“In all, I’m happy with where I am,” Woods said. “I felt okay out there, and even though I made a couple mistakes, I’m still in a good place, just a few shots back. I can’t imagine anyone is going to go very low on this golf course.”
That analysis would prove correct. At the end of the day, the leaders — as is often the case at the Open — were a couple of unknowns. One was Justin Hicks, who had been the only other player to make birdie on the first playoff hole along with Rocco ten days earlier in Columbus. He had shot 68. Hicks was thirty-three, a player who had conditional status on the Nationwide Tour and had made a little more than $8,000 coming into the Open. The other leader was Kevin Streelman, a twenty-nine-year-old PGA Tour rookie who had played solidly the first half of the year and would go on to a superb second half, making more than $1 million for the year, finishing 74th on the money list.
No one thought that either Hicks or Streelman was going to be a serious threat to win the Open. In fact, you probably could have gotten better odds that night on one or both missing the cut than on either of them winning the championship. A first-day leader missing a cut is rare in majors but not unheard of: In 1993, Joey Sindelar led the Open at Baltusrol on Thursday and didn’t play the weekend. Six years later at the British Open, Rod Pampling did the same thing.
The list of players people thought might be in contention late on Sunday began with the four players at 69: Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 Open champion; Stuart Appleby, an accomplished player who had come close to winning majors in the past; Eric Axley, a past winner on tour but still considered a long shot; and Rocco — also considered a long shot but someone the media was hoping to see continue to play well because he was, they all agreed, a good story and a great talker.
There were five players at 70 — most notably two-time Open champion Ernie Els and Lee Westwood, one of Europe’s best Ryder Cup players, who had flirted with winning major championships in the past. That made eleven players under par, just about right for the first round as far as the USGA was concerned.
Seven players were at even par 71, among them Mickelson and Vijay Singh. Woods was in a group of twelve players at 72, and Adam Scott had shot 73. It was exactly the kind of bunched-up leader board one would expect at the Open.
Woods had accomplished two goals on Thursday: He’d gotten through the round without falling or doing any more damage to his knee (as far as anyone knew), and he had done what all great players try to do on Thursday at a major: not lose the tournament. One of golf’s oldest sayings is that you can’t win a tournament on Thursday but you can certainly lose it. Sitting just four shots behind the leaders — three behind those he would have considered serious threats — Woods had every reason to sleep well on Thursday night, especially since he didn’t have to be on the first tee the next afternoon until 1:36. This was the USGA’s dream: Woods and Mickelson teeing off together late afternoon on the East Coast, their round stretching well into prime time — it would be well after nine o’clock in the east before they finished — with both still in contention
Rocco’s round was also scheduled to start relatively late — at 1:03 Pacific time. He felt great about the way he had played on the first day but knew from experience that a good first round, even a great first round, was a long way from being in contention on Sunday afternoon.
“I slept much better that night,” he said. “What the first day told me was that I hadn’t been fooling myself when I thought I could play well on the golf course. I didn’t want to get too excited — it was much too soon for that. I told myself, ‘Keep having fun and you’ll be fine.’ ”
He smiled. “Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done — especially at the Open.”
12
Tiger Shows Up
THE JUNE GLOOM THE USGA had been concerned about made an appearance on Friday morning. It wasn’t a heavy fog, the kind that made it impossible to play, but it was enough to make the morning temperatures a little warmer and the wind a little less brisk.
“I had thought playing in the afternoon Friday we’d get some wind and a very fast-running golf course,” Rocco said. “But the fog coming in made everything softer. You don’t really expect relatively soft greens playing in the afternoon on Friday at the Open, but that’s what we got.”
Players will always tell you they prefer playing in the morning than in the afternoon. Most golfers are by nature morning people, accustomed to getting out of bed early to get to the golf course either to beat summer heat or the crowds or to play and then get on to whatever else is on their calendar for a given day. And there is usually less wind and the greens are more pristine — fewer spike marks, since many players on tour still wear metal spikes — earlier in the day than later.
