Through brutal honesty, Daly retains popularity
Golfer has had personal issues, but he keeps things fun for fans
POTOMAC FALLS, VA. John Daly is 51, not 31, but who’s counting? He’ll always be the lovable, gripit-and-rip-it, devil-may-care golfer who says exactly what he thinks at any moment of the day and gathers fans like a latter-day Nicklaus or Palmer, senior tour version.
On the eve of the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship, Daly said that attitude is precisely the reason for his popularity.
“Because I don’t have any skeletons in my closet,” he said. “I’m a guy that’s always told them when I screw up, I screw up and I admit it and go on. I don’t hide anything. There’s just nothing to hide with me. I’ve always just been straight upfront with you guys. I’m not one of those guys that’s going to lie to anybody about what’s going on in my life. I think it just takes the pressure off of not having anything looking back or anything.”
As an example, Daly pointed out how he has gone public in the past when he has been fined by the PGA Tour.
“The Tour hates it when I get fined, but I tell you anyway. Because if I screw up, I did. I think the fans relate to that. I think that if you hold something in your stomach for so long, if you don’t get it out, you’re always worried about it, and it just creates more problems. I can say, with this big old belly that I got, that there’s nothing inside that you probably don’t know about me.”
Any wonder why galleries will be swelling around this guy this weekend, and every weekend he pulls out a club and sends a golf ball flying?
Daly, who won his first Champions Tour event just two weeks ago, has always been Everyman to everyone for as long as we can remember, going back to that wild and glorious week in the summer of 1991 at the PGA Championship at Crooked Stick near Indianapolis, when, as the ninth alternate, he slipped into the field at the last minute and improbably won the tournament.
We have been fascinated by him ever since. There have been two trips to rehab and the times when he has walked off the course midround or hit a moving golf ball, and the recent full-throated defenses of Donald Trump that might make some at Fox News blush, but that makes him all the more appealing in a bad-boy, reallife, coloring-outside-the-lines kind of way.
Daly gave some new insight into his childhood in an answer to a student journalist’s question at a news conference this week about how he got into golf.
“I was motivated through Jack Nicklaus and started when I was 4,” he said. “I wasn’t allowed to play on our little nine-hole golf course in Dardanelle, Arkansas. They would let me wade in the ponds. I got to sell them the good balls (he found), I had to keep the bad ones. They wouldn’t take the bad ones.” There’s more. “Then we lived on a baseball field, so I learned how to play kind of on a baseball field: hit cuts to the right, straight shots over center field, hooks down the left, third-base line. Flops to the pitcher’s mound. Pitch and runs to first, second and third. That’s kind of how I learned how to play.”
He took it to a golf course when he was 6.
“And I learned through the Jack Nicklaus Lesson Tee, the cartoon. I learned the grip that way and everything in the cartoon. So that’s kind of how it all started for me.”
It would be easy to say that Daly is himself a bit of a cartoon character, wearing bright colors that don’t often match, living life the way few professional golfers ever have. That sounds critical, but it’s really not. You might even say it’s a compliment, accentuating the joy he brings to the game, and all the fun.