Contrast that with the exchange when the condition of his knee (a fairly important issue) was brought up:
Q: You’ve been pretty forthcoming about the knee thing. So let me throw this one at you: Is what you are experiencing right now residual soreness from the surgery or is this the way it is going to be forever and ever?
A: It’s different.
Of course that’s Woods. He will go into chapter and verse about anything relating directly to his golf game. Stray from that even a little, and you will either get a two-word answer or a lengthy answer that means nothing. He is not only a master on the golf course, he is a master of the sound-bite non-answer.
As Woods and Westwood stood on the 15th tee, Rocco again had the lead. Woods trailed by one, Westwood by two. But now it was Rocco’s turn to be in trouble. After the interminable wait, he had hooked his tee shot on 15 into deep rough on the left. From there, he couldn’t reach the green, and his pitch went 10 feet past the hole. A two-putt bogey dropped him back into a tie with Woods and left him just a little bit angry as he headed for the 16th tee.
“I don’t like to make excuses,” he said. “But that wait definitely hurt me.”
Interestingly, in the “official annual” that the USGA puts out after each year’s Open, there is absolutely no mention of Mahan’s problem or Rocco’s wait. It simply reports that he hooked his drive at the 15th, leading to a bogey.
Woods didn’t have to wait on the 15th, but his tee shot wasn’t much better than Rocco’s. He was also in the rough, and his second shot was still in the rough. He hit a reasonably good pitch to 10 feet but missed the putt.
“At that point,” Woods said later, “it looked like I was shooting myself out of the tournament.”
He was far from out of it, but he was out of the lead with three holes to play. Rocco, having just parred 16, led by one over both Woods and Westwood. Woods and Westwood also parred 16. Rocco’s lead was one, with two holes to play.
Back in Greensburg, Tony Mediate simply couldn’t sit still. He paced in and out of the family room while Donna sat patiently and watched every shot. “He kept up a running commentary,” she said later. “It was ‘Oh, no, that’s too long a putt,’ or ‘I hope he puts this one in the fairway.’ ”
“I wasn’t exactly Johnny Miller,” Tony said, laughing.
It was with Rocco on 17 that Miller got himself into trouble. Rocco hit an almost perfect drive that almost split the fairway in half. He then hit a gorgeous floating seven-iron that checked up about 10 feet behind the hole, giving him a solid look at a birdie putt that would give him a two-shot lead. With 18 being a par-five that Woods and Westwood could reach in two (Rocco, not so much), a two-shot cushion would be almost immeasurably important.
It was after seeing Rocco’s second shot that Miller blurted out his soon to be infamous line about Rocco looking more like Tiger’s pool boy than a U.S. Open champion.
Miller is so famous for saying things that get him into trouble that the Golf Channel actually put together a thirty-minute show dedicated to his ten most outrageous comments. In truth, this one was pretty innocent. He was simply expressing amazement that on the 71st hole of the U.S. Open, the 158th-ranked player in the world, a forty-five-year-old with a perpetually sore back, was standing toe-to-toe with Woods and clearly not cracking under the pressure.
“That’s exactly the way I took it,” Rocco said later. “When I heard him say it on the tape, I laughed. I know he didn’t mean anything by it other than expressing amazement that I was playing so well. Hell, I was pretty amazed by it myself.”
Rocco looked over the birdie putt at 17 with a little more care than usual. He read it as having a slight left-to-right break, a putt that if he got it rolling with any speed at all in the direction of the hole would feed down into the cup.
“I hit that putt exactly the way I wanted to hit it,” he said. “It could not have felt better coming off the putter. When it was halfway there — I’ll never forget this — the thought flashed through my head, ‘I’m going to win the U.S. Open.’ I thought it was going in and I was going to win.”
Somehow, the putt didn’t take the final turn to the right that Rocco had been certain it would take. It stayed just above the hole and went five feet past. Rocco had to take a deep breath, regroup, and make sure he hit a solid putt for par. It went straight in, and he walked to the 18th tee still leading by one but knowing the chance — perhaps of a lifetime — had just come and gone.
