My Life in and out of the Rough

by John Daly

  How did I think I’d do tomorrow? Shit, I was still thinking about today.

  Afterwards, my inner circle of buddies rallied around me and cheered me on. My best friend at the time, Donnie Crabtree, was there along with Rick Ross, who was sort of my coach. A few other guys from home, too. Mom and Dad watched it on TV at home. Fuzzy, the only Tour guy I knew well enough yet to call a friend, had missed the cut and hit the road, so I didn’t hear from him until Saturday morning, when he called and told me to “go get ’em, keep on kickin’ ass.”

  By the weekend, of course, I wasn’t the mystery guest anymore. I have the tapes from CBS of that tournament, and I can’t remember seeing any of my shots on Thursday. On Friday, I played early, so they weren’t on the air yet. But by Saturday, things were nuts. The newspapers had been full of stories about me, and the galleries had caught on.

  I was paired with Bruce Lietzke on Saturday; we were the last twosome to tee off. In the clubhouse after the round, Bruce had said to me, “I want to beat you, but if you keep on playing like this, nobody’s going to beat you this week.” Bruce is definitely a good guy.

  On every hole now, I was high-fiving people, and after all that had been in the newspapers and on TV, the galleries were going wild. I mean, the crowds were yelling and screaming and hollering, “Kill it, Big John!” I guarantee you it was the first time I ever needed marshals and security guys to get from hole to hole. I was so happy and surprised and proud of all the people rooting for me, it started to feel like a big party, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger.

  It all happened spontaneously. People were rooting like hell for me. I could hear it, I could feel it, and I guess I figured I would give them back something besides golf. If I went to Crooked Stick and just hit the ball and didn’t show them any love, maybe they wouldn’t have taken to me like they did. Anyway, it was fun.

  After only two days, I felt like I was their guy.

  The craziest thing about the whole weekend, in a way, was getting invited by Mr. Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, to be his guest at their exhibition game on Saturday night. I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but Mr. Irsay was a huge golf nut, and he’d seen the way the people in the gallery were carrying on, and so he had Mr. Michael Browning, the president of Crooked Stick, ask me if, after I got through with the media on Saturday, I’d come on out to the game. I said sure.

  See, I love football. Love it. I don’t care who’s playing. I don’t care if it’s preseason or whatever. Just to see guys out there hitting each other, it’s awesome. Hey, it’s football—let’s go!

  It was a blast. I met all the guys in the locker room before the game—Eric Dickerson, Jeff George, guys I’d seen on TV. Got jerseys. Got autographs. Gave a few. Then, during the game, I sat in Mr. Irsay’s box and signed programs for the Colts fans in the grandstand. It was great.

  Next thing I know, I’m in the middle of the field at halftime, me and Bettye, with 48,000 people screaming their heads off after they introduced me. I mean, they were going nuts. I’d never seen a city embrace somebody like that, especially somebody they’d never even heard of three days earlier. All of a sudden, after what—72 hours?—I felt like I was the mayor of Indianapolis.

  And I almost became something even better: a kicker in the NFL.

  Before the game, just kidding around, I told Coach Ron Meyer and the Colts people that I’d been a field goal kicker in high school, so if they needed someone, let me know. Well, they told Mr. Irsay, and he jumped all over the idea. Right away, he was looking into having me suit up the following week and kick an actual extra point during the game. But because of the insurance issues—I could have been hurt or maybe hurt someone else—it didn’t happen. Wouldn’t that have been something? Who knows, maybe I missed my calling.

  (I got another chance. That fall, the L.A. Rams—they were still there then—were playing the 49ers on Monday Night Football. Some PR guy hooked me up with the Monday Night Football crew, and that afternoon I hit a 3-iron out of Anaheim Stadium, where they were playing that night. Then I kicked a 35-yard field goal, barefooted. Don Meredith held for me. And John Madden put me on that year’s All-Madden team. I got an All-Madden card! I was the field goal kicker on the 1992 All-Madden team!)

