by John Daly
Dale went out with me some on the minitour circuit at first, which I really liked for her to do because it gets plenty lonely out there, driving from town to town every week, staying in one shithole motel after the other. But that slowed down pretty quick. I wasn’t making much money, because there wasn’t that much money to be made, even when I played well. She stopped going with me, and so a lot of times when I was by myself I’d end up sleeping in my car in the parking lot of whatever golf course the tournament was being played at. It wasn’t a damned glamorous life, I’ll tell you. And I got to doing a lot of drinking by myself, just like in college, only not so much.
Then all of a sudden me and Dale just got cold with each other. We had a lot of fun together before we got married. We drank beer together. We danced together. But I swear, something happened when we got married.
That fall, after I’d missed the cut again at Q-School, I made plans to go to South Africa, and I asked Dale to go with me. She wouldn’t. I kind of pretended to beg her. She said no. She said she didn’t want to be away from her family that long, but I think it had more to do with her not wanting to be with me all that long. Whatever. What was certain is that things had changed between us. Sure enough, she started divorce proceedings while I was gone.
Me and Dale never got to where we hated each other. There wasn’t any meanness between us, no big fights or anything like that. Her not wanting to have sex with me hurt. And she got to nagging me pretty hard about my drinking. The truth is, though, I was drinking pretty hard, because my golf game sucked. But mainly, me and Dale just drifted away from each other, to the point that we weren’t hardly talking to each other at all.
Shit, we were living in two different worlds—literally. She was living in Blytheville, and I was living mostly on the road, trying to get my game together and trying to figure out why I wasn’t already out on the PGA Tour, where I believed in my heart I belonged.
At the end of the day, it was a lot like most first marriages, I think. We were too young, too inexperienced. We didn’t know how to go about living with somebody else, and we weren’t clear in our own minds what we were looking for in another person to share our life with. I think that’s pretty common.
We parted as friends. She stayed in Blytheville, and I moved to Memphis. We were only married about a year, but the divorce took an extra year after that to go through. I got word that it was final in February 1990 while I was playing in South Africa. No alimony. She didn’t ask for any, which was a good thing, because I sure as hell couldn’t afford to pay her any.
Ending the marriage was something we both wanted. Even so, in a situation like that, whether you’re happy it’s over or whatever, it still hurts. The day I heard the divorce was final, I celebrated by getting shit-faced drunk, losing a bunch of money in the casino, and trashing my hotel room. If you can call that “celebrating.” So, yeah, I guess it did hurt a little more than I thought at the time, because I usually don’t destroy things unless I’m mad about something.
We haven’t stayed in touch or anything, but last I heard she’s married and has a couple kids and is happy. I hope so. I think it’s one of those deals where if I was to see Dale again, it would be like, a big hug and “Hey, how you doing? Everything going good?” What I’m saying is that it didn’t end up as a hate thing between us.
Dale was the only one of my exes who didn’t get a Rolex.
Bettye
I met Bettye in Macon, Georgia, in April 1990 at the Macon Open, one of the stops on the Hogan Tour. She was in convention sales for a big hotel chain—a good job, paying decent money. She was working at the golf course that week. We got together at the clubhouse bar after I came off the practice range.
It was a case of sex at first sight.
I’m not kidding. It’s hard to imagine any two people having sex more often than me and Bettye. I want to have sex three or four times a day. I mean, I’m horny all the time. But Bettye’s the first woman I’ve ever met up until now who liked sex as much as me. (Well, almost as much.)
We found this out about each other right away. That week we had a huge rain delay, and what happens in situations like that, a player has to call in to the tournament office to get status reports—are we in, are we out, when will we know for sure? I was staying about 15 or 20 minutes away, and I called every 10 or 15 minutes. You’d think the tournament officials would have a telephone list and inform the players what was what, but they wanted you to call them. So I did, over and over, until finally I was told it would be at least an hour. Fine, so I called back in 30 minutes, and I was told it would be another hour. Fine. So I called back in 30 minutes and I was told, sorry, you missed your tee time—DQ.
Missed my tee time! Shit, it was hard enough to scrape out a living on the Hogan Tour—it cost about a grand a week just to live and get from one event to another—without being out of a tournament before I ever got in. But at least there was one upside to this screwup: I got to spend the rest of the week in the sack with Bettye.
At the time, Bettye was living there in Macon in a friend’s house. So I just moved in for the remainder of the week, most of which we spent in bed. But hey, isn’t that the best way to get to know somebody fast?
Bettye played serious tennis and softball, and she knew firsthand about the competitive edge in sports. She’d been a college cheerleader, she had a college degree, and she was making good money. She’d been married before, just like me. And she was five years older than me, at 29.
Or so she said.
Bettye traveled with me on the Hogan Tour and sometimes caddied for me. I won once and finished ninth on the Hogan Tour money list, which got me into the final stage of the 1990 Q-School at the PGA West course in La Quinta, California. That’s where I won my PGA Tour card for the 1991 season.