Westwood and Woods both made par at the hole, Woods having to make a five-footer but, steely as always, rolling the putt in.
One hole to play. If Rocco could make birdie, he would force Woods and Westwood to have to go for the green in two and make eagle. “I was thinking I needed birdie to win,” he said. “I was fairly certain at least one of them would make a birdie.”
He aimed his tee shot down the middle and watched it drift a little farther left than he wanted it to. It found the left rough, in decent enough shape, but the lie took away any chance he might have had to go for the green in two.
“To be honest, if I’d been in the fairway, I’m not sure I would have gone for it anyway,” he said. “I just over-hit my drive and it went a little left. I did that a few times down the stretch. I had 247 to the front and that’s a long shot for me. I might have gone for it and aimed the ball right to stay away from the water, but I’m not sure. Being in the rough eliminated any doubt. I had to hit a good layup and try to make birdie from there.”
He laid up to 106 yards, a perfect wedge shot. “Maybe I was just a little more excited than I thought,” he said. “I wasn’t scared of the water or anything; I wasn’t worried I was going to spin the ball back into the water. I just hit the ball about six or seven yards farther than I wanted to hit it.”
The pin was up front on the right side of the green, and Rocco’s wedge landed behind it, took a hard hop, and rolled to a stop 35 feet away. As Rocco and Matt approached the green, Ogilvy dropped back so that Rocco could walk onto the green alone. The ovation was almost overwhelming.
“I’d never heard anything quite like it in my life,” he said. “I mean, the crowds had been loud all day. But at 18, it was amazing.”
He gathered himself for the long birdie putt. “I wanted to give it a chance,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave it short.”
He didn’t leave it short, but it was moving to the right of the hole several feet before it got there. He tapped in for an even-par 71, which meant he had finished 72 holes at 283 — one under par for the championship. Now came what would be the hardest part of his day: the wait.
LEE JANZEN HAD GOTTEN BACK to the hotel while the leaders were playing the 15th hole. When he saw what the situation was, he left Connor and his friend to watch on TV while he headed to the golf course.
“It was such a zoo I actually had trouble getting back,” he said. “Even with my player badge I had trouble talking my way through all the crowds to get where I wanted to go — which was behind the 18th green. I wanted to be there when Rocco finished.”
He made it and actually saw Cindi first. She had managed to get Steve inside the ropes, and the two of them were standing in the tunnel behind the green that led to the scoring area while Rocco finished. Janzen hugged Cindi, who was hanging on to her emotions for dear life at that point.
After Rocco tapped in for his final par and shook hands with Ogilvy, the first person he saw when he reached the tunnel was Janzen. “Rocco had been the first person there when I won in ’93,” Janzen said. “I wanted to do the same for him. I would have loved to have said, ‘My God, you won the Open.’ Instead, I just said, ‘No matter how it turns out, I couldn’t be more proud of you.’ I wanted him to know that was the way I felt.”
After Rocco signed his card, he sat in a small room next to the scoring area and watched Woods and Westwood play the final hole. Cindi, Steve, and Janzen were all there. So was Jon Miller, executive vice president of NBC Sports. His job was to make sure Rocco didn’t so
mehow disappear if he became the U.S. Open champion.
“We lost Jim Furyk in 2003,” Miller said. “He signed his card and instead of going to do his postmatch interview with us, he went into the flash area and was talking to some of the print guys. We need to get the winner right away, before the awards ceremony, before he talks to anyone else. My job since 2004 has been to make sure the minute we know who the winner is, we get him on the air.”
Woods and Westwood could still win if one of them made eagle on the 18th hole. But that chance virtually evaporated the moment each teed off. Woods’s drive was left, finding a fairway bunker. Westwood also found a bunker — on the right side.
Westwood had no chance to go for the green and laid his second shot up. Woods caught such a good lie that he actually thought for a moment about taking a shot at the green.
“If it had been a practice round, I would have gone for it,” he said. “Any other day I would have given it some serious thought. But not now. Too risky. I had to figure I had a good chance to make four if I laid up.”
