by John Daly
Finally, I turned to my brother Jamie and said let’s get out of this place, and we piled into my car and headed back to Arkansas.
By now, somebody had called 911, and the cops came, and the place was in shambles. They reported it as a “scene of domestic violence.” Bettye said she didn’t want to press charges or anything, but she did say I pushed her against a wall and pulled her hair, which was absolute bullshit. But the cops believed her and they were looking to arrest me for battery and harassment. And I’ve got to haul my ass back from Arkansas or they’re going to put out an arrest warrant on me.
How crazy is that? Bettye didn’t want to press any charges. She told the cops I never hit her. Everybody else at the party said I never hit her. She’d even called me before the cops made their move to tell me she wanted me to come back for Christmas. And all of a sudden, I’m a criminal, and I better turn myself in or they’re going to drag me away in chains?
The media, of course, immediately branded me as a wife abuser, even though Bettye issued a formal statement through her lawyer to the prosecuting attorney trying to get the charges against me dropped: “I was not struck or physically injured in the incident. I neither reported the incident nor requested the sheriff’s department to intervene.” But the prosecutor said that in his jurisdiction they weren’t in a habit of dropping domestic violence charges, even when the alleged victim refused to cooperate—and even though, from what I can tell, there was no evidence that she was a “victim” of anything in the first place.
So what I finally did in the spring, just to make the whole thing go away, I pled guilty to harassment and was sentenced to two years of probation.
Guilty? Bullshit.
Convict me for disturbing the peace—fine. Convict me for wrecking my own house—fine. But anything having anything to do with domestic abuse? Fuck that. For the next month or so, of course, everything you heard about me was that I was some kind of monster. “John Daly” and “domestic abuse”—those four words seemed to be locked together.
And you know, that shit went on and on. Years later, I was in the Horseshoe Casino down in Tunica, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, and as a friend and I were walking past some people, I heard some woman say, “Yeah, that’s him. That’s the wife abuser, the golfer.” My friend stopped and said, “You know what, lady? You just don’t know your facts.”
And just last year some jerk sportswriter in Florida hauled out the Colorado thing. He wrote that I’d been accused of “domestic violence” back in 1992. I was not accused of “domestic violence.” The guy can’t even pick up a phone and check out his damned facts? I’m suing him and the paper that printed his lies.
That shit hurts, man. I never hit Bettye. I never hit any woman. I never will. There’s lots of things I won’t say I’ll never do because, you know, I just might. But I will never hit a woman. Period.
Over the years, I’ve caught plenty of hell for bad shit I’ve actually done. That’s fine. That’s the way it should be. If I do something, I’m willing to take responsibility. But you’d think there was enough bad stuff that I have done to write about without working me over for shit I didn’t do.
What it comes down to is this, which is what I told a guy from Sports Illustrated: You remember that time when Richard Pryor said he killed his car?
Well, that’s what I did in Colorado: I killed my house.
But I did not hit, hurt, or in any physical way abuse my wife.
Nothing I said about my side of this thing cut any ice with Deane Beman, the commissioner of the PGA Tour.
A few days after the Colorado shit hit the fan, he called me up and laid out my options: agree to leave the tour “voluntarily” and get “professional help” or be fined and suspended indefinitely.
What choice did I really have? On December 29, 1992, I issued a statement through the PGA Tour:
I deeply regret the incident at my home over the holidays. I realize the importance of seeking professional help and therefore I will pursue counseling immediately for an alcohol-related problem. I will check into an alcohol rehabilitation facility and will return to tournament play only when I am comfortable my life is in order.
(You think that sounds like me? Just asking.)
The next day, I got in my car and started driving from Denver to Arizona to this rehab center called Sierra Tucson. I was going “voluntarily,” but I sure as hell didn’t want to go.
