by John Daly
That pretty much set the stage for everything that was to come. When we first got to Dardanelle, Dad played golf when he could, which wasn’t all that often. But he liked the game, and we always had Golf Digest around the house, which played a major role in my golf education. We didn’t belong to Bay Ridge, but it was a semiprivate course, so Dad would take me to play with him from time to time.
That’s pretty much where I grew up, if you want the truth of it. I spent so much time there, I guess you could call me Bay Ridge’s unofficial mascot. Mom would drop me off after school, and I’d spend an hour or so wading in the pond, fishing out golf balls. I’d sell half of them to the club for spending money. The rest I’d put in my shag bag. Then, when I had a mess of ’em, I’d take Dad’s driver over to the local Little League baseball park, which had three fields. And I’d find a free field and start hitting golf balls. At first, I’d just get up there and hit everything as hard as I could—that’s how “grip it and rip it” got started.
When I was six, Dad bought me a used set of Jack Nicklaus MacGregors. Men’s clubs. He once asked me if I wanted him to cut them down for me. I said, no, I liked them the way they were. That’s why my swing’s so long. When I’d swing one of those clubs back, the head would almost hit the ground.
(By the way, I played with those old Nicklaus MacGregors all the way through grade school until we moved to Virginia. There I got a set of used Spalding Executives. The first set of new clubs I ever owned was a set of Ben Hogan Directors that I won when I was in the ninth grade at a scramble, at Lake of the Woods, the golf course near where we lived in Virginia.)
From my first hacks with those old Nicklaus MacGregors, people have always tried to change my swing or weaken my grip or shorten my backswing or something. They’d tell me I’d never amount to anything as a golfer unless I did. I just wanted to prove ’em all wrong. When I was little, there wasn’t really anybody around to teach me, and later, I didn’t want to be taught.
A little later on, I started studying those old Jack Nicklaus instructional drawings that used to run in Golf Digest. I learned pretty much all the golf basics from those drawings—proper alignment, how to hold the club, that sort of thing. You could say that Jack Nicklaus himself taught me how to grip it, and that I picked up the rip it part on my own.
On the Little League ball field, once I got a little older, I’d set up at home plate, and I’d chip to first base, second base, and third base, and then I’d hit flop shots to the pitcher’s mound, though I didn’t know to call ’em flop shots at the time. Following those Nicklaus lessons, I taught myself how to hit a cut down the right-field line, a draw down the left-field line, and a straight shot to center. It was like having my own practice range.
The one sports lesson that Dad ever gave me—or at least the only one that I listened to—was to build up my left arm. When I played tennis, he had me shift my racket from right hand to left rather than hit a backhand. When I played Ping-Pong with him, we both played left-handed. He always told me to work on my left-handed shot in basketball. When I was nine years old, he had me hitting chip shots and putting with just my left hand. I’ve been doing stuff like that left-handed all my life, and it’s helped. To this day, when I’m loosening up before a round in a tournament, I’ll always hit a few chips and a few putts with just my left hand. And sometimes, when I’m practicing, I’ll hit a couple of hundred one-handed wedges. That’s the key to my short game.
As a general rule, they wouldn’t let kids play at Bay Ridge unless an adult was with them, but sometimes I’d go out on Sundays and play the one o’clock scramble with Mr. Ken Brett or Judge Van Taylor or Mr. Don Cline. Funny, all the time I was growing up, I was comfortable being around adults. Most kids weren’t. But adults seemed to accept me, and I enjoyed being around them—in part, no doubt, because I obviously loved golf and they could see I was good.
After a while, Mrs. Shirley Witherell, whose daughter Jane was the teaching pro at Bay Ridge, would sometimes haul me around in her electric cart, and we’d play 50 or 60 holes. Mrs. Witherell was a real sweet lady. Still is, as a matter of fact: she’s in her 80s now, and I see her every now and then when I go back home.
As I got older, I started spending more and more time at Bay Ridge, hitting and chipping for hours and hours, always making sure to stay out of the way when somebody was playing through. My favorite practice place was on the fourth hole, which had this really wide fairway where I could practice hitting draws and fades.