He took a nine-iron and produced one of the worst under-pressure swings of his career. The ball flew almost straight right and landed in deep rough to the right of the fairway. Furious with himself, Woods let out a couple of profanities and slammed his club on top of his bag. He knew he would now need an up-and-down that was, to say the least, difficult in order to force a playoff.
Rocco was stunned when he saw Woods mis-hit his second shot. “It’s just not like him,” he said. “At that moment, just for a second, I let myself think that I might win.”
Westwood was actually now in better position to make birdie than Woods, since he had found the fairway with his second shot. But almost no one watching was even thinking about him.
“To be honest, I completely forgot that he could birdie to force a playoff,” Lee Janzen said. “I was totally focused on Tiger. I’m not completely sure I even knew Westwood was just one shot back.”
At Oakland Hills, Rick Smith had been joined in the upstairs locker room by several friends. But the place was completely quiet as Woods and Westwood approached their third shots. “My mouth was completely dry and my hands were sweating,” Smith said. “I couldn’t have talked if I wanted to talk. I knew Tiger had a really tough third shot. I also knew if anyone could pull it off, it was Tiger.”
Westwood played first and, like Rocco a few minutes before, he allowed his adrenaline to take over. He hit a shot similar to Rocco’s, landing it well behind the flag and watching it roll 30 feet past the pin. He still had a chance, but it was a slim one.
Woods took a long time deciding what to do with his third shot. As he would say later in another lengthy explanation, he was again between clubs. “I had 95 [to the] front and 101 [to the] hole,” he said. “It was just a perfect number for my 56, but I didn’t think I could stop a 56 — if I hit a 56, I had to hit it short of the green, bounce it in, and that wasn’t going to be the shot. We decided to go with 60, hit it hard, make sure you play to the right, just in case it doesn’t get there.”
The number references are to the loft on wedges. Once upon a time, a golfer carried two wedges: a pitching wedge and a sand wedge. Now there are players who will carry as many as five wedges. The higher the loft, the higher the ball flies coming off the club and the more likely it is to spin and stop quickly. Woods was afraid that his 56-wedge wouldn’t put enough spin on the ball to stop it near the hole. Instead, he opted to try to hit his 60 hard, knowing if he got the ball on the green, he would be more likely to be able to get it to spin to a stop.
He had also caught a lucky break — the kind that only he seems to ever catch. Rocco noticed it right away. Few others did.
“He was in a divot,” Rocco said. “Normally that’s the worst break you can catch. But in this case it helped him because it made the ball spin more than it would have if he had just been in the deep rough over there. He actually had a better chance to get the club on the ball the way he needed to because of the divot.”
After his lengthy conversation over club selection with Steve Williams, Woods finally got over the ball and hit a spectacular shot. The ball flew just the way he wanted it to, checked up, and then rolled back toward the hole, stopping 12 feet away. It was a near-miraculous shot.
“People talk about the putt,” Rocco said. “The shot that saved him was the wedge. I’m not sure anyone else in the world could get the ball that close from where he was. In fact, I’m pretty sure no one else could.”
Rocco had now gone from thinking he had a good chance to win to thinking a playoff was likely. “Again, anyone else, the odds are he isn’t going to make it,” he said. “It’s a 12-foot putt on a bumpy Poa annua green where the ball is bound to bounce before it gets to the hole. But it’s Tiger. That makes it all different.”
Westwood had to putt first. Amazingly, with a chance to play off for the U.S. Open at stake, he left the putt short. It never had a chance, rolling to the right and checking up two feet from the hole. Westwood would talk later about how upset he was not to get into the playoff, but then add that if someone had told him on Thursday he would finish third, one shot out of a playoff, he would have been quite happy.
Which probably explains why he has won all sorts of tournaments around the world but never a major.
With Westwood finished, the stage was now cleared for Woods. He stalked the putt from every side while millions watching held their breath. Most people thought he would make the putt for the simple reason that, historically, he always makes putts that he absolutely has to make.
