Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open Read Online Free PDF Page A

were locked in a battle
     for the Open title. Only one could win, and most assumed it would be Woods.
    “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.”

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508 Crestview Drive
    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,