  After the Colts game, me and Bettye went on back to the motel. I still had a lot of nervous energy, but I didn’t have any trouble going to sleep, and I slept through the night. You know, looking back, I wonder why I wasn’t more wired up or nervous or something, but I was just having too much damn fun.

  No doubt a lot of people figured I was going to piss it all away on Sunday. Can’t blame ’em. I was a nobody. I wasn’t even supposed to be there. It was just a matter of time before my nerves would get to me and I’d start spraying golf balls all over Indiana.

  But I had something going for me that made me feel like, yes sir, I did belong. On Sunday morning, when I got to the clubhouse, I found a note in my locker.

  Now, golfers aren’t like baseball players, who’ll typically spend a couple of hours in the clubhouse. Most Tour golfers go to a locker room to change their shoes, stash any gear they’ve brought with them, and check to make sure their flies are zipped. Really, that’s about it. I mean, guys don’t usually shower there, or get medical treatments, or sit around in whirlpools.

  That’s about it, as I said, except for one thing: checking their messages.

  Things have changed a lot since cell phones and BlackBerrys came along, but 15 years ago, if an equipment rep or some friend of a friend looking to score tickets to the tournament or even your agent wanted to be sure to make a connection, the locker room attendant would leave a message in your locker. And if you’re on the leaderboard on Sunday, you’re going to find a lot of messages, even if you’re some redneck rookie from Arkansas.

  So there I was on the most important day of my life, trying to pretend I didn’t have butterflies fighting to get out of my gut, reading a bunch of scraps of paper from all sorts of people who all of a sudden wanted to be my best friend, when I came on one, neatly folded, with the following handwritten line:

  “Go get ’em, John.”

  Just those four words: “Go get ’em, John.”

  Nice note, but no big deal.

  Except that it was signed “Jack Nicklaus.”

  Jack Nicklaus!

  Holy shit! The guy I admired more than anybody else in golf, my childhood hero, Jack Nicklaus was giving me a pat on the back and telling me to go out there and get ’em. No way that didn’t help me do what I did over the next 18 holes.

  Even so, I still wasn’t thinking consciously about winning or losing the tournament. Sounds funny, I guess, but I was just thinking about going out there and playing golf. Dr. Bob Rotella, a real smart man I got to know some years later, says that’s called “staying in the moment,” and it’s what you’re supposed to do. Get ahead of yourself, start thinking ahead to where you want to end up, and you’re more likely to screw up and never get there.

  Anyway, I wasn’t scared. I had butterflies. But I wasn’t scared. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

  You wouldn’t have thought it, though, by the way I hit my first shot of the day on Sunday. I hooked my driver into the trees, your classic nervous, anxious, what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here overswing. But then I came back and made bogey, a helluva bogey, considering where I hit the drive. Made birdie on two, so I was par for the day and three strokes up on the field after two holes—man, I was in pretty good shape.

  I was paired with Kenny Knox. Kenny wasn’t particularly long, and I was outdriving him by 50 yards on some holes. That went over well with the fans, of course. On number eight, a 438-yard par 4, I hit driver and L-wedge, which tells you how far my tee balls were going.

  I owned the par 5s that week: one eagle, 10 birdies, five pars, which comes to 12 under. On the other 56 holes, I was even par. I won the PGA Championship on the par 5s.

  My second birdie on Sunday came on the fifth hole, that humongou
s par 5 I told you about. Then, just when I started getting a little nervous about where I was and what I was doing, I ran off a solid string of seven straight pars. On the 13th, a par 3, I made a 25-footer from the fringe for birdie, and all of a sudden I’ve got my right fist going, waving it around big-time.

  The 14th hole, a big old dogleg left, was a really long par 4, maybe the longest on the Tour, at 468 yards, but I was hitting L-wedge to it every day, and I had a birdie in the second round and three pars there to show for it.

  At 17, a 230-yard par 3, I hit a bad 4-iron left into the bunker. The pin was cut about 5 feet from the left edge, so I should have played it to the fat part of the green. Anyway, I hit a sand wedge out about 20 feet, knocked it past about 7 feet, missed coming back, and finally tapped in for double bogey—and still had a three-stroke lead. You got to feel pretty good about your chances when you double-bogey the 71st hole in a golf tournament and still have a three-stroke lead.

