During 2005 and 2006, Rocco and Linda had talked at times about divorce. According to Linda, she was the one who initiated the conversations, wondering if separating might make them both happier. Rocco, she said, wouldn’t hear of it.
Linda had been so unhappy during that period that she went to therapy. She finally decided that maybe — just maybe — if the entire family was together on the road for an extended period of time, it might bring them all back together.
“To be honest, it didn’t work,” she said. “Rocco was miserable. Whether it was because he was playing poorly or because he wasn’t used to having us on the road, I’m not sure. But having all of us there was clearly too much.”
After Pebble Beach, Linda and the kids went home. The experiment was over.
The Nissan Open in Los Angeles was next up. Rocco decided to go from Pebble to L.A. to spend a couple of days hanging out with his friends Bill and Brad Shaw before the tournament began on February 15. He drove to Los Angeles on Sunday morning — the cut at Pebble comes on Saturday because it is after 54 holes — and, since the back felt okay, he told the Shaws he would meet them at Los Angeles Country Club to play.
It was that afternoon that Bill Shaw asked him if he might want to get his back worked on the next day to see if it might help him play better that week.
“Sure, why not?” Rocco said. “Who have you got in mind?”
“Cindi Hilfman,” Bill Shaw said.
“Who’s she?” Rocco asked.
Bill Shaw shrugged his shoulders. “She’s a physical therapist here in town. She works on a lot of guys who play at L.A. Country Club. She’s very good.
“Oh, and she’s very sick; she may be dying from kidney disease.”
Rocco still remembers his friend saying those words. “He said it matter-of-fact, like, ‘And she has blond hair,’ ” he said. “I don’t think he meant it to be cruel or to sound like he was being casual about it. I think it just struck him as one other thing he knew about Cindi to tell me before I met her.
“I didn’t know what to think. I was certainly willing to meet her and let her take a shot at my back. I had nothing to lose. But I almost expected her to be wheeled in or something or look incredibly feeble when she showed up. To say she wasn’t what I expected is putting it unbelievably mildly.”
The Shaws put in a call to Cindi Hilfman. Cindi not only knew who Rocco was but had told Brad Shaw almost a year earlier that she thought she could help him with his problems.
“I was actually sitting watching the Masters with Brad,” she said. “I saw what happened to him when his back went again that day. I could see what the problem was watching on television. I mean, to me, it was so obvious I could see it even through his clothes.
“The problem was in his lower back — in his pelvis. It had nothing to do with the disk he’d had surgery on. His pelvis was asymmetrical, out of balance. I could see it when he tried to swing the club. I remember saying to Brad, ‘I can help that man. You have to tell him I can help him.’ ”
When Brad Shaw called that Sunday afternoon, she said she would come to the house the next morning. Rocco was sitting in a chair, feet up, talking on the phone to Frank Zoracki when he heard the doorbell. A minute later a face peeked around a corner.
“I saw this smile,” he said. “It was the kind of smile that lights up a room. I remember thinking, ‘If this is Cindi, she certainly doesn’t look to me like she’s dying.’ ”
It was Cindi. She was forty-one and she wasn’t dying, but she had been sick most of her life. Shortly before she turned four, she was rushed to the hospital with what doctors thought was an appendix problem. An appendectomy was performed, but it didn’t make her better. Eventually, after numerous tests, she was diagnosed with an extremely rare autoimmune kidney disease — medullary sponge/kidney disease, which, among other things, causes kidney stones to form in her system constantly.
“On average I pass somewhere between seven and ten a month,” she said. “The first time I obstructed, they thought it was my appendix. When the appendectomy didn’t make me better, they ran more tests and that’s when they discovered the problem was in my kidneys.”
The disease causes cysts to form in both her kidneys, which leads not only to the kidney stones but to blockages and to difficulty getting the kidneys to drain. Through the years she has had stents put in to open up the kidneys and one transplant attempt — which failed.
