Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open (4 page)

“Can someone named Rocco really win the U.S. Open?” NBC’s Johnny Miller asked. “He looks more like he should be cleaning Tiger’s
pool than leading the Open.”

But there was Rocco in the lead, late on Sunday afternoon. If the world was surprised, he wasn’t. Nor were his boyhood friends
watching back home in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a small town about thirty miles outside Pittsburgh.

“Rocco has always had what I would call an irrational sense of self-confidence,” said Dave Lucas, a buddy for almost forty
years. “A lot of people dream about playing on the PGA Tour; Rocco always
knew
he’d play on the tour, when there was no logical reason to believe it because he just wasn’t good enough. There was no logical
reason for him to beat Tiger, which is why I knew he would think he could beat him. It makes no sense at all — unless you’re
Rocco.”

All of which made perfect sense to Rocco. One-on-one with the greatest player in history over 18 holes for the U.S. Open title?
“Bring it on,” he said Sunday night. “I can’t wait.”

T
HE STORY OF
T
ONY AND
D
ONNA
Mediate’s courtship isn’t all that different from most stories about kids growing up in middle-class homes in the 1950s.

They both came from small western Pennsylvania towns. Tony was the son of immigrants: Rocco Santo Mediate (pronounced Meed-e-atay
until he arrived at Ellis Island and was told to pronounce it Meed-e-ate, as an American) had stowed away on a steamer bound
from Calabria, Italy, to New York and had found work on the railroad in Pitcairn, Pennsylvania. After he had made enough money,
he sent for his wife, Maria, and they settled in the tiny town of Wall, which was right across the tracks from Pitcairn.

They had had three daughters previously in Italy, but Anthony was their first child to survive birth. He was small but a gifted
athlete, an excellent high school pitcher who once struck out seventeen hitters in seven innings while pitching a no-hitter
in a semipro game. Even though he was a Yankees fan — they were baseball’s dominant team in the ’50s — he frequently made
the forty-mile trip on the Ardmore Street trolley to Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and was even given the chance to throw batting
practice to the Pirates.

“I remember pitching to Dale Long and Sid Gordon and, of course, Roberto Clemente,” Anthony said. “A couple of times I ran
laps in the outfield with [pitcher] Roy Face. One day we were out there and Clemente was lying down on a bench in the bullpen.
Face took me over and introduced me. I’ll never forget shaking hands with him — his hands were huge. He looked at me and said,
‘You want to be a baseball player?’ I said I did. He shook his head and said, ‘You too small. Go and eat more.’ ”

Eating wasn’t going to make Tony much more than five-foot-eight. What’s more, he had a lot more on his life’s plate than food.
His dad had died of an aneurysm when Tony was thirteen, and he had gone to work selling newspapers to help his mom and his
younger brother, Joe. “I made ten dollars a week,” he said. “We bought our food with it. We’d go shopping with that money
and it bought so much we couldn’t carry it all home in those days.”

He finished high school while he worked and played baseball. No one drafted him, so he played at the semipro level until his
early twenties, when he realized it was time to make a serious living. He had uncles who had cut hair for a living, so he
did the same thing — except he decided to cut hair for men and women, knowing there was a good deal more money to be made
cutting women’s hair than men’s. He opened a small salon called Anthony’s, in downtown Greensburg, which was the “city” near
Wall, having a population of about 40,000.

Tony met Donna Emrick soon after that, one night at a dance club. “In those days everyone went dancing,” she said. “That’s
how we got to know each other. He asked me to dance one night, and we just kept going out to dance clubs after that. He was
fun and he was sweet.”

She was second generation — German and Irish on her father’s side, Italian on her mother’s, and the fourth of seven children.
She had grown up on a farm on the south side of Greensburg and was just out of high school when she started dating Tony.

They were married in July of 1960, and their first child, Rocco Anthony, was born on December 17, 1962. Soon after that, the
growing family moved into Rural Oaks, a new development outside town. It was so new that the Mediates were the first family
to move there. The community grew quickly, though, with young middle-class families moving in as the suburbs continued to
expand.