Once, when I was maybe eight or nine years old, I said to Mrs. Witherell and Judge Taylor, “You know, one of these days I’m going to own this golf course.” They kinda laughed about it, as you can imagine.
Well, the sale went through in August 2005. Yep, I bought my old golf course. Jamie, who has a construction business in Dardanelle, did a lot of work on it. It reopened this year as the Lion’s Den Golf Club. Best real estate deal I ever did.
Until my junior year in high school, when I needed to be out there to be recruited, I never played in many junior tournaments, because we couldn’t afford the entry fees and the travel expenses. But I’ll always remember my first tournament, when I was 10. I shot an 89, and the kid I was playing against shot a 96. I kept his score, he kept mine, just the way we do on the PGA Tour. But the little bastard flat-out cheated: he said he “lost” my scorecard, and that I’d shot a 97. His father was running the tournament and naturally took his son’s word over mine. Mom was really upset. So was I, but she was practically crying. I had to calm her down. I told her, “Never mind, Mom—he’ll never make it, and I will someday.”
(Turns out I was right.)
Those AJGA tournaments, when you get a little older—say, 15 or 16—are every bit as tense as the PGA Tour events. They’re where college coaches come to do their recruiting. Play good and you could get a scholarship. Play bad and you better hope your parents have the money to put you through college.
When I was in 16 we were living in Jefferson City, and I heard about this AJGA tournament in Hudson, Ohio. We had cousins in Hudson, so if I could get in, we could stay with them. As I said, that was important because we couldn’t afford a lot of traveling to golf tournaments. Back then, I think if you were from out of state you had to send a letter requesting to play. So I wrote this letter saying how much I wanted to play in their tournament, told them what my handicap was, and that I played out of Jefferson City Country Club, where our golf team practiced. All that. Usually parents write those kinds of letters, but I guess they thought it was kind of cool that I was taking care of my own business. Anyway, they let me in. Well, I ended up beating Billy Mayfair, who I now play with on the PGA Tour, to win the tournament.
The next year, I returned to Hudson as the defending champion. Like before, we stayed with our cousins. This time, though, I played just horrible. Dad was ragging on me pretty hard, really bitching at me because I’d played so bad. So I just left the house, right in the middle of this heavy rainstorm, and started walking. Walked for about an hour. It was a strange town to me, and I wasn’t paying attention, and I got lost. Raining like hell, soaked to the bone, and I didn’t have a clue where I was. Finally, Dad and my cousin, who’d been driving around looking for me, picked me up and took me home.
That same year, at the Junior World tournament in San Diego at Torrey Pines, I finished second behind Stuart Hendley. Make that, I would have finished second, except that I got a two-stroke penalty for grounding my club in a hazard, and finished sixth. We were staying with my aunt and uncle. When we got back to their place, I threw the sixth-place trophy on the ground and broke it. Mom got all over me. She asked me, “Did you do your best?” “Yes, m’am, I did, but I choked at the end.” “But you did your best, John, so what do you have to complain about?” Mom always knew the right thing to say, even if I didn’t understand that at the time.
Matter of fact, I don’t think Mom’s lesson ever sank in far enough. I’ve always had a tendency to brood about my game when I’m playing bad. Bro
od, and get really, really mad at myself. Sometimes I’ll just kind of explode inside while I’m on the course. Sometimes I’ll lose it altogether, just go haywire, and beat the shit out of a motel room or something.
Mom was right: if you do your best, try your hardest, then you don’t have any cause to beat up on yourself. Mom was right, and I was wrong not to pay more attention to her.
My last junior tournament was the AJGA championship in Atlanta when I was 17. I probably shouldn’t have even bothered playing in it, because I’d already decided I was going to Arkansas the following year, but I did, and it ended pretty ugly. The night before the final round, me and a few guys went out partying, and I got shit-faced drunk. The next morning, there I was, in the toilet stall at the golf course, puking my guts out. I barely made my tee time. I played just awful, and I stank to high heaven from the booze, so one of the officials pulled me aside to check me out, and he found a bottle of Jack Daniels in my golf bag. DQ on the spot.
