None of this came as any surprise to Mediate, who played the regular tour right up to his 50th year, his last win coming in October 2010, when he holed out with full shots from the tee or fairway four times — including a hole-in-one. Because he knew how much of a challenge the Champions Tour transition would be, and how much he wanted to do well, Mediate recently started working on his game harder than he ever had before.
“I’m practicing more than I did on the PGA Tour,” he affirms. “I work mostly on my putting and use a chalk line between the ball and the cup to confirm I’m swinging the putter on a good line. I maybe hit 200 putts a day, just monitoring my stroke.”
Mediate earned close to $17 million during his PGA Tour career and thus says the motivation to succeed on the Champions Tour isn’t simply to make money. Players like Langer and Fred Couples, both of whom earned considerably more than Mediate in their younger years, are likewise driven by something other than the financial rewards.
“Success on the Champions Tour really means something nowadays,” says Mediate. “Win out here and you can legitimately add it to your resume. Hale Irwin’s resume got even better than it was after winning all those tournaments in his 50s. It elevated the status of the Champions Tour.”
Because of that, says Mediate, there is a sizeable group of players who, like him, are still putting in long hours on the range and practice green. The one exception, perhaps, is Fred Couples.
“Freddie doesn’t really need to practice that much,” says Mediate. “He’s just so darn talented.”
It seems strange but, after 27 fruitful years on the PGA Tour — at one point (September 2002) climbing as high as 15th in the world rankings — Mediate says when making the transition to the Champions Tour earlier this year, he felt he needed to earn his competitors’ respect once again.
“Yeah, I did. I can’t really explain it, but it felt like I was starting all over,” he says.
Of course, earning that respect didn’t take long. In his first event, the Allianz Championship in Florida, Mediate opened with a five-under 67, then followed that with an 11-under 61 and a closing 71, enough to see him home by two shots over Pernice and Langer, and become the 16th player to win his debut on the Champions Tour.
“He knows he belongs now,” Langer said afterwards. “And he’s going to love this tour, because his personality suits this tour just perfectly.”
“From my perspective, he didn’t have to prove anything,” said Pernice. “I would be surprised if Rocco didn’t play well out here. He’s a very established player.”
Most Mediate fans learned all they needed to know about his game and character during that famous showdown with Tiger at Torrey Pines. Mediate knew quite well that hardly anyone gave him a chance.
“He was supposed to walk all over me,” he says. “But I really wasn’t that nervous — well, not in a bad way. It was more excitement, and all I was concerned with was how I’d do against the greatest player in the game. I love what he does and respect him so much, but I was able to remain pretty calm. It was the same when I played against Greg Norman back in the ‘90s. I just couldn’t wait to get out there to see what I could do against him.”
Sure enough, Mediate appeared relaxed the whole way around, and was actually a shot clear after making three-straight birdies from the 13th. Woods would birdie the 18th to draw level on even par, however, and then win his 14th major with a par four to Mediate’s bogey five on the first sudden-death hole.
The cash and exemptions that resulted from the performance were nice, but the real reward, says Mediate, was the extra respect he felt from his peers.
“I think my standing in the game went up a little,” he adds. “I think it changed how a lot of people saw me.”
As a fearless golfer, possible giant-killer, and potential major champion, perhaps, but not as an unfailingly sunny, cheerful entertainer. We always knew that.
Tony Dear is the award-winning author of many books on golf, the publisher of BellinghamGolfer.com, and a frequent contributor to Cascade Golfer.