Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle With Tiger Woods at the US Open by John Feinstein, Rocco Mediate

in the morning
     and drove a couple of miles to find a stream so I could wash my hair before I went to the house. I guess I should have realized
     I was hooked then.
    “I do remember Donna being less than thrilled. Rocco had just broken up with someone and had missed six cuts in a row, and
     she thought he needed to concentrate on golf.”
    On Monday morning, Linda walked into the salon and found a dozen roses and a card at her chair. There was also a plane ticket
     — to Memphis. “Of course I went,” she said.
    She was on and off the tour the rest of the year. Donna’s concerns abated when Rocco began making cuts on a regular basis
     after he and Linda started dating. “We would write to each other when I wasn’t out there,” she said. “I still have a letter
     he wrote me two weeks after we started dating in which we began naming our kids. At the time, we were planning on having six.”
    While Rocco was still in college, Jim Ferree had introduced him to Larry Harrison, a friend of his from Hilton Head. Harrison
     had liked Rocco enough that he offered to sponsor him on the mini-tours and continued to do so while he struggled to make
     money that first year on tour.
    “It was pretty apparent right away this [Linda] was going to be it,” Ferree remembered. “If Linda wasn’t out, Rocco would
     finish up in a tournament and jump in the car to drive back to Greensburg to see her for a couple of days before the next
     tournament. I understood what he was feeling, but I did finally sit him down and say to him, ‘You know, Larry’s put some serious
     money into helping you play. You really shouldn’t be spending all your free time in the car driving back to Pennsylvania to
     see a girl.’ Naturally he ignored me. And naturally it all worked out.”
    Linda may not have been a golf fan, but she was willing to put up with golf to be with Rocco. She went with him to both stages
     of Q-School that fall. After he had made it back to the finals, they were in a hotel in Jacksonville Beach. Rocco was going
     to get ready to play the finals, and Linda was flying north to go back to school and to work.
    “The morning I was leaving, he said to me, ‘Look, I’m only going to ask this once, but please don’t go back to school next
     semester. Come out and travel with me full-time. If it doesn’t work out, you can go back to school in a year.’ I knew perfectly
     well if I dropped out of school I wasn’t going back. But I said yes anyway.”
    After Rocco made it through the finals, he and Linda were a couple on the tour in 1987. The plan was for them to get engaged
     once he made enough money to clinch his card for 1988. That moment came when Rocco finished second to John Inman in the Provident
     Classic in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By then, everyone on tour knew what the plan was.
    “The guys who did the scoreboard drew wedding bells next to Rocco’s name after they posted the final scores,” Linda remembered.
     “That was a fun time to be on tour. It was much smaller and everyone knew everyone — players, officials, everyone. It was
     before people traveled everywhere on their private jets.”
    They were married the following spring. By then, Rocco was playing well enough on tour and making enough of a living that
     they were able to buy a house in Ponte Vedra, Florida, right near the tour’s headquarters at the TPC Sawgrass.
    All the work with Rick Smith and the year of experience on tour had started to pay off during 1987, that second year on tour.
     Rocco began to make cuts on a more consistent basis (19 of 32) and found himself playing later and later on Saturdays and
     Sundays. The second-place finish behind Inman at the Provident Classic in July — he lost by a shot — was worth $62,000, more
     than triple what he had made in all of 1986. He finished the year with $112,099 in earnings, which was good for 91st place
     on the money list.
    “It was such a great time in my life,” he said. “Every day was a