Frankly, I didn’t much give a shit, what with it being my last AJGA tournament and all, and I was there mainly to have a good time, and me and my buddies had seen to that. But my parents, they were really pissed off. They laid into me pretty good.
Growing up, I played baseball and football. In baseball, I was a pitcher (good speed, good curve, great knuckler). In football, I was a field goal kicker—and my senior year, I made all-state. My problem in sports was that I’m flat-footed and never could run for shit. I picked golf to focus on, but golf also sort of picked me.
School came easy. I never really studied, but I was a good listener in class, and I made A’s and B’s all the way through my junior year in high school. I was good at history, good at math, pretty good at English. But literature, I hated. I never liked to read, and I didn’t see the point. Shakespeare sucked. I couldn’t stand reading that shit.
I’m serious. I mean, you got to learn a little math, and you got to learn to read because you want to read the sports pages or a love letter. But what else is there to read?
Funny, though, I did like to write stuff. Essays and stories? Notes to friends? Letters? Fine, no problem. Today it’s lyrics to songs. But reading about Hamlet or Macbeth or somebody like that to me was like, who…really…cares?
I never had a problem talking to people, making friends. Sure, all that moving from one place to another, it was a little tough sometimes. I’d make a few friends, maybe even hook up with a girlfriend, then—boom!—we’d move. But somehow it didn’t bother me that much. As a kid, I always thought one of these days I’d be on the PGA Tour or playing in the NFL, and I thought it was important to get to know people. Anyway, when I’d get to a new place, there was always golf, which I could do by myself.
I always played golf, whatever the season. When we lived in Virginia, we’d get some snow in the winters, and I’d be out there at Lake of the Woods scraping off the greens so I could practice my pitching and chipping. We had a dog named Poo-Poo. She’d go out there with me and fetch my balls. She’d always wait till a ball stopped rolling, then she’d pick it up and bring it back and drop it at my feet. Mom and Dad couldn’t believe it. Tell you what, it beats hell out of having to go gather up your own balls.
As I said, we moved back to Dardanelle midway through my senior year so I could qualify for in-state tuition at the University of Arkansas. I’d gotten a half-scholarship offer that fall from Arkansas to play golf, and in-state tuition for the other half meant I could afford to go to college at the only place I’d ever wanted to.
Our house in Dardanelle was on 13 acres—nothing fancy, a log cabin, maybe 1,500 square feet, tops. But me and Jamie, who by then was going to school at Arkansas Tech in Russellville, we had it all to ourselves most of the time after we moved back, because Dad was off working in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and Mom was usually with him. For better or worse, me and Jamie pretty much raised ourselves after our sister, Julia, got married and moved out when I was 14.
And let me tell you, me and Jamie used to have some mighty fine parties there. At first, we’d have about 20 or 30 kids from the high school on a pretty night. Jamie’d build a big bonfire out back on the property, and we’d all hang around it and drink beer. No big deal.
Then word started to spread, and pretty soon we’d get 200 or 300 people there. High school kids from surrounding towns, college kids from Arkansas Tech—shit, we’d empty out Dardanelle and Russellville and then some on a good Saturday night. Trucks, cars parked everywhere. Music blaring from radios and portable stereos, sometimes from local shit-kicking country rock bands. People drinking beer, dancing in the field, just hanging out. We had a trampoline in the backyard that we’d haul up next to the house, and then we’d all go up on the roof and jump off. It was about a 10-foot drop. We were all so shit-faced, it’s a wonder somebody didn’t kill themselves. I drank a lot of beer then, and whiskey, too. Truth is, I drank just about everything at those parties.
We always knew when Mom was coming back from Beaver Falls for one of her monthly drop-ins, so we always made sure the house was spic-and-span when she got there. I was your basic neat freak, even as a kid. (Still am, only more so.) I always had to have everything just so. So after we’d have one of our parties, I’d take care of the inside of the house, and Jamie would take care of the acreage, picking up all the beer bottles and trash. Mom never found out about those parties.
(Or if she did, she never said anything to me and Jamie.)