“More important than that, when you play in the morning you have less time to think,” Rocco said. “That’s a bigger factor on a weekend when you’re in contention, but it’s true on Thursday and Friday too.”
On tour, everyone plays early one day and late one day during the first 36 holes of a tournament. The same is true at an Open, only more so because the USGA stretches the tee times out a little more than other tournaments do to take into account the difficulty of the golf course. Most PGA Tour events have a nine-minute gap between threesomes, occasionally going to ten. The USGA separates each Open group by eleven minutes — meaning the last tee time of the day is about an hour later than at most events.
That’s why Rocco, even though he and Thompson and Bryant were in the fourth group of the afternoon wave of players, didn’t tee off until 1:03 P.M. This time they played the front nine first. Once again, Rocco was very happy to find the fairway with his opening drive and perfectly satisfied when his five-iron landed 30 feet from the hole on the putting surface.
But he got a little jumpy on his birdie putt and watched helplessly as his ball ran a good 12 feet past the cup. “I forgot that when you’re putting toward the water, which I was, you have to figure the ball is going to pick up speed even if it’s not straight downhill,” he said. “I just kind of mind-blocked for a second.”
He took his time with the par putt and managed to sneak into the right side of the hole for a deep-sigh-of-relief par.
“When you’ve played well the first day, the last thing you want is to start the second day badly,” he said. “That’s not an easy opening hole — ask Tiger. But after hitting the green, there would have really been no excuse for making bogey. You know you’re going to make them out there; you just don’t want to make one right out of the chute. That par putt was a big deal for me.”
It became a little bit bigger when he birdied the second hole. “I didn’t feel comfortable on that tee all week,” he said. “I decided to hit three-wood because it took the left bunker out of play — I couldn’t reach it. That made me feel better standing on the tee box.”
He made a 25-footer for birdie there, meaning he had made two long putts to start the round. Given his history — always a good driver, not always a good putter — that was both an encouraging start and a positive harbinger for the day.
“Those two putts and those two holes got the butterflies out quickly,” he said. “You never tee it up in a major — unless it’s Sunday and you’re in the first group and have absolutely no chance — without feeling some butterflies. Making those two putts gave me a real shot of confidence and made me feel like it was going to be a good day again.”
At three under par, he was back on top of the leader board. Streelman had teed off early that morning and had shot 77 to drop back, and Hicks, playing a couple of groups in front of Rocco’s, was in full reverse on his way to an 80. He would make the cut — by one shot.
Rocco’s play on the front nine was virtually flawless. He birdied the fourth hole — making another long putt, this time from closer to 30 feet — for the second straight day, playing his natural draw on the hole by starting the ball out well right and letting it drift back to the fairway. “Those four holes [three through six] were a key part of my playing wel
l,” he said. “I played those holes well all four days, and especially on the three days I started on number one, that section of the course helped get me into a good mind-set for the rest of the day.”
In all, he would play those four holes in one under par and the other 14 holes in one over par. That doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but on a golf course that wasn’t giving up many birdies, on a difficult stretch of holes without a par-five involved, that was very solid golf.
He had to lay up again at the ninth and settled for par, but as he walked to the 10th tee he was four under par for the championship and in the lead. “Twenty-seven holes is way too soon to start thinking about anything serious,” he said. “But I was certainly feeling good at that point.”
Not long after Rocco’s group teed off at the 10th, the group of Woods, Mickelson, and Scott walked from the 18th green to the first tee. There wasn’t a smile to be found anywhere near the world’s three top-ranked players.
Woods had again started poorly, bogeying the 10th and 12th holes to fall to three over par. He had then bounced back in typical Tiger fashion, reaching the 13th green in two and draining a 25-foot putt for eagle. That got him his first real Tiger roar of the week and jumped him back to even par for the day and one over for the championship. But he bogeyed both 16 and 17 to go back to three over, meaning he trailed the leader (Rocco) by seven and was only four shots inside what would be the cut line at the end of the day.