A few miles outside of Castle Pines, I called Donnie Crabtree on the car phone. I told him I was sick to death of the whole shooting match. There was a big cliff up ahead, and I pulled over facing the edge. I told Donnie that my life was shit and I might as well gun the damned car over the guardrail. Donnie said, “You didn’t do anything but beat the shit out of your own house. You didn’t touch Bettye. Don’t even think about what you’re thinking about doing.”
I don’t know whether I was really thinking about driving over the cliff and killing myself. Maybe—no, probably—I just wanted to hear somebody I loved and who cared about me tell me I wasn’t a worthless piece of shit and that I should get myself together and deal with it. We must have talked for half an hour, me and Donnie, before I headed on to Tucson.
I checked into Sierra Tucson in early January 1993 and stayed there for three weeks. As I said, I did it “voluntarily.” I learned some things. I met a very strong individual, Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, the former Dallas Cowboys star, who became a very important person in my life. And later, I named my second daughter Sierra.
But you know what? I went there for the wrong reasons. I went because other people told me to. I went to get Deane Beman off my back. He would have suspended me if I hadn’t gone in on my own. I do know that my conclusion after those 18 days was, hell, I’m not the one who’s fucked up here.
The truth is, I should never have said I was an alcoholic.
That’s right: I believe now that I should never have admitted I was an alcoholic. I only did it because that’s what you’re supposed to do in rehab. I did it to appease people, not because I thought I really was one. I don’t know for sure what I thought, to tell the truth, or what actually was going through my mind. I mean, you’re sitting around in these group sessions with these screwed-up people telling their sad stories, and it gets to the point where it’s, you know, okay, just to not look like an idiot, I’m going to say I’m an alcoholic.
Meanwhile, all the time I was there, me and Bettye were sneaking off together. Since the day we’d met back in 1990, we’d always been superactive sexually, but for something like three weeks after Colorado, we’d been sort of estranged. She was staying in one of these villas on the property that Sierra Tucson has for spouses and family, but you’re not supposed to see each other or get together or anything while one party is in rehab. Only me and Bettye, we were being ourselves, so I snuck out of my window at night and went over to her place and we got it on pretty good.
We even got back together for a while after I left Sierra Tucson, but we didn’t stay together long. Bettye filed divorce papers that spring and I was, fine, let’s get it done. I was glad to be shut of all the mistrust and the lies, but I’ll say this: despite all the shit that went down, sex was never a problem between us.
The thing is, I had to go to rehab so fast that there was no way I could really defend myself to the media and everybody on that deal. I should have given myself time to at least been able to tell my side of what happened. I’m not going to sit here and lie to you and say that I didn’t destroy my house. I did destroy my house. But I didn’t put anybody in harm’s way. I mean, Dan Hampton’s a pretty strong boy. He could take care of himself and a mess of other folks at the same time. But he didn’t have to. I was mad out of my mind, but all I attacked was my house, not people. Dan did finally manage to get me calmed down. But by then, though, somebody had called the police.
On the way back to Arkansas after me and my brother decided to get the hell away from Colorado, Jamie said to me, “This is bullshit, John. You oughtn�
��t to live here; you need to live where it’s warm. You don’t need the fucking snow.” Jamie was right, of course. Always as a kid I got crazy when it got cold. I always wanted to go somewhere where I could play golf all the time. So what the hell was I doing living in Colorado? All I can say is I made some pretty dumb decisions back in those years, and Colorado was one of them.
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last.
Every year, usually the Monday and Tuesday after the International, Peter Jacobsen used to host this great charity event in Portland called the Fred Meyer Challenge. It always attracted a great field because Peter’s such a great host. He threw this great party every year where he and his band, Jake Trout and the Flounders, would entertain about a thousand people in this humongous tent with some good old rock-and-roll. Peter was the lead singer and played guitar. Payne Stewart used to be one of the Flounders.