The disease is so rare that Cindi has never encountered anyone else with her specific symptoms. “A lot of the doctors I’ve dealt with have told me they studied it in medical school and that they know of it, but I’ve never met someone who treated anyone other than me,” she said. “The guess is there aren’t more than thirty or forty people in the country who have it. It isn’t genetic; it’s probably caused by some kind of birth defect.”
Even though she was always frail because of the kidney problem, she grew up a self-described tomboy. “I lived in a neighborhood surrounded by boys,” she said. “So I played a little bit of everything, including golf.”
She was also a superb student who wanted to go to medical school. Even though her grades in college (South Dakota) were plenty good enough to get into med school, her doctors and friends told her that her health would make it impossible to get through the rigors of residency. So she applied to Duke’s master’s program in physical therapy and spent three years there.
After graduating, she and a friend from back home, Jeff Booher, talked about starting their own clinics specializing in golf-related injuries. Booher went off to work in the fitness trailer on the PGA Tour while Cindi went to work for the veterans administration, dealing often with people who had undergone transplants and were trying to rebuild their bodies. In 2003, Booher left the tour and started Fitness Golf, in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he had gone to live. Soon after, Cindi opened a Fitness Golf franchise in Los Angeles.
“We worked mostly with amateur golfers, a lot of them really good players — college golfers, elite amateurs, that type of player,” she said. “I never worked with anyone on the tour even though I had met some of the guys when I went to visit Jeff while he was still working out there.”
She had actually seen Rocco in the fitness trailer on a number of occasions, but they had never spoken — even though Cindi knew Rocco was friends with the Shaws.
After Rocco and Cindi were introduced, she sat down and began asking him questions about his back. Cindi eventually asked Rocco if he would lie down so she could take a look at his back. He complied.
“First place she touched me — with one finger — I jumped about ten feet straight into the air in pain,” he said. “I remember hearing her say, ‘Just as I thought.’ ”
She worked on him for about two hours that day, isolating a trigger point in his lower back that was about the size of an egg and caused him pain every time she touched it. By the time she was through for the day, it was closer to the size of a marble.
“If you want,” she said, “I can come back tomorrow.”
“Please,” he said.
For the next three days she worked on him. On Wednesday he played in the Pro-Am and was pain-free, feeling as if he could swing the club without hurting for the first time in three years. “Honestly, I felt like I could do cartwheels,” he said. “I felt as if someone had willed me a new back.”
He shot 71 the first day and got hot with his putter on Friday, shooting 66, easily the best round of golf he had played since the Masters the previous April. “It was nice to make a cut with room to spare,” he said. “It was even nicer to play completely pain-free for the first time in about a hundred years. I felt liberated.”
On Saturday he shot 71, which put him in position for his first top ten finish since the 2005 U.S. Open — if he could play well on Sunday.
“Yeah, if,” he said. “I went out and was tight on the front nine Sunday, really tight. I was trying too hard. It had been a while — other than Augusta — since I’d played late on a Sunday. I
was struggling when I got to the 11th hole. I hit my second shot, and I heard a voice a few yards away say, ‘Nice shot, Rocco!’ I turned around and she was standing there.”
Cindi Hilfman had been at the Shaws’ house that afternoon. Rather than wait around and see how her new patient was doing in small snippets on TV, she decided to go out and see for herself.
“Rest of the day I didn’t miss another shot,” he said. “She gave me a real boost.”
He ended up shooting 68, which jumped him into a tie for ninth place. That was worth $135,200 — a major step toward making the money he needed to, as he put it, “keep my job.”
More important than any of that, though, was the way his back felt and the way he felt about the way his back felt.
“It was as if I had discovered the fountain of youth or something,” he said. “All the people I’d been to, talked to, all the work I’d done, had produced nothing. Now I’m with this woman for one week and I think I can dunk a basketball — which I couldn’t do before I had back problems.”
