by John Daly
Me and my wife, Sherrie, and a bunch of friends were back in Dardanelle for a big Fourth of July cookout and party. It was a big party, maybe 50 or 60 people, with a lot of friends from all over. We threw it at my house, which is near our old place where we grew up. Me and Sherrie, we’re staying in my tour bus, which was parked out front, and we’re out there at about 10:30, when there’s a knock on the door. It’s Sherrie’s friend, Kelly, and she wants to come in because my dad’s been following her around, she says, trying to hit on her. Look—Kelly’s 25, maybe 26, and Dad’s 69. He’s in his bathing suit, and he’s drunker than shit. I tell him, “Dad, just get back on out of here, get back on out to the patio.” Then I go get Jamie and tell him Dad’s drunk, he can’t walk, and we got to get him home.
Well, Jamie and I manage to walk Dad back to his house, and all of a sudden he bows up on me, like he’s wanting to fight. He starts at me, and I just push him back into the chair. I tell him, “Dad, just sit down and shut up.” Mom, meanwhile, is over at my house, listening to Johnny Lee sing—thank God, she didn’t see or hear any of this.
After a while, Dad gets up and stumbles into his bedroom. We think he’s going to bed. But all of a sudden he stumbles back out of the bedroom with a big old pistol in his hand, and points it at me, about 6 inches from my head. He was so hammered, he didn’t know who the hell I was.
I’d had it with him. I say, “Just go ahead and shoot me—if you don’t recognize your own son, just go ahead and shoot me.” You know, I think he might have done it, he was that shit-faced. But before he could, Jamie comes up, pushes his hand away, shoves his head up against the wall, takes the gun out of his hand, and shoots it off, I guess to get Dad’s attention. Whatever, it worked. Dad looked up, and without a word, staggered off into his bedroom.
The next day Jamie talked to Mom and told her what happened. She was devastated. She really got up in Dad’s face. He didn’t remember anything. He had a total blackout of the whole thing. He apologized to Mom, to Jamie, to me, to everybody. All I know is that Dad was so drunk on Jack he didn’t know who the hell we were, and that if Jamie hadn’t been there, Dad might have shot me dead.
End of story.
Well, almost end of story. There’s one more thing: Dad hasn’t had a drink since that day.
The reason I’m telling you this story now about my father pulling a gun on me is that, even though it only happened four years ago, I feel like it could have happened anytime while I was growing up.
Looking back, I can see that my relationship with Dad was complicated. There would be times when I wouldn’t see him for months because he was off somewhere on a job, and there would be times when he was around that he supported me in my golf or whatever other sport I was involved in at the time. But there would also be times—a lot of times—that he’d be so crazy mean drunk that I just wanted to stay clear of him entirely, just to keep him from beating the shit out of me for no good reason.
Between those times and the times when Mom would be off with him, it’d be just me and Jamie and Julia at home—or later just me and Jamie. The only place I felt comfortable and safe was on a golf course. Anytime I was out on the golf course, it was just me, playing the game, even if I was playing with somebody else. And a lot of time it was just me, period. Late in the afternoon in Dardanelle or Locust Grove or Jeff City, hitting balls by myself until it was dark—and sometimes later, if there was a full moon.
Growing up, those were the most peaceful times in my life. And today, being on the golf course, inside those ropes at a tournament, clearing my head and focusing on one thing and one thing only—the shot I want to hit—that’s about the only time and place I feel at peace from all the stuff that’s rained down on my head the last 20 years.
The golf course is the only place where I feel really, truly at home.
THREE
CHASING MY DREAM
Ever since my father taught me to holler “Ooooo, Pig! Soooie!,” I’d been a huge Arkansas Razorbacks fan. Since we were first-graders, me and Donnie Crabtree would spend whole afternoons after school doing play-by-play of Arkansas-Texas football games. The Hogs always won, usually in the last few seconds, when me or Donnie would catch the winning touchdown pass or plow through a bunch of Longhorns into the end zone.
(Oh, yeah—we played in all those games, too.)