But even more fun was the “golf clinic” Jake put on for the fans before the tournament. People jammed temporary grandstands behind the first tee, and Jake stood on the tee box and did this funny-ass routine where he mimicked the swings of a lot of the guys. He used to do a terrific Arnold Palmer, where he would take this vicious hack, then bring the club back and turn his head way over to the side. (Close your eyes, think of Arnie hitting driver. See?) And he did a killer Craig Stadler, with a towel stuffed up under his sweater. Then, with everybody in a good mood, he’d bring out a few pros to demonstrate different kinds of shots—you know, a cut, a draw, a banana slice, a straight-up L-wedge, that sort of shit. It gave the crowd a good demonstration, and it gave us a chance to show off.
Well, it was after this part of the show that I did something that got me up to my ass in hot water.
As you’d figure, Peter asked me to come out and demonstrate hitting driver. He set me up real good, cracking jokes about this and that, and I played along because I wanted to put on a good show for the fans. Only when I went to hit my drive, I turned around and set up facing the fans in the stands. I made a big production of it, taking my time, loosening up my shoulders, and waggling my Killer Whale (the Wilson driver I used at the time). The fans were cheering and whooping and eating it up. Kill it, Big John! Grip it and rip it! One guy in the back row, he stood up and held his arms up like he was a goalpost. And so I stood up to the ball and let ’er rip.
I think everybody thought it was going to be one of those fake exploding balls. It wasn’t. It was one of my John Daly Wilson Staff signature babies, and I caught it good. It cleared the stands by a good 50 feet—splitting the uprights—and ended up in the parking lot about 300 yards away.
People went nuts. They loved it.
Deane Beman went nuts, too. Only he hated it.
John, that’ll cost you $30,000.
Looking back, I can see that maybe it was not the smartest thing to do. But honest to God, I hadn’t coldcocked a line drive off the tee since I was 15 years old. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to hurt anybody. I was just trying to show them a good time. But I surprised the shit out of Peter, and I shocked a few other people as well.
P.S.: The next year, we did use one of those fake exploding golf balls. People didn’t like it half as much.
What I did in November 1993 at the Lincoln-Mercury Kapalua Invitational, though, was just plain stupid. I picked up my golf ball on the 11th green without putting out and walked to the 12th tee. I knew better. I was pissed off. I’d four-putted three times already—four-putted! The tournament was set up as a pro-am, and in the pro-ams we play every week, you pick up your ball when the hole is settled, and…shit, I feel like an idiot trying to explain it now, because it was a bonehead move then and it’s still a bonehead move now, 13 years later. I knew I had to keep score. I knew it wasn’t a regular Wednesday pro-am. But I picked up my ball and went to the next tee and hit my tee shot before somebody came up to me and said, “John, what the hell are you doing?”
I apologized and all, but Deane wasn’t hearing any of it: he fined me $30,000 and slapped me with an indefinite suspension. Well, I’d done plenty of things that were worse and never got punished so hard, but I know Beman didn’t like me, so he took his best shot. Last place was like, $7,650, so I go, “Just give that to charity as well.”
Fact is, that suspension might have been a good thing in disguise. Since winning the PGA in 1991, I never worked hard on my game for a good, solid week. I was too busy going here and there and everywhere, picking up big checks. I don’t blame myself for that. My job as a professional is to make my living from golf, right? But I got to use the time off for working on my game, so the suspension may have been a blessing. In one stretch I worked eight straight days in Palm Springs, six and a half hours a day, practicing hard.
(Thank you, Deane.)
But what gave me a bad case of the red ass wasn’t the size of the fine or even the suspension, but the idea it planted in people’s heads that I was drinking again. In announcing the suspension, the PGA Tour office said I’d been “advised to seek counseling,” some bullshit like that, and everybody took it to mean that I was drinking again. Uh-uh. I wasn’t. I was nearly two years sober, and I was playing like shit, and I felt like shit because of the antidepressants I was taking, but I wasn’t drinking.
I wanted to be drinking. I wanted to drink a lot. But I didn’t.
All I can say about 1993 is that there was no 1993, at least not in terms of golf. The only good thing was that I had been sober a year. That had been my goal, and I achieved it. Golf? The best thing I did all year was reach the 630-yard 17th at Baltusrol in the U.S. Open in two—driver, 1-iron.