“I really didn’t feel as if I was playing that badly,” Woods said later. “I felt comfortable out there; I just made three mistakes in a row — bogeying 16 and 17 and then making a par at 18 with the tees way up. When we went to the back [actually front] nine, I was thinking if I could get back to even par for the tournament by the end of the day, I’d be okay.”
Things weren’t going any better for Mickelson — the one player in the group who didn’t have an injury excuse to fall back on — or for Scott. Mickelson had been tied with Woods on the first nine holes of the day and was at two over par after 27 holes. Scott was one shot back of Mickelson.
As the group made the turn, there was considerable concern among the USGA and NBC honchos. David Fay, sitting in the NBC booth as he always did when the network was on the air in case a rules explanation was needed, wasn’t seriously worried that Woods would miss the cut. But he was worried about how much longer he was going to be able to continue playing.
“You could see right from the beginning that there were certain swings where he was in a lot of pain,” Fay said. “He wasn’t playing well, and I honestly wondered if he might make a swing that would put him on the ground and that would be it.
“After the first day [Woods’s agent Mark] Steinberg had been very honest with our guys. He’d said that Tiger was hurting. Of course we could all see it, but that confirmed it. I didn’t think he would miss the cut. But I wasn’t entirely convinced he would finish 72 holes.”
For NBC, Woods making the cut wasn’t really enough. The network didn’t need him teeing off with the rabbit groups on Saturday morning; it needed him in contention. Even with Mickelson in contention until the final hole at Winged Foot, even with a wild and crazy finish there, the ratings without Woods had dropped noticeably from 2005, when he had finished second at Pinehurst. They had gone up again in 2007, when he was in the last group on Sunday at Oakmont.
So while Rocco was making his way around the back nine that afternoon having the time of his life, there was a good deal of attention surrounding the group that went off the first tee shortly after four o’clock Pacific time.
As he had done on Thursday, Woods drove the ball wildly on number one. This time, though, he caught a break — one that might have changed the tone of the entire week for everyone involved in the championship. Instead of burying in the rough or going behind a tree where he would have no shot, Woods’s ball came to rest just to the left of a tree trunk on some hardpan dirt, where his lie was decent and he had a difficult but hardly impossible shot to the green.
“Give him an opening and he’ll make something happen with it,” Rocco would say later in the week.
This was no exception to that rule. “It was a lucky break,” Woods said. “I had about 157 yards [to the] hole and a pretty clear shot, plus I could control the ball off the lie I had. I was able to get at it with an eight-iron.”
The only real issue on the shot was that Woods had to stand on a cart path to take his swing. By rule, he was entitled to a drop because of that, but he opted to play the ball from where it was. “If I had dropped, I would have had to drop behind a tree,” he explained.
These days, many pros have taken to wearing golf shoes with soft spikes in them, because they are lighter and more comfortable to wear than metal spikes. Woods still wears metal spikes, meaning he had to be careful not to slip while standing on the cart path. He didn’t.
The ball ended up on the green, 18 feet from the hole. When Woods holed the putt for birdie, he shook his fist — not the exaggerated Tiger fist-pump that is so often imitated, just a little ‘Okay, let’s get going’ type of fist-pump. Instead of making another bogey after a bad drive, he had made birdie. Suddenly, he felt he was back in the game.
When Woods starts to feel confident, particularly with his putter, he can get on the kind of roll that no other player in the world can get on. This turned out to be one of those afternoons. He drained a 20-foot putt for birdie at the second hole, made another 18-footer at the fourth, and then swished a 25-footer at the fifth. That made four birdies in five holes and sent him from three over par to one under par. He went from a tie for 55th as he made the turn, seven shots back, to a tie for fourth, just one shot back of the coleaders at that moment, Stuart Appleby and Rocco, who had bogeyed the 10th hole and the 12th hole to fall back to two under par.