So now, going off to college to play golf for the Arkansas Razorbacks? Man, I figured I’d died and gone to heaven. Only better.
If we’d stayed in Jeff City, I suppose I would have gone to the University of Missouri and played golf there, which wouldn’t have been half bad. I’d won the Missouri Amateur when I was 16, so I had a reputation in the state. But it wouldn’t have been the same.
Anyway, it turned out to be a great half year all around. Me and Jamie had the house pretty much all to ourselves while Mom and Dad were off in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, where Dad was working at the time, and we were throwing all those hellacious parties. And all the while, I was getting more and more psyched about my dream coming true—playing for the Razorbacks, only this time for real.
The moral to this story is that you better be careful what you wish for. I went to Arkansas, all right, but I didn’t play for the Razorbacks, at least not my freshman year.
See, our coach, Steve Loy, must have hated me.
Let me put that another way: Coach Loy acted like he hated me. Hell, I can’t know what he really felt about me. I do know one thing for sure though: Steve Loy made me hate myself.
The day we all showed up for our first team meeting, Loy said to me, “You have to lose 60 pounds if you want to play for me.” Period, end of story. At first, I was like, okay, he wants me to lose some weight, I’ll lose some weight. At the time, I weighed about 235. Up some from the spring, when he recruited me—what the hell, I’d spent pretty much the whole summer drinking beer at the parties me and Jamie threw. But lose 60 pounds? No way. He had to be exaggerating to make his point.
But he was dead serious. And so I got serious, too.
At first, he had me on this bullshit diet of salad with no dressing and vegetables, which I hated, and fruit and nothing, absolutely nothing, fried. And he weighed me every day. I mean, shit, I grew up on my mother’s fried chicken and her biscuits and chocolate gravy, and when I was a teenager I practically lived on hamburgers and fries. It didn’t take long for me to come up with my own diet.
The first thing I did was change my drinking habits. Beer was mainly what had fattened me up over the summer, so I quit it altogether and switched over to Jack Daniels exclusively. Pretty soon I was averaging a fifth a day, usually straight from the bottle—no glass, no ice, no water. I hardly ate anything.
Next I started smoking. I hated cigarettes, couldn’t stand them. My mother smoked. It was the only thing I didn’t like about her. Driving in a car, she’d keep the windows up so the smoke would be all around her. I hated that.
But Coach Loy said it would kill my appetite. And so I started smoking. Pretty soon I was up to three packs a day. I bumped up my drinking of Jack Daniels because I didn’t want to eat the diet Coach Loy had me on: boiled chicken, a little bit of rice, dry salads, no burgers, that sort of thing. Oh, and I switched over to Special K for breakfast. I used to eat Frosted Flakes and all those sugar cereals, but I got used to the Special K. That was my best meal.
Coach Loy also made me switch from Coke to Diet Coke. That was tougher than learning to smoke: it must have been three weeks before I could get used to the taste.
Eventually, it got to the point I just wouldn’t eat hardly anything. I’d just sit in my room and drink straight out of a Jack Daniels bottle, then go practice for three or four hours, come back, and start drinking.
Some of the guys got worried, but I wanted to play. If Coach Loy said I had to lose weight to play for him, fine, but I’d do it my way: cigarettes, a little dry popcorn, and plenty of JD. And the pounds were peeling away.
Then, one week late in October, I went something like thre
e days without eating anything at all, and drank four fifths of Jack. I got the dry heaves and passed flat out in my room. Next thing I knew, I was coming to in a hospital in Fayetteville. It was my first visit to an ER with a whiskey overdose. I made another one later that fall. Of course, it wouldn’t be my last.
But you know what? My cigarettes-popcorn-whiskey diet worked. The pounds just peeled right off. By Christmas, I’d lost 65 pounds.
I probably ought to have written a diet book or something.
I just couldn’t figure Coach Loy out. I could understand why he wanted me to lose some weight, but he was always, always on me about it. Like when I left for Christmas break my freshman year, I was down to 172, but I came back 4 pounds heavier because I’d spent the break eating Mom’s cooking. What’d he expect? It was the Christmas holidays.
