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

the rim — and dropped in.
    Rocco saw Woods go into one of his victory dances — both fists shaking, back arched, screaming to the sky joyously. His caddie,
     Steve Williams, was screaming too and hugging his boss as if he had just won the Open.
    This wasn’t Tiger’s dream, though; it was Rocco’s. The putt, amazing as it had been, hadn’t won the Open. It had tied him
     with Rocco Mediate, son of Tony and Donna, the kid who described his handicap as a high school senior as being “about a thousand.”
    And so Rocco Anthony Mediate sat there watching Woods and Williams exult, thinking on the one hand that he had been one inch
     from winning the U.S. Open. On the other hand, he was now going to go head-to-head with the greatest player in history for
     18 holes in a playoff for the U.S. Open title the next day.
    “No disrespect to Jack Nicklaus,” Rocco said. “He was great, but this guy [Woods] is from another planet. He makes shots under
     pressure that no one else has ever made. If he hits fair-ways, he wins by 15. If he doesn’t hit fairways and puts the ball
     in impossible places, he still wins. He’s the absolute best ever, without any doubt at all.
    “But I wasn’t afraid to play him head-to-head. I wanted to show him what I could do. I wanted to show
me
what I could do. I wanted to show the world what I could do. When the putt went in, I wasn’t the U.S. Open champion. But
     I had a chance to win it in a way no one would ever have dreamed possible.
    “Except me. I dreamed it.”
    T HE VERY FACT THAT R OCCO relished the idea of going head-to-head in an 18-hole playoff against Tiger Woods made him markedly different from most of
     his colleagues on the PGA Tour. Most dreaded the idea of even being paired with Woods for an ordinary round of golf on a Thursday
     or Friday at a weekly tour stop. His presence was intimidating, in part because he was without question the greatest player
     in the world, but also because of the way he carried himself. Every pore of his body oozed confidence, the message always
     the same from the very first tee: I’m better than you. I know it and you know it and so does everyone watching us.
    Only on rare occasions did Woods fail to live up to that message. He had stormed onto the tour in 1996, winning two times
     that fall at the age of twenty, and then had won his first major as a professional, the 1997 Masters, by 12 shots. “He’s a
     boy among men and he’s showing the men how to play,” eight-time major champion Tom Watson said that week.
    Woods hadn’t let up much since that Masters. He had eye surgery and knee surgery, and always seemed to come back better than
     before. He piled up victories at a stunning rate, especially for the modern era. At a time when any player winning twice in
     the same year was thought to have had a superb year, Woods averaged more than five wins a year during his first eleven seasons
     on tour. By 2008, he had already won thirteen majors as a pro, putting him second all-time and well on his way to Jack Nicklaus’s
     record of eighteen. During one extraordinary stretch in 2000 and 2001, he won four majors in a row. Considering the fact that
     any player who wins three majors in a career is considered a lock Hall of Famer, the four majors in ten months — known in
     golf circles as the “Tiger Slam,” since he won all four of the game’s Grand Slam events in succession but not in a calendar
     year — was arguably the greatest feat in golf history.
    “Playing with Tiger is just hard,” said Paul Goydos, a veteran pro who, as with most players, liked Woods when he didn’t have
     to compete against him. “Most of it isn’t his fault. The galleries are always huge and they’re always moving after he hits
     or putts out. They’re noisy. Getting from one green to the next tee can be tough because security is so focused on him.
    “He’s not unfriendly out there, but when it’s important to him and he’s grinding — which is