Much will roll off Rocco Mediate‘s shoulders, including one of Johnny Miller‘s most infamous off-the-cuff comments.
At the 2008 U.S. Open, where Mediate famously battled 91 holes with an injured Tiger Woods, Miller found himself in hot water (imagine that!) for some candid remarks about Mediate during the broadcast.
During the fourth round, Miller, then NBC’s lead analyst, said that Mediate “looks like the guy who cleans Tiger’s swimming pool,” later adding, “Guys with the name of ‘Rocco’ don’t get on the trophy, do they?”
The comment was seen as insensitive by some Italian-American groups, one of which sent a letter to then-NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol saying Miller’s comment “reinforces a demeaning and damaging stereotype about an entire ethnic group.”
How did Mediate, who was the guest on this week’s episode of GOLF’s Subpar, take it? He didn’t seem to mind.
Mediate told co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz that when Miller called him to apologize the same day as the 19-hole playoff with Woods, Mediate was unbothered.
“He said, ‘Let me tell you what I said,'” Mediate recalled. “And I went, ‘Yeah, so?’ I said, ‘I’m okay with this.'”
“He goes, ‘Yeah, but they’re yelling.’
“I said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’”
Later that year, Mediate was slated to be honored as the Italian American Sportsman of the Year in New York City, but he gave the organizers an ultimatum if they continued to push for punishment for Miller.
“I said, ‘If you guys do one thing, I ain’t coming — not that they would have cared — but I’m not coming to the thing,'” Mediate told Knost and Stoltz. “It’s not anything against the Italians. Okay, that’s what they’re thinking, right? I said, it’s not against us. It’s just Johnny’s being Johnny. I’m okay with it.”
But Mediate still wanted to have the last laugh.
Later that year, Miller invited Mediate to his pro-scratch event in Utah and introduced him at a gala before the tournament. Before the gala, Mediate asked someone to go to the hardware store and get him PVC pipe, a pool net and a cleaning net, and then made sure Miller would introduce him last.
“I go back and I pull my pants up, have my khakis on, pull them up to my knees, the shoes and socks off, take off my shirt, T-shirt on, wrap the black PVC pipe around my body, take the net out,” Mediate said.
As he walked out, the room burst into laughter, including Miller.
“Johnny turns around and he goes, ‘Oh my God,” Mediate said. “And I walked up to the microphone and I said, ‘You want to tell him, you want me to?’
“And he goes, that was the greatest comeback he’s ever seen.”
For more from Mediate, including what he learned from Arnold Palmer and stories from his U.S. Open duel with Woods, listen to the full podcast here or watch below.
