round at Augusta National was now a good day. Winning scores have been consistently higher in recent years at the Masters, topping out in 2007, when Zach Johnson won at one-over-par 289 after a week in which the winds blew every day.
In 2006, the tournament was plagued by rain delays. By the time darkness closed in on Saturday, most of the leaders were still in the early stage of their third rounds. Rocco, who had shot 73 in the second round to stay within striking range of the leaders, had played only four holes. The players had to return to the golf course to resume play at 7:30 the next morning, meaning about a 5 A.M. wake-up call for most.
Rocco continued to play well Sunday morning. He was three under par for the tournament, trailing Phil Mickelson by only two shots, when he arrived at the par-five 15th hole. He hit a perfect drive down the right side of the fairway and had a three-iron to the green.
“The ball was a little bit above my feet, but it was still a shot I felt good about,” he said. “The ground was still wet from all the rain. When I swung down at the ball, my foot slipped.”
Rick Smith, who was out walking with Rocco, saw his foot slip and saw him reach for his back. “I knew it was trouble right away,” he said. “I’d been thinking I’d have both my guys in the last group for the afternoon [Smith was also working with Mickelson back then], and then I saw Rocco grab his back. My next thought was, ‘Can he finish the round?’ ”
He finished, still in contention at two under par, tied for fourth place just two shots behind Mickelson, who had made a late bogey to fall to four under. Rocco went straight to the fitness trailer to be worked on before he had to tee it up for the final round.
“We had a couple hours,” he said. “By the time I got out of there, I felt a lot better. I thought I might be able to make it through the round.
“So much can happen there on Sunday afternoon,” he said. “Even with all the changes to the golf course, you still have holes where you can go low and you can go high. I was as excited going into that last round as I think I’ve ever been at a golf tournament. I thought if the back would hold up I had a legitimate chance to win.”
He felt exactly the same way standing on the ninth tee that afternoon tied for the lead. The ninth hole at Augusta National is a short but extremely difficult par-four. Players drive the ball straight down a hill and then must play their second shot straight up a hill to a green that tilts back to front. The Sunday pin placement is always near the front of the green. Any shot that lands pin-high or below the pin almost always rolls off the green and back down the hill, leaving a difficult pitch to try to get close enough to salvage a par.
In 1996, still leading Nick Faldo by three shots playing the ninth hole, Greg Norman hit a second shot that landed no more than a foot from the hole. But the ball spun back off the green and halfway down the hill. Norman made bogey; the lead, which might have jumped back to four shots had he hit his second shot a few feet farther, went to two shots; and Faldo ended up winning by five shots as Norman completed one of the most famous final-day collapses in major championship history.
Ten years later, Rocco hit a perfect drive down the hill but knew he had a problem when he got to his ball. He was on a sidehill lie, and he was afraid that when he swung he might slip again. “I tried as best I could to stay absolutely still over the ball,” he said. “The amazing thing is I hit a hell of a shot.”
The nine-iron shot flew directly at the hole and hit the bottom of the flagstick. It could have dropped in or it could have stopped near the hole. It did neither. If it had just missed the stick, it might have settled close to the hole. Instead, it bounced backward off the green and halfway down the hill. At that moment Rocco didn’t really care where the ball was. His back had gone on him again the instant he followed through on the shot.
“I hit the ball pretty much exactly the way I wanted to hit it,” he said. “For a second I thought it was perfect. In a sense, it almost was. But I knew my back was gone. I could barely get up the hill to where my ball was. For an instant I thought I might go down, which I certainly didn’t want to do with all those people around the green, not to mention all the people watching on television. Sunday at the Masters — how many people do you think are watching? A billion, a trillion?”
Certainly millions. Rocco managed to make it up the hill to his ball and, under the circumstances, made a miraculous par, chipping the ball to four feet and making the putt. But as he walked off the green, he knew he was in serious trouble.
“I’d felt that pain enough times in my life that I knew exactly what it was and exactly how badly I was hurt,” he said. “If I hadn’t been so high up on the leader board, I would have walked straight off the green and into the clubhouse because, realistically, I knew I was done. But given where I was, I had to at least try. I was about 99.999 percent sure I wasn’t going to win. But I was hoping I could somehow get through the back nine and still finish at least in the top ten.”
He couldn’t. Walking down the hill on the 10th fairway was murderous, and by the time he reached the 12th tee he was one over par on the back nine (having just missed making a five-foot par putt at the 11th), in extreme pain, and fading fast.
