Should Rocco Mediate defend his title at this week’s Frys.com Open, the 48-year-old PGA Tour golfer will win the “triple crown” of putting, he told reporters Tuesday.
Mediate, who famously lost the 2008 U.S. Open in a playoff with a hobbling Tiger Woods, has won tourneys with a putter of conventional length, a long putter, and will try to repeat at CordeValle Golf Club with a belly model. In fact, Mediate was one of the earliest users of a stick that makes traditionalists swoon each time they spy Adam Scott lining up a putt.
The six-time PGA Tour winner knows all about the whispering campaign that followed him back in 1990 when he tried a long putter on for size, but he paid it no mind.
“I was the antichrist then in the putting world,” Mediate told reporters. “I mean trust me, I had a lot of interesting comments about the putter.”
It wasn’t the yips — the conventional reason that aging golfers struggling with their short games went to longer putters in the old days, before the young guns on tour made them fashionable — that convinced Mediate to go with a longer blade. He said he simply was not putting well. Several consecutive top-10 finishes made him a believer, although he has switched among the three types of mallets over the years.
This week, Mediate has a slightly shorter hammer in his bag and points to the successes PGA champ Keegan Bradley, Deutsche Bank Championship winner Webb Simpson, and others have had with the belly putter. A win this week with a putter stuck in his gut would be “unprecedented,” Mediate proclaimed.
“I’ve won with the long and won with the short,” Mediate said. “I got it done last year here. And if I win with the belly, unprecedented. It would be a triple crown.”
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