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

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