“It was a perfect neighborhood for kids,” Donna Mediate remembered. “Every family had kids and they all played together. They
would play together right there in the neighborhood, and when they were older they could walk to the neighborhood pool during
the summer and the ice-skating rink in the winter. It was pretty close to ideal.”

Tony and Donna’s second child, Vincent, was born in 1964. But unlike Rocco, who was a lively, healthy boy from the start,
Vincent was born with brain damage, and as an infant he frequently had seizures. Tony and Donna took him to specialists, finally
settling on a doctor in Media, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia), who ultimately recommended surgery to try to relieve pressure
on the brain. It didn’t work. Two-year-old Vincent suffered an aneurysm during the surgery and never woke up.

Rocco was four when his brother died and he says now that he doesn’t remember much about him or about his death, but it is
apparent that his death deeply affected him — and still does to this day.

“I remember my parents coming home without him,” he said. “They told me he had died, but I’m not completely sure I understood.
My mom took me to the funeral home, and I remember trying to open his eyes. I thought he was just sleeping. He looked so beautiful
lying there, and I wanted him to wake up.

“I’m not sure if his death is the reason, but I’ve never been able to go to funerals. I didn’t go to either of my grandmas’
funerals, and I know that upset my parents, but I couldn’t go. I don’t think I’ve been to a funeral since my brother died.
It’s just too upsetting for me, I guess. I can’t even tell you that I remember that much about him, because he was so young,
but I guess it’s fair to say that, even though we never talked about it, his death deeply affected my family. I would have
loved to have had a little brother; I know that. I don’t think my parents ever completely got over it.”

At first, Tony and Donna thought they didn’t want more children, Vincent’s death making it too painful for them to contemplate
the idea that something could go wrong with another child. They changed their minds, though, and Nicki was born in 1967, Gina
two years later. By then Rocco was seven and spending most of his time hanging out with other kids in the neighborhood.

After his baseball career ended, Tony turned to golf as his sport of choice when he wasn’t working. His business was growing,
and he joined Hannastown Golf Club, a small nine-hole club not far from Crestview Drive, where the family lived. He had become
a good player, a three or four handicapper, and he would frequently take Rocco with him to the club — sometimes to play a
few holes, sometimes to caddy.

“He didn’t like golf,” Tony said. “Sometimes when he would caddy for me we would get to the sixth hole, which is right by
the front gate of the club, and he’d just say, ‘Dad, I’m going home.’ He’d drop the clubs and walk home. It wasn’t much different
when I let him play. He’d play a few holes and then we’d get to number six and he would be gone. He just wasn’t that interested.”

The two sports that did interest Rocco were baseball and skateboarding. Long before anyone thought about the X Games or any
extreme sports, he and several of his friends built a half-pipe in an empty lot in the neighborhood. “There were about four
or five of them who were really into skateboarding,” Donna remembered. “They somehow put together six or seven hundred dollars
to buy the materials and to build it. After a while, though, some of the neighbors didn’t like it, and they had to take it
down. It was too bad; they had a lot of fun with it.”

No one objected to baseball, and Rocco was decent at it — but not nearly as gifted as his dad. “I still remember my dad would
throw us batting practice sometimes, and if he wanted to throw hard — even then — we couldn’t touch him,” Rocco said. “He
would throw his fastball right by us and if he threw a curveball, forget it, we had no chance.”

Rocco’s baseball career has become the stuff of legend, in the strictest definition of the term — it has been built into far
more than it really was. When he is playing golf on TV, the announcers frequently will talk about the “promising” baseball
career Rocco gave up when he decided to pursue golf. Sometimes they will talk about what a talented pitcher he was. The PGA
Tour media guide says he became interested in golf in high school, “after years of playing baseball.”

The part about him playing baseball is true, but that’s about it. “What I remember about Rocco playing baseball is that I
could never hit a curveball,” his lifelong friend Dave Lucas said. “Except for Rocco’s. I could hit his curveball.”