Like most kids, I used to sneak sips of Dad’s beer, beginning when I was about eight. Unlike a lot of kids I know, I loved it. Just loved it. But the first time I got actually drunk was when I was about 12 or 13 years old. How it happened was that Dad used to make me and Jamie stamp on the grapes for his muscatel wine that he made down in the basement. He’d put it up in these big Mason jars and store it on shelves that lined the basement walls.
Well, this one time, we were mad at Dad because he’d made us stomp on these grapes for a couple of hours. I mean, we wanted to go do something, and we were tired, and our feet were all purple and blue and sticky. So Jamie and me decided we were going to drink us some of that wine. The next day, when Mom was out somewhere and Dad was at work, we drank a whole quart-size Mason jar between us. It tasted great, just like grape Kool-Aid. But we got drunk—boy, did we get drunk. I mean, we were drunker than Cooter Brown. We heard Mom pull up, and I hid in a cabinet underneath the kitchen counter. Jamie ran outside and hid in the backyard. But when Mom caught on to us, out came the belt. We were just lucky Dad wasn’t there.
Every time Mom whipped us, trust me, we deserved it, and she always used a belt. But Dad, he’d use anything at hand—belt, stick, garden hose, whatever. And he hit hard.
Dad drank a lot of whiskey. A lot. And he was tough. He spanked us when we needed to be spanked, but he sometimes beat on us for no reason, too. When he got drunk, he could get pretty irate. I’ve seen him throw bottles at Mom. Before Mom died, she told us all the other things he did to her when we weren’t around—beat her up, threw her around, shit like that.
Once when I was about 15 or 16, Dad was home, and he was out in the garage, where he’d often go to drink. I went out there to see how he was doing, and he said, don’t worry about it, I’ll get you a drink. So I had a couple of sips of his, and then he said, “Go in the kitchen and get me another Jack and Coke.” He was already smashed. So I got him his drink, and I got me one, too, and I’m sitting there in the garage drinking with him and the next thing I know, he knocks the shit out of me and says, “Who said you could have a drink?” Dad could be mean when he was drunk, and he was drunk a lot back then.
But Dad wasn’t always a bad guy. He also had his good points. He always encouraged me in sports. I took part in the Punt, Pass and Kick contest from ages 8 through 13 in Dardanelle, and Dad painted yard lines on the street in front of our house, and would catch my kicks and punts. In 1974, I went to the Superdome in New Orleans to represent the Saints in the regionals of Punt, Pass and Kick, Eight-Year-Old Division.
I got to the semifinals before some kid in Dallas beat me by 3 inches in the punt. The next year, I slipped while punting and nearly fell on my ass. I lost by about 6 inches. You could say I peaked in PPK before I turned 10.
Come baseball season, Dad would also play catch with me. And, of course, we played golf when he had time, but not so much after I started winning.
When Dad was sober, he was great. It was when he was drunk—and that was a lot of the time—that he was scary. I couldn’t figure him out back then. Now I understand that he got just about exactly the way I got when I drank whiskey.
I guess you could say I pretty much learned to drink whiskey in high school, when me and Jamie would throw parties while Mom and Dad were gone.
One of the best parties, though, was one I gave myself the fall of my senior year at Helias High School in Jeff City. Mom was off with Dad in Beaver Falls. So me and Chris Hentges—he was later a great running back at Iowa State—and some of the other guys on the football team got together on Saturday night after a game. We had a friend, who was 21, get us some beer and some whiskey. People made a few telephone calls, and pretty soon there were 70 or 80 people at my house, all getting smashed. A bunch of ’em passed out and slept there all night.
Look, I want to make one thing clear—about this party and the other ones me and Jamie had after we moved back to Dardanelle for the second half of my senior year. We were rowdy, and we were loud, but we weren’t violent or anything. We didn’t trash anybody’s property. We didn’t wreck anybody’s house. We didn’t get in a lot of fights—a few, but not many. We just sat around and got drunk—and tried to get laid. Mostly, we just got drunk.
I think about those times and how much fun they were, and then I think about a lot of stuff that’s happened since that hasn’t been any fun at all, and then I focus in on July 4, 2002.
