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

almost always — he gets this look
     in his eyes that tells you he doesn’t want to hear any jokes or kid around. You can almost see the intensity radiating off
     his body, especially if it’s Sunday and he’s in the hunt.”
    Which, as Goydos points out, is almost always. In 2007, Woods had had a fairly typical year. He played in sixteen tournaments
     and won seven times — including the PGA Championship. He finished second three times, including in the Masters and the U.S.
     Open — results that angered him. In all, he had finished in the top ten twelve times and the top twenty-five fifteen times.
     That gave him sixty-one victories in his career and 144 top tens in 230 career starts. Some perspective: Phil Mickelson, the
     number two player in the world, who is guaranteed to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, went into 2008 with thirty-two victories
     (a remarkable number by mortal standards) and 130 top tens. He had played in 363 tournaments to accumulate those numbers —
     133 more than Woods.
    It wasn’t just the numbers that made Woods scary. Anytime he showed up on a leader board, other players began thinking about
     what second-place money was worth. When Woods was injured and off the tour, Lee Janzen, a two-time U.S. Open champion, joked
     that “our purses just went up 18 percent.” The winner’s share on tour is 18 percent of the total purse.
    In fact, Woods didn’t even have to be on the leader board to make people nervous. In 2003, when he was going through his second
     swing change and struggling, Woods had to get up and down from a bunker to make par on his last hole in the second round just
     to make the 36-hole cut at the Masters. Watching on TV, veteran tour caddy Mark Chaney watched Woods make his par putt. He
     walked over to Brennan Little, Mike Weir’s caddy.
    “Well, Butchie,” he said, calling Little by his nickname, “I thought there for a second you guys had a chance to win. Tough
     luck.”
    Weir was leading the tournament at that moment — and leading Woods by 11 shots. As it turned out, he did win, but not before
     Woods closed to within a shot of him early on Sunday. Even with his game at its low ebb, Woods still frightened the competition.
    It wasn’t a coincidence that on all five occasions when Woods had finished second in a major championship, the winner had
     not been paired with him on Sunday. And even when it appeared he had no chance to win, he still managed to put a scare into
     people.
    In 2002, he trailed Rich Beem by five strokes with four holes to play in the PGA Championship. Then he birdied the last four
     holes. Beem, playing two groups behind him, managed to keep his composure and win by one. In 2007 at the Masters, Woods needed
     to hole out from the fairway on the 18th to tie Zach Johnson, who had already completed his final round. With the ball in
     the air, everyone — including Johnson — held their breath, wondering if Woods could pull off the miracle.
    Tiger didn’t hole the shot that time, but Johnson said later that “anyone else, you know the odds in a situation like that
     are very much in your favor. With Tiger, I figured the chances were about fifty-fifty.”
    No one wanted to be paired with Woods late in a major championship. He had clearly established his ability to intimidate en
     route to that first dominating Masters victory in 1997, when he had a two-shot lead on European Tour veteran Colin Montgomerie
     after 36 holes. Montgomerie, one of the best head-to-head players in Ryder Cup history, spoke confidently on Friday night
     about his experience in big situations and how he thought that would help him playing with the rookie the next day.
    Woods shot 65. Montgomerie shot 74.
    So much for experience.
    The only two players who had withstood the pressure of going mano a mano with Woods in the final round of a major were relative
     unknowns. Bob May, who had never won on the PGA Tour, had matched 66’s with Woods during the final round of the