Those first months of 1991 were great between me and Bettye. In January, I made my debut as a member of the PGA Tour at the Northern Telecom in Tucson. My childhood dream had come true, and Bettye was with me. I didn’t make the cut, but we were in love.
Photographic Insert
Grippin’ and rippin’ on the 6th hole at Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Invitational in Orlando in 2005. This is where I made an 18 in 1998. But I’ve made a few birdies there, too.
Dardanelle High School, Class of 1984. This is one of the few times in my life that I ever wore a tie.
In 1974, Ol’ No. 22 went to the Superdome in New Orleans to represent the Saints in the regionals of Punt-Pass-Kick, 8-Year-Old Division.
Me in the fifth grade. No logos!
Ooooo, Pig! Soooie! The University of Arkansas golf team in 1985. Recognize me?
To this day, I practice hitting wedges one-handed to strengthen my left arm and develop feel.
Me and Fuzzy Zoeller, my best buddy on the PGA Tour.
President Ford, Bob Hope, Vice President Quayle, and yours truly at the 1992 Hope Chrysler Classic.
Me with my boyhood idol, Jack Nicklaus, at the British Open at St. Andrews in 2000.
That’s Mark O’Meara without a hat on the right, and that’s me on the left. Anybody recognize the young guy in the middle?
Fighting my way out of the Road Hole bunker at the Old Course in St. Andrews in the fi nal round of the 1995 British Open.
The Claret Cup and the 1995 British Open Champion at Swilcan Bridge. This is the picture that kept the White House on hold.
With Mom and Dad at home in Dardanelle after I won the 1995 British Open.
Sometimes you just feel like throwing something.
Another missed birdie.
Peter Van Der Reit, my caddy and good buddy, wants to be damned sure I pull the right club.
Man, we have got to do something about slow play.
My daughter, Shynah, wasn’t all that impressed by the Claret Cup.
… and the Lion shall lie down with the Bear.
Pickin’ and singin’ in my home on the road before the 2002 U.S. Open.
Golf? Who wants to play golf on a day like today? Mem
phis, 1996.
Getting ready to audition for a job with Hootie and the Blowfish in 2005. (PS: I didn’t get it.)
At my charity golf tournaments, people give a lot of money to good causes and I get to sing and play. I like that arrangement.
Some things I just can’t live without.
Back in the day, I would go through fifteen to twenty packs of M&M’s in a round. (With peanuts, please.)
In and out of trouble— again.
This is one line I never mind standing in.
Little John, my wife Sherrie, and me after the most important win of my career, at the 2004 Buick Invitation in La Jolla, California.
I lost in a playoff to Vijay at the Buick Open in 2004, but my son Austin made the hurt go away.
The Lion and the Tiger squared off in a playoff at the WGC American Express Championship in San Francisco in 2005. The Tiger won. This time.
Our best single day together came on Masters Sunday in 1991. I had played that morning in the final round of the Deposit Guaranty Golf Classic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, an event they used to schedule the same week as the Masters for guys like me who hadn’t qualified. I shot an ugly 78 after going 68-71-68 in the first three rounds, so I was in a foul, hateful mood. That changed pretty quick, though, because me and Bettye laid up in bed and watched the whole last round of the Masters with the sound turned off, listening to Randy Travis and screwing like crazy. All told, we did it 10 times that day.
For me, it was a personal record.
(Ian Woosnam won the Masters that year when Tom Watson made double bogey and José María Olazábal made bogey on the 72nd hole and Woosie made par.)
We’d been talking about a trip to Vegas for a while, so after I missed the cut at the Buick Classic the second week of June, we finally went. I’d played seven straight weeks, missed four cuts, and needed a break. Bettye figured I was going to spend most of my time partying and gambling, and I was. But I had another item on my agenda: I wanted to get married.
Why not? I loved her, she loved me. We’d been getting along great for almost a year. Our sex life was fantastic. There was this cute little chapel right there on the Strip where we could do it without a lot of fuss and bother. So why not get married? But when we got to Vegas, and I brought up the idea, Bettye started hemming and hawing.
I didn’t get it. Later, I found out why she said no. But I didn’t get it then. Finally, I said, “We’re coming back here for the Las Vegas Invitational in October? What about then? How about us getting married then?” And she said, “Yes, John! Yes! We’ll get married here in October!”
So that was it. I figured I’d be leaving Vegas with a new wife. I figured wrong. But at least I was leaving with a new fiancée.
Only then, after the PGA Championship in August, everything between me and Bettye got turned upside down.
Here’s what came out over the next six weeks: it turned out Bettye wasn’t 29 when we met the year before, but more like 38 or 39; it turned out she had a 13-year-old son from her first marriage that I’d never heard about; and it turned out she wasn’t divorced at all but was still married to her second husband!
Some of my buddies had kind of half-joked to me before about Bettye’s age. They didn’t believe she was 29. I just told them to fuck off. But now, with our pictures in all the newspapers and magazines, people who knew her from back-when got in touch with people I really trusted and told them who and what she really was. All of a sudden, I went from living out a beautiful dream to fighting my way through a nightmare.