That was fucking historic. The rest of the year was shit.
Guess what? The following year, 1994, after a good start, didn’t finish any better than 1993.
My suspension was lifted in March. I returned to the Tour at the Honda Classic where, rusty as I was, I finished T-4. (Take that, Deane.) Then I scuffed it around—a T-21, two cuts, and a T-48 in my next four tournaments—before posting a T-7 in Houston and an honest-to-God, I-haven’t-forgotten-how-after-all win at the BellSouth Classic in Atlanta. But the rest of the year slid down the crapper. In my last eight tournaments, I had four cuts, one WD, and one DQ.
It was another year of personal hell. I was on antidepressants that were fucking me up, giving me the shakes and the sweats and diarrhea. I was miserable. I was gambling—and I was eating chocolate like a madman.
There were times after I’d stopped drinking JD when I’d get a sugar craving so bad at night in my hotel room that I’d call down and have them open up the gift shop and send me all the M&M’s they had. Man, I’d suck down anything chocolate: chocolate ice cream, chocolate shakes, chocolate cake, chocolate chip cookies, Butterfingers, you name it. Sometimes I’d eat 15, 20 packs of M&M’s a round (with peanuts). When I won the British in 1995, I ate chocolate chip muffins and chocolate croissants all day long, every day of the tournament.
At rehab, they call it cross-addiction. They warn you that when you give up one thing, like whiskey, you’re going to be looking to replace it with something else. They say you go from one addiction to another. For me, when I stopped drinking I started eating more chocolate and gambling more.
A lot more.
One made me fat. The other damned near bankrupted me.
The gambling started big-time after I came out of rehab in January 1993. My home in Memphis is about 45 minutes from the casinos in Tunica, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast. There’s a Tour stop in Vegas. There’s a Tour stop in Reno. From anywhere on the West Coast swing, it’s a quick bump over to Vegas or Reno. I know. Beginning in 1994, that’s where I spent a lot of my spare time and even more of my money.
By the end of the year, I had won about $340,000 on the Tour but I managed to lose about $4 million—four million dollars—at the casinos.
The year was good because I stayed sober. On just about every other count, it sucked.
There’s a saying that bad press is as good as good press, and some of the bad press
may have helped me in a lot of ways. I mean, I get along with most of the guys who cover the Tour—most of the regular guys, who are around a lot—because I don’t give them any shit. They ask me a question, I answer it. You want “No comment,” go talk to some other guy.
But I get burned sometimes when some guy starts talking to me and it turns out he has an agenda. Or when somebody drags up something out of ancient history—that really pisses me off. I mean, how many times do I have to go over some of the bad shit I did 5, even 10 years ago?
C’mon guys, gimme a break. I know I’ve got some new bad shit you can write about, if you’d just do your homework. Actually, that’s not true. The last five years, about the only bad shit you’d have to write about involves me and my putter.
Probably the worst hosing I ever got from the press came in Scotland, in 1994, and I have to admit that I was in part to blame. Here’s what a reporter said I said. My agent still has the clip, probably as a caution to me not to blow off my big mouth so much:
There are certain people on the Tour who do the crazy stuff. They’re never going to get exposed unless they are found out by the police and put in jail…. I wish we could have drug testing on the Tour. If we did, I’d probably be one of the cleanest guys out there…. Drugs, cocaine, some of the other crazy things. If you’re going to test everybody, athletes in the NBA, football players for steroids, test the golfers. Let it come out…. I think it’s unfair that a lot of this stuff has been hidden. If we did introduce tests, it would help the guys with the problems, not hurt them.
When I read that, I flipped out. I’m not saying I didn’t say it, but I’m damned sure I didn’t mean it the way it came out. I tried to clear it up the next day: “I don’t know of anybody who uses drugs on the Tour, but I have heard rumors. I don’t know it, but I believe it.” But that didn’t help.