More than that, it changed the mind-set of everyone on the grounds. Woods went from shuffling around, head down, wondering if he really should be on the golf course given the condition of his knee, to pumped up, full of confidence, knowing he could win the championship. The only player Woods believes can stop Woods is Woods. He certainly didn’t look at the leader board and worry about Stuart Appleby or Rocco Mediate or anyone else up there. The only name that mattered to him, now in a red number as opposed to a black one, was his own.
Around the golf course, in the clubhouse, on the driving range (where a large TV screen had been set up), and around the country — it was now prime time on the East Coast — people watched the Woods birdie binge. Most thought the same thing: Here comes Tiger; his knee is just fine.
They were half right. The knee wasn’t fine. Tiger was coming anyway.
___
ROCCO, A COUPLE OF HOLES deeper into his round than Woods because he’d started thirty-three minutes earlier, certainly noticed when Woods’s name appeared on the leader board. Unlike some players who claim not to look at leader boards — sometimes to the point of actually doing stupid things as a result — Rocco looks at them all the time. He wants to have an awareness, regardless of how early or late it is in a tournament, of where he stands, how the golf course is playing (the best scores tell him that), and whom he might be competing with should he get into contention.
“Tiger on the board is like no one else on the board,” he said. “He’s Tiger. Tiger at his very best you aren’t going to beat. Tiger playing okay you’re still going to have to work to beat. When he popped up on there after not being there for a while, I thought, ‘Okay, he’s here now; he isn’t likely to go away any time soon.’ ”
Rocco had bogeyed the 10th hole, disappointing because it was not one of the tougher holes on the golf course, but not too upsetting because it was his first bogey of the day. “You’re going to make bogeys at the Open,” he said. “There wasn’t a hole out there where you could fall asleep and not get into trouble. I hooked my drive left of the bunkers and had no chance to get on the green. There’s never a hole at the Open where you can make a mistake like that and expect to get away with it. T
his isn’t like a regular PGA Tour event where guys can go out almost any day and make six birdies, an eagle, and no bogeys. You hope to make birdies at the Open, but you almost never walk off a hole after a par feeling anything but good.”
The wind was coming up a little bit by now, and the greens were beginning to speed up. The USGA had wanted them at about 13, but they had been a bit slower in the morning because of the June gloom. By late afternoon, they were probably in the 13 range.
“Fact is, I missed a couple of shots on the back nine,” Rocco said. “On the 12th, I simply can’t afford to miss the fairway, because it’s a 500-yard par-four [actually 504 on the scorecard], and even from the fairway I’m going to need a long club to get to the green. I don’t mind that; I’m very comfortable hitting long clubs, and I can hit them high enough that the ball will stop on the green. But there’s no margin for error on that hole.”
He missed the fairway left at 12, his drive starting down that side and drawing into the rough — again beyond the bunker — instead of starting down the right and drawing into the fairway. From there, he found a green-side bunker, blasted out to ten feet, and missed the putt for his second bogey of the day.
He had to lay up at the par-five 13th, so he settled for par there, and then he missed another fairway at the 17th, leading to his third bogey in eight holes. By then, for the first time all week, he was a little frustrated.
“I wasn’t mad and I wasn’t down,” he said. “I just wasn’t happy with myself for missing three fairways out of six [11 and 16 are par-threes], because that’s not me, especially when I’m playing well. I mean, there are times, when I’m home and out playing with guys and there’s no pressure, where I might go a week without missing a fairway. I’m not exaggerating. Now, this is different. There’s pressure and you’re talking fairways as wide as my hotel room. [The Open fairways ranged from 24 yards to 33 yards wide, far narrower than those of just about any other tournament in the world. At Augusta National, the fairways are generally about 50 yards wide.] So I don’t expect to hit every fairway. But three out of six sucks.”
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 19