  Play it safe on the final hole and protect my lead?

  No way: you gotta let the big dog eat.

  Squeeky didn’t hesitate. On the 18th tee, he handed me my driver without blinking an eye. The final hole was a par 4 with water down the right side. I figured, even if I hit it in the water, I could still make bogey and win. Well, I killed my driver smack down the middle and then hit an 8-iron from about 160 yards to inside 30 feet. That’s when I began my “victory tour,” walking tight up the middle of the 18th fairway, knowing I’d done it.

  There were something like 35,000 people at Crooked Stick that day, and I felt like every one of them was on my side. For some reason, as I started walking, I began waving my right arm around, just like Arsenio Hall.

  The hairs on my arms were sticking up, but I still rolled in a 4-foot par putt for a 276 total, three shots better than Bruce Lietzke.

  The last guy to get into the PGA Championship finished first.

  When I look at the tapes of the 1991 PGA, I see the same guy I am today, only a bunch of pounds lighter. I mean, my swing was in perfect balance. I wasn’t hanging back. I wasn’t de-accelerating through the ball. Hips turned good. I was making a full, strong follow-through on everything. Yeah, I’m more mature now. I don’t push as hard as I did then. I don’t get overanxious. And I don’t let the dark side affect me the way I did back then—and later. But the swing and the game, they’re the same.

  I played fearless golf that weekend. I just went out there and hit the ball. I just did my thing. My short game was great: I hit my approaches close, and I made a bunch of putts from inside 10 feet. Most of the time the ball went where I wanted it to. When it didn’t, I didn’t get scared. I just went and found it and hit it again. I was fearless. That was the key.

  (That, and Nick Price’s wife going into labor.)

  The very best thing about that weekend—aside from winning, of course—was the way the fans rallied around me. And they’ve been with me ever since. That Saturday night at the Colts game? It was like that at St. Andrews four years later when I won the British. It’s like that in Houston, in San Diego, in Augusta, pretty much wherever I play—no matter how I’m playing at the time, no matter how much I’ve screwed up along the way.

  And it all began 15 years ago in Indianapolis.

  It all happened so fast. The whole week was a blur. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve answered a million questions about it. But except for the Colts game, it was just like every other tournament week: wake up, breakfast from McDonald’s, play golf, dinner from McDonald’s, go to bed, then wake up and do it all again. You’d figure with all that was going on, and with me seeing my name on the top of the leaderboard at a major, that I’d have trouble sleeping or something. Uh-uh. I slept like a baby every night.

  The only difference was that on Sunday night when I went to sleep, I was the 1991 PGA champion.

  TWO

  FINDING MY WAY HOME

  I was born in Carmichael, California, near Sacramento, on April 28, 1966. I don’t remember much about California, though, because when I was four years old, my father, Jim, moved my mother, Lou, my sister, Julia, my brother, Jamie, and me to Dardanelle, Arkansas.

  That’s where I learned to play golf.

  Dad was a construction worker who helped build the Unit One nuclear power plant right outside Russellville, just on the other side of the Arkansas River from Dardanelle. Dad was always being yanked back and forth between the day shift and the night shift, and he was always being called away to work on some other plant in another state when they had an outage or something. Sometimes he’d be gone two months or so at a time. Then, when he came back, it seemed like he’d always be catching the night shift and sleeping days. My brother, sister, and I really didn’t get to spend a lot of time with Dad when we were growing up.

  Mom pretty much raised us. Everybody called her Momma Lou. She ran a pretty tight ship, mostly without ever having to raise her voice. When she did take a belt to me or Jamie, it was because we really needed it. She sewed a lot—she even made a lot of our school shirts—and she was a good cook. Even now, I can close my eyes and taste her chocolate gravy and hot biscuits. But my last couple of years in high school, she was gone a lot. She’d go off to Kansas City when my father was working up there. Later, when he got assigned to a plant in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, she’d go up there for three weeks at a pop, come back for a weekend, then go back again.