Anyway, he said that’s it, I wasn’t playing until I got down to 170. Can you believe it? We hadn’t even been walking the course yet because it was too cold even to practice outside, and he’s worried because I’d gained 4 pounds over the holidays? Shit, being around Mom’s chocolate gravy and her biscuits for 10 days, it’s a wonder I hadn’t put on 40.
Coach Loy was tough on all the guys, but he especially had it in for me. I mean, I was probably one of the hardest-working guys on the team. I practiced all the time. And all the guy could talk about was how much I weighed.
We had a dozen guys on the team, but only five could play in an NCAA tournament, with the best four scores counting for the team total. (Other tournaments, it might be six and five.) So if we had a tournament coming up, we had a qualifier—that is, the 12 guys would play 18 or 36 holes a day for two or three days. Stroke play. Theoretically, the five or six guys with the best scores would be picked for the tournament squad. Unless one of them was on the coach’s shit-list for being too fat.
One time I’m leading by, God, I don’t know how many shots. On the tee of this par 4, Coach Loy says to all of us as we come up to hit our drives, “If you hit it left, you’re out of the tournament.” (I guess he was trying to teach us something about course management or something. Nobody ever asked, and he never said.) Anyway, I’m trying to shoot the course record, and I don’t want to set up for a fade and risk hitting it way out into the driving range on the right like everybody else. So I play my usual tee shot, a long draw, and it takes a bad bounce and kicks about a foot into the left rough. No problem. I knock it on the green and two-putt for my par. Meanwhile, the teammate I’m paired with blows it way right and ends up making six. And who do you think got picked for the tournament squad? Not the guy who missed breaking the course record by one shot.
My way or the highway—that was Coach Loy’s coaching philosophy.
Another time, during a qualifier, my brain froze or something and I hit this really shit bunker shot. I mean, it was the kind of shot I’d been puring since I was 15, and I was steamed. So I threw my sand wedge towards my bag. Not good golf etiquette, I know, but no worse than you see a dozen times every Saturday and Sunday morning on every golf course in every state in the entire United States of America. Coach Loy didn’t say anything. Instead, he picked up my club, and when I walked up to get it, he swung it hard against my right leg. Not a word, just this hellacious whack. I still have the scar on my shin to prove it.
That’s what I took away from my freshman year under Coach Loy. A fifth-a-day drinking habit, a cigarette jones, and a fucking scar.
I got to play a lot my sophomore year, because two of our best guys, Mike Grob and Mike Schwartz, had finished school, Coach Loy didn’t have much of a choice. We finished third in the Southwest Conference. I never won a college tournament. I finished second, third, and fourth a ton of times. I could have taken a lot more chances to try and win a tournament individually, but I wanted to make sure the team did good, so sometimes I wasn’t as aggressive as I wanted to be. I was a good team player.
Coach Loy had us all playing scared. He had us in a “don’t go for birdie because you might make bogey” mentality. We couldn’t really show our talents. We were the probably longest-hitting golf team in golf in NCAA history. All of us could knock the shit out of it. But, he had this hand signal for 1-iron off the tee, another for 2-iron, and so on.
Let me just say, we hit a lot of irons off a lot of tees.
Bill Woodley took over in 1986 after Coach Loy left. They were as different as night and day. Totally different. We were all in shock. While Coach Loy only wanted things done his way, Coach Woodley let us play. Coach Loy was all about discipline. Coach Woodley was all about trying to win golf tournaments—how you did it was up to you.
Under Coach Woodley, we got to play to our strengths. My strength is hitting driver. The courses we played were generally pretty short, so I was driver, L-wedge on just about every par 4. And now, nobody was flashing hand signals telling me to hit 2-iron. As a team, we were a lot closer together and played a whole lot looser.
My junior year, golf became fun again.
We were closer as a team, but I didn’t hang out with my teammates much off the course. Every now and then, we’d get together and shoot some pool or drink a few beers, but frankly I think some of the guys might have been a little scared to hang around me because of my partying ways.