He was flying home to Naples on Monday, but before he did he talked to Cindi one more time. “Look, you’ve performed a miracle here,” he said. “I would really like it if you would think about coming out on tour to work on me on occasion.”
She said she would think about it and let him know. He told her he was playing in two weeks at the Honda Classic and then going to Tampa and then on to Bay Hill — Arnold Palmer’s tournament.
“I flew home as excited as I had been in years,” he said. “I told myself it was only because of the way my back felt, but deep down I probably knew it was more than that.”
Later that week, Cindi called. “I think I can make it to Tampa if that works for you,” she said.
“Absolutely, it works,” he said. “I’ll see you there.”
ROCCO PLAYED REASONABLY WELL at the Honda Classic, making the cut and finishing in a tie for 39th. The back didn’t feel as good as it had in L.A., but it held up. He was very happy that Cindi would be coming to Tampa.
As soon as she arrived and started working on his back, it began to feel better again. “What was amazing was that after all the years and all the people I’d gone to, she seemed to have figured out what needed to be done to relieve the pressure so that I could play pain-free,” he said. “It was nothing short of a miracle.”
Cindi also worked on Paul Azinger that week — at Rocco’s urging. Azinger has dealt with on-and-off shoulder problems since undergoing radiation treatment in his shoulder for cancer in 1994. “He was about to withdraw, and Rocco suggested to him that he let me take a look at him,” Cindi said. “I worked on him and he ended up making the cut. Rocco didn’t.”
Rocco missed the cut by one shot, in part because he was so excited about everything that was going on in his life all of a sudden. He was amazed by how his back felt, and seeing what Cindi was dealing with made his problems seem simple.
“How she deals with it day after day I will never know,” Rocco said. “But she never complains. She just does what she has to do and moves on. She is absolutely amazing.”
Initially, Rocco simply saw Cindi as someone who made it possible for him to play golf, and whose friendship quickly became important to him. Cindi saw Rocco as someone who needed help.
“I saw a lot of pain when I first met him,” she said. “It wasn’t just the physical pain — that was obvious. But the fact that his body had failed him at critical times in his life clearly bothered him, especially what had happened at the Masters. Even when the back didn’t hurt, he was convinced it was going to happen to him again. That clearly weighed on him even though he kept saying, ‘It’s no big deal.’ It was a big deal.”
Frank Zoracki could hear the newfound happiness in his voice when they talked.
“Rocco being Rocco, he was already convinced that Cindi was the best friend he’d ever had — that much I could tell,” Zoracki said. “He kept saying, ‘Frank, I’ve never met anyone like this in my life.’ ”
Cindi continued to come out on tour, and as time went on, she became a part of Rocco’s group. “She did become my best friend very quickly,” he said. “I could talk to her about anything.”
That was the way he introduced her to people — as his back therapist and his best friend. He was, at the time, telling the truth.
IF ROCCO’S LIFE WAS COMPLEX off the golf course, it was finally headed back in the right direction on the golf course, even though he had missed the cut in Tampa by bogeying the last two holes on Friday. “I think in a way I was just too excited about everything that week,” he said. “I was so happy to feel healthy and to feel happy. It had been a long time since I had felt those two things at once.”
Next came Bay Hill. Most of the time, a player who had fallen to Rocco’s spot on the money list wouldn’t have been playing Bay Hill, since it is an invitational, with a limited field. Normally only players who finish in the top 70 on the money list are guaranteed a spot. But because of his friendship with Palmer, Rocco was given a sponsor’s invitation.
He took full advantage. He shot 66 the first day to trail leaders Tiger Woods, Vaughn Taylor, and Paul Casey by two shots. The next day he blew by everyone in the field, shooting 65 to take a stunning three-shot lead.
“I simply could not believe the way I felt,” he said. “I had no pain — at all. I was on a golf course I knew, playing in front of great crowds. I could not have felt better. Problem was, on Friday night I started thinking about how cool it would be to win again. I let it all get to me.”