The 12th hole at Augusta National is a tiny little par-three that is listed on the scorecard as being 150 yards long. It is the middle hole on the treacherous three-hole swing dubbed “Amen Corner” by the great Herbert Warren Wind because players in contention on Masters Sunday pray they get through these holes — water is in play at each of them — unscathed.
The 12th at Augusta has frequently been the hole where Sunday dreams come to die at the Masters. Although players rarely hit more than a nine-iron off the tee — often only a pitching
wedge is called for — they must carve a precise shot over Rae’s Creek to a tiny green. Miss short and you are wet. Miss long and you are in a bunker or a flower patch, aiming your second shot downhill in the direction of the creek.
“Any time you are in contention and you stand on that tee, you get the shakes,” said Fred Couples, the 1992 Masters champion who may have caught the luckiest break in Masters history on 12 the year that he won the tournament. His tee shot came up short of the green and seemed destined to slide back into the water. Somehow, the ball got stuck on a tuft of grass and stayed there, allowing Couples to chip up, make par, and win by two shots. “I knew when the ball stayed up it was my day to win,” he has often said when the subject of that shot comes up.
Rocco wasn’t shaking standing on the 12th tee — his back hurt too much for him to be nervous. He took an eight-iron even with the hole playing short and he hoped he could take an easy swing and have enough club to clear the creek.
“I almost made it,” he said later. “When the ball was in the air, I thought it might get to the front of the green and I’d be okay. Then I could see it was short and I was hoping it might somehow stay dry.”
It didn’t. It came up just short of clearing the water. The silence as the ball hit the water was deafening. Rocco walked to the drop area, hoping he could get his wedge close enough to salvage a bogey. Instead, he went into the water again. The all-time record for turning the 12th into a nightmare is a 13, set by Rocco’s onetime mentor Tom Weiskopf in 1977. Rocco didn’t get to the record, but he came close. He hit three balls into the water from the drop area.
“I was honestly beginning to think I might never get the ball on the green,” he said. “In fact, the thought crossed my mind, ‘Am I going to run out of golf balls?’ If I did, that’s it, I have to walk back in, I’m done. Fortunately I had a dozen balls in the bag. The fourth shot from the drop area I actually hit pretty well.”
He got it to five feet and made the putt for 10. Any hope for a top ten or even a solid finish drowned in Rae’s Creek.
“If I’d been smart, I’d have walked in right then,” he said. “But I didn’t want to look like I was quitting because I’d made a mess of 12. At that point, like it or not, I had to find a way to finish.”
He did, actually playing respectable golf on the last six holes to shoot 45 on the back nine. That was nine over par, seven of those nine shots coming on the tiny 12th. He signed for an 80, which left him tied for 36th place, and went home knowing he wasn’t going to play golf for a while.
“Hilton Head [the week after the Masters] is usually one of my favorite events,” he said. “There was no way I could play there.”
He went home to rest and get the back treated. He wasn’t sure what was more upsetting, getting hurt again or getting hurt at a moment when he had a real chance to win the Masters. He was beginning to wonder if he was ever going to be healthy again.
“Dr. Day had told me this was the way it was going to be,” he said. “I didn’t have a ruptured disk like I’d had when he did the surgery. I still had a bad back. It’s the kind of thing where if you don’t play golf for a living, it can be annoying and at times painful, but you can function. But if you play golf for a living, there are going to be times when you can’t. And you never know when it’s going to happen. That was probably the worst part of it.”
He came back to play a month after the Masters in Charlotte. He managed to make the cut there — finishing in a tie for 59th place — but the rest of the year was a lot like 2004: stops and starts, the back flaring up, the back feeling a little better.
“If I’d been smart I would have just stopped playing,” he said. “I would have rested it for a long time and maybe gone to see someone about a different kind of rehab program because clearly what I was doing wasn’t working. There were times when I would be home alone and I would walk down the hall to get something and I would just go down. I would have two options: Lie there until someone came home to help me, or crawl to a chair or into my bed. At times I felt like a complete cripple.
“The pain wasn’t even the worst part; the frustration was. I had the feeling this was something that was never going to go away, that I had probably been lucky to play healthy for as long as I had and this was it. I really thought there was a good chance I was done — especially since it didn’t look like I was going to make enough money to keep my card.”
He ended up playing only ten more tournaments after the Masters. He shot a 68 the first day at Westchester but had to withdraw because the back went on him again. This time he was out for six weeks trying to get healthy. He attempted to play the Buick Open, a tournament he had won in 2000, and had to withdraw again. That led to another six-week break before he was finally able to play in five events in the fall. He managed to make four straight cuts, but except for the tournament at Jackson — a second-tier event that was played at the same time as a lucrative World Golf Championship tournament — he never finished higher than 50th. He was 16th at Jackson, but with the purse not as high as most weeks, that was worth only $39,400.
