IN AND OUT OF THE ROUGH
What the PGA tour needs are colorful characters who fans connect with, like John Daly
BY DOUG FRENCH
The PGA Tour is populated with a hundreds of seemly identical golfers, one as boring as the next. These guys have to be boring. Being emotional, wearing your heart on your sleeve, or just plain making yourself accessible to the fans will sink most golf careers. There are thousands of guys (and now women) who are beating hundreds of balls a day and spending hours on the putting green trying to get good enough. Each year, PGA tour pros must perform, if not, it's back to Q-School, or maybe the Nationwide or Hooters Tours.
But one player stands out as the people's choice: a guy everyone can identify with, John Daly. A quick glance at the cover of his new book, My Life In & Out of the Rough: The truth behind all that bull**** you think you know about me, and you know Daly's not your typical PGA pro. The first thing is the ever-present Marlboro Light dangling from his lips. The few PGA pros who do smoke work hard to hide it. Daly lights up two packs a day. That's hard to hide, so he doesn't even try. And while most good golfers are tall and angular, Daly is short and plump, with plenty of space to proudly display 84 Lumber and Hooters logos on his shirt. Top that all off with a military-style buzz haircut and there's John Daly.
Daly's life has been an open book for PGA fans virtually since he made it on tour and shocked the golf world by winning the 1991 PGA Championship as the ninth alternate. As incredible as his victory was the fact that nine players withdrew allowing him to tee it up at all. Daly was lucky to even be in Indianapolis where the tournament was being held. He drove up there just to hang out and maybe have a couple of drinks with his friend Fuzzy Zoeller, and found out less than 12 hours before his tee time that he was in the tournament.
Of course, Daly couldn't play a practice round; it was just "grip it and rip it," with the rest being history. It turns out that while most tour pros are practice and work out junkies (re: Tiger Woods, Vijah Singh), Daly doesn't like to practice and won't go near a gym. He makes his living on pure talent, but has nearly thrown everything away with his behavior off of the course.
To say Daly has an addictive personality is, well, an understatement. Although he contends numerous times in My Life that he doesn't have an alcohol problem, he certainly has had one in the recent past. He has lost millions playing slot machines and blackjack, and although he admits having a gambling problem, it's clear he has no intention of stopping. Stop smoking? Forgetaboutit. Daly wolfed down chocolate chip cookies on his way to victory at the 1995 British Open and he loves anything chocolate, as well as, hamburgers, fries, Diet Cokes and Miller Lite beer. Realizing that continued consumption of Jack Daniels whiskey would kill him, he has sworn that off - for now.
Despite his frumpy frame, Daly has never had problems attracting girls. He's on wife number four (in 15 years) and there was almost a fifth. What he hasn't lost in casinos has gone to alimony and child support. Interestingly, his current wife is serving time in prison for money laundering and structuring of financial transactions. But, she'll be out soon after serving a five-month sentence, which is good because John is also addicted to sex. He says that he thinks about it all day long, which can't help his golf game. Daly set his personal sex best on Masters Sunday in 1991 when he and his second wife Bettye did it 10 times.
It's stories like these from My Life that have some sport writers believing Daly should be suspended for his honesty. "It's always amazed me why Daly is so beloved among sports fans when he is 10 times more corrupt than Terrell Owens, Barry Bonds and Ricky Williams combined," wrote Mike Bianchi in the Orlando Sentinel. "I guess it pays to be a good ol' boy white golfer."
What Bianchi hasn't grasped is that there is a little John Daly in all of us. And what the PGA tour desperately needs are colorful characters who connect with the fans. This humble guy from Arkansas with immense talent and a truckload of personal problems gives people hope, and people return the favor by rooting for him. LW
Doug French, associate editor of Liberty Watch: The Magazine, is an executive vice president of a Nevada bank. He is the 2005 recipient of the Murray N. Rothbard Award from the Center for Libertarian Studies.