Which may explain why Rocco didn’t make the team as a high school sophomore. “I came home the first day of practice and told
my dad I had no shot,” he said. “I just wasn’t good enough. I was a reasonably good hitter, I had a decent arm, but I wasn’t
going to be able to play varsity baseball — that was apparent. That was really when I first got interested in golf.”

Before that, Rocco and Dave Lucas had been spending a fair amount of time at Hannastown. Their parents would drop them off
after school, ostensibly to play golf. “We would get there, go inside, and get something to eat,” Lucas said. “We might putt
a little, maybe play a few holes — sometimes we didn’t play at all. Then we’d call one of our parents to be picked up and
go home. Neither one of us was into golf. We just hung out. Golf was pretty much the last thing on our minds.”

At fifteen, Rocco looked around and realized that both his baseball and skateboarding careers were behind him. His dad had
joined another club that year, Greensburg Country Club, which had 18 holes and excellent practice facilities. By then, Lucas’s
family also belonged there, and Dave had made friends with several very good players — Arnie Cutrell and Bob Bradley among
them.

Lucas began bringing Rocco out to play at the new club every once in a while, and slowly but surely, Rocco got hooked on the
game. “What I remember is that he wasn’t very good when he first started coming out to play,” Cutrell said. “I mean, we were
pretty good. Bob and I were single-digit handicappers by the time we were in high school. We were pretty good junior players.
Rocco just hadn’t played that much. If he shot in the mid-80s that was a pretty good day for him. Dave was about the same
as he was. We usually shot in the 70s. After a while, though, it was pretty clear that Rocco had decided he wanted to get
better. He began working at it — a lot.”

What became apparent to Cutrell, Bradley, and Lucas was what his parents already knew: Once Rocco decided something was important
to him, once he decided he wanted to achieve something, he would do just about anything to reach his goal.

“He’s never done anything halfway or had an emotion that was mixed,” his father said. “When he decided he was interested in
watches, he had to have the
best
watch collection. When he decides he likes someone, they can’t just be a good person, they are the
best
person. You never hear him say that someone is a good teacher; they’re a
great
teacher. I think one of the reasons he’s been able to get to where he has in golf is because whatever teacher or swing coach
he’s worked with, he’s believed in what they’re telling him completely and worked and worked and worked at doing what they’ve
told him he needs to do.”

Though he often uses superlatives, Rocco’s description of himself as a high school golfer is typical Rocco too: “I wasn’t
any good at all,” he said. “I was like a thousand handicap.”

Not exactly. By his senior year, he was playing number one for the high school team and was breaking 80 on occasion. “He improved
a lot and he improved in a hurry,” Cutrell said. “You could see the hard work paying off. But it wasn’t as if he had gotten
so good that any of us thought he was going anyplace as a golfer. He’d gotten good — but he was still a long way from being
anything special.”

What he had gotten — more than anything — was obsessed with golf. Once baseball and skateboarding were in his rearview mirror,
golf became his life every day from sunup until, most of the time, after sundown.

“It was all he did,” Donna said. “He didn’t date, he didn’t go to the movies, he didn’t study very much, to tell the truth.
He went to school and then he went to the golf course. He would play, he would practice, and then he would come home, stop
in the garage to wash his clubs, eat dinner, and go to bed. He would put the clubs to bed, then he went to bed. He would get
up the next day and do the same thing. The only time it was different was on the weekends — then he would spend the entire
day at the golf course.”

The sunup until after sundown routine was not an exaggeration, according to his father. “I would wait until it got dark —
pitch-dark — and then I’d drive over to the golf course to pick him up,” he said. “The putting and chipping green was next
to the clubhouse, so there was always some light there. I would pull up and it would look like it had snowed on the green
— it was completely white with golf balls. Sometimes I wouldn’t see Rocco and then I’d look and he’d be down in the bunker
with a bag of balls at his feet. He’d say, ‘Hang on, Dad, I have to hole two more before I can go.’ Or he’d just want to finish
the bag.”

All the work began to pay off, though not that quickly. “It wasn’t as if he went from a 15 [handicap] to scratch overnight,”
Dave Lucas said. “But he was clearly a lot better player as a senior than he had been as a sophomore, when he really started
getting into it.”