I was trying to play golf and take care of business and deal with all the great new opportunities that were pouring in, while at the same time trying to make sense of all this shit about Bettye and her past. She denied everything, and said it was all a pack of lies that my friends were spreading because they hated her.
I didn’t know who or what to believe.
But I did know one thing: we had to postpone that sweet October wedding in Vegas that we’d agreed to back in June until I could sort out who she really was.
I was busy that fall with all the Silly Season stuff, but as soon as I had a little stretch of free time, I sat Bettye down back in Memphis to get to the bottom of all this shit with her once and for all.
Or tried to.
Bettye kept saying it was all a pack of lies, that this was some sort of plot to split us up. But I showed her this picture from her 1972 high school yearbook that I’d gotten my hands on, which meant that for her to be 30 now, she’d have had to graduate from high school when she was about 12. She admitted she might have shaved a few years off her age: “Don’t all women do that?” she said. I reminded her she skipped an invitation to the White House to meet President Bush Sr. because her passport number hadn’t matched up or something. And what about this son of hers? Did he exist or not? If he did, how come she hadn’t ever mentioned him once in the year and a half we’d been together? And was she still married or what?
Trust her? Why should I?
That December I went to Jamaica to play in the Johnnie Walker Classic. I wanted to go by myself to clear my head, but Bettye insisted that she come, too. She came. Needless to say, I played like shit. I had a 77 in the first round, and a Doesn’t Matter in the second, because I mistakenly put down a five on the 18th hole when I had a four and signed my scorecard without correcting it. That meant an automatic DQ.
By the time I got home, I’d figured out what me and Bettye had to do: split up.
So before Christmas, I told her to pack up her shit and get out. I told her I was going back to Dardanelle to be with people I loved—and trusted. And then she dropped the P-bomb on me: she told me she was pregnant.
My first reaction? Bullshit. By then I knew she’d been lying to me about just about everything else in her life—why wouldn’t she be lying about this? It’s true, she said. Prove it, I said. (Shit, she didn’t look pregnant. She looked as good as ever. But, as it turned out, she was about four months gone.)
So that was pretty much that—I thought. I went to Dardanelle; she packed up and moved out of our house in Memphis. It was done with. We weren’t even married; we were just two people splitting up. No harm, no foul. Only she didn’t go back home to Macon or whatever. She got on a plane and flew to L.A. and hooked up with that famous “palimony” lawyer, Marvin Mitchelson.
(Oh, and one other thing: on January 6, 1992, her divorce from the guy she’d denied even existed finally became final.)
We were done with each other except for one little problem: we still loved each other. Or maybe not. I do know we still liked having sex with each other as much as ever. And we had fun partying together. But I also realize, looking back, that we weren’t best friends, the way I believe two people who truly love each other should be. Friendship is based on trust and sharing. But I knew I couldn’t trust her, and as for sharing—well, I think Bettye was committed to my business, if you know what I mean. The money was pouring in, and—although it didn’t really penetrate my thick skull back then—it’s now pretty obvious to me that she wanted to make sure she got plenty of it.
You know, it’s so funny, before I married her, it was like all fun and games, and all she wanted to do was be there for me. (Bettye caddied for me, for God’s sake.) But as soon as we got married, it was like, she wanted to run my life, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Anyway, Marvin Mitchelson fired off a letter to me saying that I had until January 24 to reach an agreement with his client—that is, cough up a bunch of money—or she’d take my ass to court with a palimony suit. My response was a printable version of “Go fuck yourselves.” Here’s what I told some newspaper: “It’s sad. It’s hard to believe that someone could be that crooked, that mean. It makes me look stupid. Here I go with this girl for a year and a half and I didn’t know how old she really was or that she had a kid or that she was still married.”
Maybe they thought I was going to roll over and play dead or something. But I was righteously pissed off, and I wasn’t going to be bulli
ed into paying her off, given all the grief she’d put me through. So she filed suit, asking for a million dollars and all kinds of other shit, and I went off to Australia to play some golf and make some money. I won the Australian Skins, but my heart wasn’t in it, and after an 81 in the second round at the Australian Masters, I didn’t sign my scorecard and got DQed.
And when I got home, guess what? Bettye had withdrawn her lawsuit because Tennessee didn’t recognize palimony. Me and Bettye were back to square one.
So we got married.
That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Bettye was pregnant, remember. And we hadn’t figured anything out, and she was due in June. At least all our shit was finally out in the open—or at least I hoped it was. And we both wanted the kid to be, you know, legitimate. So we went to Vegas in May and got married. And in June, our daughter, Shynah, was born.
That summer, I planned to play in the Federal Express–St. Jude Classic in Memphis, like I always do, only this time my mind wasn’t on golf, and I withdrew. Instead, I became a father for the first time.
That’s right. We’d scheduled a C-section for June 10, the day before the tournament began. (That’s one way to get out of the pro-am!) So that Wednesday morning, me, Mom, Dad, Jamie, and Don Cline went to the hospital.