It got to him on Saturday, when he shot 76 to slide down the leader board. At 207, he was three under par and trailed Taylor by five shots. He was still in the top ten going into the last day and thinking he might at least cash a big enough check to get close to clinching his exemption for the rest of the year.
“I never really thought about winning on Sunday,” he said. “I was just trying to shoot as low a number as I could and see where it got me.”
Only two players who started the last round in the top ten broke 70 on that brisk Sunday afternoon. One was Vijay Singh, who shot 67 to win the tournament by two shots over the runner-up. That runner-up was Rocco, who also shot 67 to blow by everyone else.
“Looking back, there’s part of me that will always be disappointed because I really lost my chance to win on Saturday,” he said. “Being Arnold’s tournament, that’s one of the ones I always really wanted to win. But what I knew was most important was the money I made by finishing second. It took all the pressure off me that I had been feeling at the start of the year.”
It was his highest finish in a tournament since he had finished second in Boston in September of 2003. Second place was worth $594,000, which was more than enough to put his ’06 and ’07 earnings well past Darren Clarke’s. Just as he had done at the start of 1996 with his finish at Phoenix, Rocco had earned his job back. He made it with four tournaments to spare.
“I can’t tell you how I felt that Sunday night,” he said. “The first thing I did was call Cindi to tell her what had happened, because I felt she’d had as much to do with it as I had. I just felt fantastic about everything at that point. I didn’t have to worry about the money list anymore, not just for one year but for two, because the second-place finish, combined with what I’d done in L.A. [where he had made $135,200] and Honda, put me at $700,000, meaning that if I kept breathing for the rest of the year I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping my card for ’08.
“But what really felt great was I was pain-free. I could swing a golf club. I wasn’t worried that I was going down at any minute. I felt like I had a new life — in so many ways — at the age of forty-four. All of a sudden I thought I was twenty-one and starting all over again when anything seemed possible.”
That feeling took a hit a few weeks later at Hilton Head. Rocco hadn’t been in the Masters, so he had been home the previous week. On Monday night he went to Jim Ferree’s house to speak to a group of junior golfers who were in Hilton Head as pa
rt of an annual event that matched juniors from Hilton Head with juniors from Dornoch, Scotland.
“We do it every year,” Ferree said. “One year our kids go over to Dornoch and play, and the next year their kids come to us. Rocco came to the house and spoke to the kids and they loved it. He told us he was playing a practice round at seven the next morning and if any of the kids wanted to come out and walk along, he would be able to talk to them throughout because there wouldn’t be anybody around. They thought that was great.
“We got there at a little before seven and went to look for him. Someone said he was on the putting green. We walked over there, and he was lying on the ground.”
“I got there about 6:30 in the morning, hit a few shots, and went over to the putting green,” Rocco said. “There was nobody around because it was so early. I hit a few putts, walked over to pick a ball out of the hole, and — boom! — I went down again.”
He managed to get to the fitness trailer, where the tour’s trainers worked on him and got the back loose enough that he could get up and walk around. They recommended he not try to play that day and see how he felt in twenty-four hours.
“I decided to just go home,” he said. “I wanted to know what had happened before I pushed it again.”
He called Cindi, who immediately offered to fly east. He told her no, but she was insistent. She flew to Florida and worked on him for two days.
“She had me up and running again in twenty-four hours,” he said. “If I had stayed at Hilton Head, I probably could have played on Thursday. She explained to me that I was never going to have a good back again, that the key was trying to keep the muscles from getting so tight that I couldn’t play or couldn’t walk. She was still trying to figure out exactly how to get that done. I was a work in progress.”
The back held up well after Hilton Head, even through 36-hole qualifiers for the U.S. Open and for the British Open. Rocco didn’t qualify for either event but was encouraged by the fact that he was able to play — and walk — 36 holes in a day pain-free.
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 13