“I’m thinking, ‘This is not an easy putt,’ ” Mike Davis said. “But I’m also thinking, ‘Yeah, but it’s Tiger. He’s going to make it.’ ”
In the NBC TV booth, David Fay wasn’t so much thinking Woods would make the putt as wanting him to make it. “Normally, the last thing we want is a Monday playoff,” he said. “This was different. If it had been Westwood, I’d have been praying for a miss. But since it was Tiger creating a Monday playoff, I wanted him to make it.”
Rocco expected Woods to make the putt. But he would not have been shocked if he had missed it.
“I knew the moment wouldn’t get to him,” he said. “He lives for moments like that. I knew he would read it right, I knew his hands wouldn’t shake, I knew he would put a good stroke on it, and I sure as hell knew he wasn’t going to leave it short.
“But I also knew at that moment on that green he could do all those things and he still might miss. He could hit a perfect putt, and if it hit a bump at the wrong moment it could swerve an inch outside the hole.”
Woods was thinking almost the same thing.
“The putt was probably about two and a half balls outside right,” he said. “The green wasn’t very smooth. I kept telling myself, Make a pure stroke. If it bounces in or out, so be it, at least I can hold my head up high and say I hit a pure stroke. I hit it exactly where I wanted to and it went in.”
It just went in, catching the right corner of the hole, spinning around, and, at the last possible moment, dropping in. It could have, as Woods put it, “plinkoed in or plinkoed out.” It plinkoed in.
Woods, famous for his reactions to making crucial putts, went completely nuts — shaking his fists, screaming with joy — as the crowd went crazy.
Even though he wasn’t surprised, Rocco’s heart sank when the putt went in. He had been one inch — almost literally — from winning the U.S. Open. Now he had to go home, try to sleep, and come back the next morning to go 18 holes against the best player in history.
Mark Rolfing was right there with an NBC camera seconds after the putt went into the hole.
“Unbelievable. I knew he’d make it,” Rocco said bravely. “That’s what he does. It was an amazing day out there, and I can’t wait for tomorrow.”
Later, in the interview room, he said almost the same thing. He liked the 18-hole playoff format, going head-to-head with Tiger was a dream come true, he had incredible respect for him but wasn’t af
raid of him. As he got ready to leave, he had one last thought: “I think we’ll give you guys a good show tomorrow. It’s going to be a blast.”
15
A Great Fight
AS ROCCO WAS LEAVING the interview room, he encountered Woods, who was on his way in to give his version of what had just taken place.
“I guess we have a game tomorrow,” Woods said.
Rocco laughed. “You better be ready, big guy,” he answered. “I’m going to be ready for you.”
He had laughed and joked his way through his session with the media. He had never had a day like this one on the golf course, he was living his dream, he was “toast,” but he would be ready by the time he and Woods teed it up at nine o’clock (Pacific) the next morning.
He meant everything he said. He wasn’t afraid of Woods, because he knew there were only a handful of people in the world who thought he had any chance to win. “Which meant,” he said, “that I had nothing to lose.”
The group eating Fleming’s steaks out of plastic containers in room 1422 at the Hilton was the same as the night before: Rocco and Cindi, Sticky, Gary, Michael, and Vince. Everyone ate dinner and watched replay after replay of what had just taken place.
All of which made Cindi nervous.
“He was getting a lot of love from the commentators, from everywhere,” she said. “But it had been so close, and it hadn’t happened. I thought it was actually energy sapping to sit there and watch it over and over. Plus, it was starting to get late and, unlike the last three days, he had a morning tee time, which meant we had to be up early. I knew he wasn’t going to sleep much, but I wanted him to at least have a few hours to lie down and close his eyes.”
Cindi finally got everyone to leave at about 11:30. Rocco still wanted to watch TV. The Golf Channel was showing the last few holes and the post-round interviews and commentaries over and over.
“I probably would have stayed up all night watching if she hadn’t stopped me,” he said. “I was mesmerized by everything that had happened.”
Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Page 24