  Mom died in November 2002. I miss her a lot. So does anybody who ever met her. Dad’s still living in Dardanelle in a place I bought him and Mom near our old house.

  Dardanelle’s a town of about 5,000 people located right in the middle of the state—35 miles west of Little Rock, 75 miles east of Fort Smith, just south of the Ozarks. The Arkansas River runs through it. Russellville, on the other side of the river, has a population of about 35,000.

  Our family wasn’t rich or anything, but Dad always had work, and by the time I was a teenager, he was making decent money. He was tight, though. He didn’t like to spend it. When Jamie or I wanted something, we always went to Mom. Or we’d go to Woodson’s, this clothing store in Dardanelle, and we’d charge jeans, shoes, shirts, whatever. When Mom would see the bill, she wouldn’t get mad or anything, but Dad, he’d sometimes have a shit-fit.

  We were a close family, I guess, but in a kind of distant way. Dad wasn’t around much. Mom was, until me and Jamie got to be teenagers, and then she started spending a lot of time with Dad when he was called away on some job. We never really talked about any problems we might have had. I guess we all sort of figured that if you had some kind of problem, you’d work it out by yourself. We kind of went our separate ways.

  I know I never talked about my problems with anybody, except maybe Mr. Don Cline and Judge Van Taylor over at Bay Ridge Golf Club, when I was a teenager. Seems like I was the one who was always asking everybody else if they were okay. I kind of let my own problems build up, I guess. If I was hurting inside about something, I kept it to myself.

  Me and my brother Jamie were tight as ticks when we were growing up, even though we were real different. He was always working on cars and building things. I didn’t have anything to do with any of that stuff. I was into sports. The only sport he cared about enough to do was waterskiing. He’s 14 months older than me, and as teenagers, we always got along. But when we were little kids, we got into our fair share of fights, and it usually came down to a choice: get a whupping from Dad or put on the boxing gloves and fight it out in the backyard. We always went for the backyard.

  Our house in Dardanelle was close to the Bay Ridge Country Club. Back then it was your basic country nine-hole track. It didn’t even have a bunker at the time. But it’s located on a great piece of property. From one point, on the fourth hole, you can see maybe 25 miles, all the way to Mount Nebo and Lake Arkansas. It’s a beautiful place.

  (Today, it’s got 18 holes and a new name: Lion’s Den Golf Club. I bought it in the fall of 2005.)

  I got teased a lot when I was a teenager because of my size
. I was chunky. Not really fat, but definitely chunky. Hell, I ate too much.

  I loved Mom’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes and hot biscuits, and I loved hamburgers and French fries and chocolate shakes.

  I hated vegetables. I tried all of them, too, because Dad made me sit at the dinner table until I did. But every time I’d eat spinach or green beans or peas or any of that stuff, I’d go running to the bathroom and throw up.

  I hated seafood, too. Even now, when I go to pro-am banquets at tournaments, they always have shrimp and salmon and lobster and crap like that, and I practically puke.

  Other kids used to pick on me for playing golf. Back then, kids in rural Arkansas didn’t play golf; it was an old man’s sport. Hey, Johnny, you’re so fat you got to play golf! I heard that a lot. I also got teased for these two big front teeth of mine. Even when I smiled, I tried to hide my teeth. I was embarrassed. Truth is, I wasn’t much to look at.

  We moved around a lot: Locust Grove, Virginia (between Culpeper and Fredericksburg), where I went to school from the seventh through the ninth grade; Zachary, Louisiana (near Baton Rouge), for the first semester of my sophomore year in high school; Jefferson City, Missouri, through the first half of my senior year; and then back to Dardanelle for the second half of my senior year, so I could graduate from high school there and qualify for in-state tuition at the University of Arkansas.

  All I wanted to do as a kid was play sports. There’s a picture of me at one of my first birthdays holding up one of my father’s putters. The first time I swung a golf club—I was four and we were still in California—I hit a cut-down 7-iron about 30 yards on a beeline and smashed one of our living room windows. The first nine holes of golf I played at Bay Ridge—I think I was six, maybe seven—I shot 42. Of course, that was from the ladies’ tees. My first score from the men’s tees was 56.