When the painful year was finally over, he had entered eighteen events and made eight cuts. His winnings were a paltry $145,899, by far his lowest total since he had returned from back surgery in 1996. He finished 227th on the money list and found himself asking the tour for a medical extension at the start of 2007.
This time the tour was generous. Because he had been forced to withdraw from three tournaments, the board deemed Rocco to have played only fifteen times. He had averaged between 23 and 25 starts a year when healthy, so he was given ten tournaments at the start of 2007 to make a little more than $450,000 — which would give him combined earnings of more than $660,000, which had been the total earned by Darren Clarke, who had finished in 125th place on the 2006 money list.
Rocco was relieved to be given a reprieve at the start of 2007, but he knew it wouldn’t do him any good if he continued to feel the same kind of back pain he had felt through most of 2006. For the first time in his life, he found himself thinking in terms of a backup plan.
“I thought resting for a couple of months, really resting, might help,” he said. “But I’d taken a couple long breaks in ’06 and had come back and still had problems. It was better in the fall but not good enough. I had to be realistic: I needed to play well in the ten tournaments they’d given me or I was going to be reduced to asking for sponsor exemptions. I had to think about an alternative if things didn’t work out.”
As luck would have it, just when he was thinking about an alternative, one came along — at least a temporary one. New TV contracts had been negotiated by the tour beginning in 2007. Included in the package for the first time was the Golf Channel. ESPN had opted out of most golf coverage, since it was paying Tiger Woods prices to televise tournaments that almost never included Woods. USA Network, which televised Thursday– Friday rounds of numerous tournaments, also opted out.
That opened a door for Golf Channel, which had previously been allowed to televise Champions (Senior) Tour events and Nationwide ( Triple-A) Tour events but never the PGA Tour. Under the new deal, Golf Channel had the Thursday–Friday rights to every PGA Tour event and would televise the entire week of all the Fall Series events and the first three tournaments of the year: the Mercedes Championships, the Sony Open in Hawaii, and the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. Those three January events were on weekends when the NFL was televising playoff games, and none of the networks wanted to compete with that.
The new deal meant Golf Channel needed to hire a lot of people. Networks that televise golf are constantly looking for explayers who can translate their understanding of the game to a microphone. For every one who can, there are at least a dozen who can’t. Knowing that Rocco’s playing future was murky after his injury-riddled 2006 and knowing that he had always been glib and comfortable in front of a camera, Golf Channel offered him the chance to work the first three tournaments.
“I figured why not give it a shot,” he said.
“I wasn’t in the Mercedes anyway and I didn’t usually play Hawaii. It was a chance for me to see if I was any good at it and to maybe give myself a fallback position if the back didn’t get any better.”
It was, in effect, a tryout for both sides.
The three weeks went well. Rocco enjoyed himself, the Golf Channel people liked what they saw. There was definitely a sense that this could be something Rocco could do when the time came for him to stop playing.
He still wanted to play. But as he headed to Phoenix to return to playing the game rather than talking about the game, he knew he might be ten tournaments away from asking for a more permanent chance to wield a microphone.
“The thought that I might be done — I mean really done — crossed my mind. I’d been scared after the surgery but convinced I would work my way back and be able to play again. Now, though, there was no reason to believe that was going to be the case. I’d done the work. I’d had the best care. I’d tried everything and I was still struggling.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
8
Cindi
BACK ON THE GOLF COURSE with his clubs rather than a microphone, Rocco didn’t start 2007 any better than he had ended 2006. In fact, he started worse.
“At least at the end of ’06 I was making cuts,” he said. “Out of the box in ’07, I couldn’t crack an egg.”
He hadn’t played in a tournament for three months when he teed it up at the FBR Open in Phoenix. Perhaps it was just rust, but he missed the cut by, as he likes to say, “a million.” Actually, it was by three shots. A week later at Pebble Beach, a place where he had made the cut as a rookie when he was convinced he wasn’t good enough to play on tour, he missed the cut again — this time by a whopping nine shots. He had eight tournaments left to make the money he needed to remain an exempt player.
During those first few weeks on tour, Linda and the kids had traveled with him. Linda had decided at the end of 2006 to take the kids out of school, enroll them in an online homeschooling program, and bring them on tour with Rocco.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 12