You’re not going to believe this, maybe, but I was a pretty good student in college. My freshman year, I always went to class, paid good attention, and kept my GPA around 2.5. That tailed off some in my sophomore year, and in my junior year, when I was pretty sure I was going to quit and turn pro, I didn’t go to class at all my second semester. But, hell, three years of college with a GPA safely over the 2.0 needed to retain his eligibility from somebody who hated school as much as I did? Not half bad, especially considering I didn’t even buy books after my freshman year.
Like always, I was just plain bored by school. I stayed eligible, but that’s about it. In college, just like in high school, it was, “Let’s get to the weekend and party.” Only the way I was drinking in college, it was kind of a party every night, even if I was sometimes the only one there.
I didn’t know a lot of people. But once you got hold of a fake ID and got into a couple of bars, and the bartenders got to know you, it didn’t matter whether you knew a lot of people. You can make a bunch of new friends every night.
Money was never a big problem. Don’t get me wrong—we weren’t rich or anything, and my folks sure weren’t sending me any allowance. But for a long time I’d been able to pick up a little cash by scrambling. That’s what we called it. Other people called it hustling. But whatever you call it, it was the same thing: playing other guys for money, usually men at the local golf clubs who thought they were better than they were, and who figured they could kick this fat kid’s ass. That’s the way I spent my summers (and a lot of weekends during the school year) when I needed a few bucks. Think of it as my permanent part-time job.
Remember, making my own spending money dates all the way back to wading in the pond for balls at Bay Ridge. Later, we always lived near a golf club in all the places we moved to. My parents made it clear to me: you stay out of trouble, and we’ll get you close to a place to play golf. So I could always count on a little scrambling money to go along with what I made in my ball retrieval business. Plus, junior memberships at the clubs I played at were pretty cheap.
There’s one chunk of change that to this day I do regret passing up. It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I learned I could have collected $500 for incidental expenses—laundry and stuff like that—my freshman year as part of my half scholarship. Five hundred bucks! That would have been drinking money for a couple of months!
I’d been thinking for a while about not coming back for senior year, but I didn’t make my final decision until early August. I called Coach Woodley and asked him if I was getting a full ride that fall, and he said, no, only a half scholarship, like before. That pissed me off, because some of the guys on full boats couldn’t even qualify for a tournament squad. He said he was sorry, that if I�
��d come to him in the spring he could have done something about it, but that there was nothing he could do now. So I said, Coach, I understand, I should have talked to you earlier, but I believe I deserve a full ride, and I think what I’m going to do is leave school and turn pro.
And that’s exactly what I did.
I won the first tournament I entered as a professional.
A few days after I turned pro, my mother gave me the $300 entrance fee to the Missouri Open. Damned if I didn’t go up there and win that sucker. My winner’s check was for $6,700. I took it right home and tried to give it to Mom. She wouldn’t take it. She wouldn’t even take back the $300 she’d given me.
The next two months, I made about $28,000 in four events. I finished second in a playoff in a tournament in Duncan, Oklahoma. Then in the top five at the Arkansas Open. A top 10 in the Oklahoma Open followed. Then another top five in St. Louis at a kind of Masters for the minitours.
I was practically on fire, right from the start, and the timing was perfect, because the next thing up was the PGA Tour Qualifying School, where I would earn my PGA Tour card for the 1988 season, which would let me start playing with the big boys.
Problem is, I flunked out.
Ask just about any professional golfer and he’ll tell you that the toughest golf tournament he ever played in—by far—was Q-School.
Q-School is held every fall in three stages, for a total of 252 holes if you make it through the final stage. Last year, about 1,200 golfers competed for 30 PGA Tour cards for 2006. Get through Q-School and you get a shot at setting yourself up for life. This year, for example, if some new graduate of the 2005 Q-School finishes 125th on the 2006 money list, he’ll make about $650,000—not counting sponsorship money and outings money—and he’ll get a ticket to come back in 2007 and do it again.
