Like a Rock

The game of golf is fraught with challenges-more than enough to make what is supposed to be a leisurely pursuit an agonizing one. Rocco Mediate knows such pain, and it is very real, sometimes dropping him like a boxer felled by a brutal blow. For Mediate, all it can take is a single swing, and there he is, knocked out cold.

For the better part of a decade, Mediate, 41, a popular golfer on the PGA Tour, has attempted to make his living knowing that one wrong move could put him on his back. Not that golf was ever meant to be easy. "I certainly wasn't a prodigy,'" says Mediate.

Beneath the Callaway cap, behind the sunglasses, is a 19-year tour veteran who still pinches himself now and then when he considers the life professional golf has afforded him. But he expects no pity because his career may have been even better had a bad back not robbed him of success. And don't suggest that Mediate is at a disadvantage when pitted against some other player with a different pedigree.

"I'm not afraid of any situation," Mediate says. "I may fail, but I'm not afraid."

Mediate, who will soon move to north Naples, remembers where he came from. He had no golf club in the cradle. Tiger Woods was playing golf when he was three. Mediate started when he was 15. By dint of gritty determination, Mediate ended up at Florida Southern, a Division I-AA college in Lakeland, and excelled.

"I just wasn't that good," Mediate recalls of his early years in golf. "When I went to [Florida Southern], everybody said, 'Are you crazy? You're never going to make it down there.' But I got through it and got better. The only reason I tried tour school [the PGA Tour's qualifying tournament] was because I had been playing golf for five years. I figured at least I'll give it a shot, so in 10 years I won't have to say, 'Boy, I wonder if I would have made it?'

"But I wanted to try it, and here I go make it the first time, and I'm still here. It still surprises me sometimes. Some people think I'm crazy for thinking that. I know I'm a good player and everything, but this keeps proving it and I'll just keep thinking that when it happens. I'm not a world player, by any means, but I'm holding my own."

Perhaps Mediate is a bit hard on himself. No doubt, he is a much better player than he gives himself credit for. Merely to make it this far with so little junior experience and a small-college background, is a remarkable feat.

A five-time winner on the PGA Tour with more than $11 million in career earnings, Mediate was the first player to win on tour using the long putter. He did so at the 1991 Doral-Ryder Open, defeating two-time U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange in a sudden-death playoff in Miami. At the time, the long putter was a novelty, used mostly by senior players who had putting problems.

But Mediate helped make the putter more mainstream. It helps alleviate pressure on the back when a golfer bends to stroke putts, and Mediate adopted it mainly to deal with the back ailments that have plagued him for most of his career.

Even so, Mediate's back woes surfaced again last year and limited his play. But he says he didn't mind spending time at home in Ponte Vedra Beach, near St. Augustine, with his wife, Linda, and three sons. He barely missed qualifying for the season-ending Tour Championship, reserved for the top 30 money winners (he finished 31st). His second-place finish to Adam Scott at the Deutsche Bank Classic helped.The Labor Day weekend tournament made Mediate realize again just how special it is to play and compete.

"To be in that heat again, I just love that," Mediate says. "I just wish I could get there more often."

His goal for the year was to not miss a cut, and he did so for 10 straight tournaments before withdrawing from the Memorial and missing the cut at the U.S. Open.

"Everybody says, 'Your world ranking has dropped,' and it has dropped," says Mediate, who was 51st in the official world rankings through this year's Masters. "I've [spent a lot of time] with my boys and my wife. My world ranking has dropped, but my ranking with my children and my wife, I'm number one. I can get the other world ranking up higher if I do more of that."

Mediate, who has signed a five-year endorsement agreement with WCI Communities, has purchased an estate home in WCI's Tuscany Reserve Golf Club, the Bonita Springs-based developer's new development off Livingston Road in north Naples. The Mediates are expected to be the first family to move into the 460-acre golf community.

Mediate first became interested in Southwest Florida when he played in the 2002 Franklin Templeton Shootout, an unofficial PGA Tour event played at Tiburón Golf Club in Naples, a WCI community with a golf course designed by Greg Norman, the Shootout's founder and host. Nor-man is designing Tuscany Reserve along with another noted golf-course architect, Pete Dye. As part of his deal, Mediate will wear the WCI logo on his golf apparel and represent WCI and Tuscany Reserve at outings, member golf tournaments, dinners and receptions.

Not bad for someone who didn't take up golf until he was nearly old enough to drive. As a kid, Mediate had liked baseball better, even though his father was a golfer. But when his teen-age friends got into golf, there was no one left to play baseball with, he says. Despite his late start, Mediate is the most successful golfer this side of Arnold Palmer to emerge from western Pennsylvania. (Mediate grew up in Greensburg, about 40 miles east of Pittsburgh.) The most recent of his five PGA Tour victories came at the 2002 Greater Greensboro Chrysler Classic.That victory vaulted Mediate to number 12 in the world. At the time, only six Americans were ahead of him-Woods, Phil Mickelson, David Duval, David Toms, Davis Love III and Chris DiMarco. It also capped a 10-month period in which Mediate finished fourth in the U.S. Open, second in the Pennsylvania Classic and third at the Bay Hill Invitational and the Players Championship.

Mediate originally attended California State College, a small teachers' college in Pennsylvania. His game improved, but it wasn't the best place for a golfer to prosper, especially in winter. So Mediate headed south to Florida Southern, where he became a formidable player. A two-time All-American, Mediate led the Moccasins to the 1982 NCAA Division II National Championship. There he became a teammate and friend of Lee Janzen, who would go on to win two U.S. Opens, in 1993 and 1998.

After graduating in 1985, Mediate attended his first PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament that fall. Only 22, Mediate managed to gain his tour-playing privileges on his first attempt, a remarkable accomplishment. But Mediate was nowhere near ready for the increased competition and rigors of PGA Tour golf.

Even before he played in his first tournament at the 1986 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Mediate figured he was in trouble.

"I knew I was going to lose my [tour] card," Mediate says. "I walked up and down the range and I said I've got no prayer here. These guys are way too good. That whole year, I was disappointed. I made one cut, my first tournament at Pebble Beach, and I didn't make another one until April or May. It was tough to take, but I knew deep down.

"Rick Smith and I started working big time then. He gave me something I could play with, and I went back to school [the qualifying tournament] and I've been here ever since."

Smith, who has a teaching school at Tiburón, is another good reason for Mediate to move to Naples. It never hurts to be close to your teacher. The two have been working together for some 20 years, and their working relationship has developed into a friendship that has helped Mediate become a top player.

"He's not afraid to do things," Smith says. "He wasn't afraid to make a swing change 20 years ago. He wasn't afraid to go get cut [surgery]. In fact, he gets more driven by someone saying he can't do something. If someone says to Rock, 'You can't do something, you can't this or you can't do that,' well, guess what? He can and he will."

Now might be one of those times. Back problems have again surfaced, causing Mediate to miss the cut at the Masters for the first time in his career and forcing him to withdraw from several spring tournaments.

If not for a bad back, Mediate undoubtedly would have been a more prolific winner. It was in 1994, a year after capturing his second PGA Tour title, when back problems finally felled him. Mediate had no choice but to have surgery. Without it, he could no longer play, because there would be days when he could not move.