If the question is, how far can you get on talent alone, the answer is John Daly.
In 1991 he wasn’t just a story, he was the Daly Planet. A rookie, he gets into the PGA Championship as the ninth alternate, replacing Nick Price, the genial Zimbabwean who would win the same championship the following year. Using Price’s caddie, Jeff “Squeaky” Medlin, who would die of leukemia in 1997, he’s playing a golf course, Crooked Stick, north of Indianapolis, that was stretched to what seemed like absurd distances, but he hit the ball so far, with a swing that seemed so freakishly Gumbyesque, that he cut the course off at the doglegs and flew its hazards as if they weren’t even there. He took the club so far past parallel, he looked like a tweedless, cleekless, mullet-haired caricature out of a Scottish painting from the 1800s. The players in front of him walked faster than usual just to escape what they knew would be his landing area. Once they got down range, they turned to watch the ball and shake their heads.
No one had ever seen anything quite like Daly. He led the championship from the second round on and was the darling of the gallery with his long blond hair, his chain-smoking, his whoop-whoop circular gesture with his right fist over his head, adapted from the popular Arsenio Hall television talk show. When it was all said and done, and he’d won by three shots over Kenny Knox, he donated thirty thousand dollars to the family of a man who had been killed by lightning in a parking lot near the fifteenth fairway on Thursday. On the Sunday night when he left Crooked Stick in a limo with the woman who would become his second wife, Bettye Fulford, and the Wannamaker Trophy, they went to a McDonald’s drive-through. At the window John paid for their hamburgers and got the food standing up through the sunroof.
But we were just beginning to get to know John Daly. There was the Jack Daniels and Coke (the favorite drink of his father, too, who would years later pull a gun on him), at least one binge bad enough to land him in a hospital. There was the gambling. Millions of dollars lost. There was the assault charge involving Bettye. There was rehab. There was a domestic violence program. There were disqualifications. There were the marriages. Though the PGA Tour has a bizarre policy of not publicly announcing suspensions, there were the suspensions. By the time Daly won the Open Championship at St. Andrews in 1995, he was, for the moment, sober and, for the moment, married to his third wife, Paulette.
And he was magnificent. While this Open Championship is remembered more for Constantino Rocca’s chili-dip pitch into the Valley of Sin and the fifty-footer he made to force the four-hole aggregate playoff Daly won by four shots, what can’t be glossed over was Daly’s sheer genius around the greens. He lag-putted brilliantly. He chipped superbly. He ran the ball along the ground as if he’d grown up in Gullane and not Dardenelle, Arkansas, and Locast Grove, Virginia, and Jefferson City, Missouri. That a man not far removed from the delirium tremors could have the touch and feel Daly possessed around the Old Course’s immense double greens was nothing short of astonishing. Here was a fellow blessed with the long game of Paul Bunyan and the idyllic touch of Paul Gauguin.
Plus all the weaknesses human frailty can muster and then some. To Daly’s credit, if that’s what it is, he has never tried to disguise a single one of his proclivities, of which there were many. He chain-smoked cigarettes, chain-drank Diet Cokes, and was as kindhearted a person as you’d ever want to meet, most of the time. After St. Andrews there was more drinking. Another divorce. Suicidal thoughts. Another marriage. More gambling. More drinking. He was shaking and sweating on the golf course in Vancouver. He was shuttled off the golf course when he was shaking and sweating and couldn’t finish a round in Pennsylvania. He played hockey on greens in Mississippi. He hit six shots in one water hazard in Orlando. His giveupmanship reached staggering, literally, heights. His fourth wife—there was another doomed relationship in between—Sherrie, was arrested along with her parents on drug and money-laundering charges. He showed up at the tournament in Memphis with what looked to be fingernail scratches on both cheeks and insisted Sherrie had attacked him with a steak knife. She and her parents pleaded guilty to money laundering. All followed by more of everything, including a rolling John Daly megastore for selling his personalized logo merchandise in Hooters parking lots.
And so it went, until it finished in lap-band surgery; blond hair dye; yet another woman, Anna; and slacks that could outfit every clown car under the big top.
Raymond Floyd, the four-time major champion, had a reputation as a partyer early in his career. “I was a young guy. I was enjoying the environment, if you would,” says Floyd. That ended when he met and married, Maria, his wife of nearly forty years who passed away in 2012. The story Floyd often tells is when he and Maria were in a hotel room in Jacksonville, Florida, after he’d withdrawn from a tournament, hell-bent for a racetrack in Miami. Throwing his clothes in a suitcase, he told Maria to pack. She refused. She told him he was still young, just thirty-one, and if there was something else he wanted to do in life, well, he should make up his mind and do it. Otherwise, grow up. “That was like hitting me beside the head with a bat,” says Floyd. “From that day forward, I never gave it less than 100 percent. I’ve known players through my years that had the ability but they didn’t have the support behind them. It’s a very, very difficult career path. Nothing says that all of a sudden something happens, your abilities lesson, injury, many things that can all of a sudden wake you up and now it’s too late. You didn’t give it your best. I was blessed. I played from 20 to 30 just rambling around. Then from 30 forward, I got my act together.”
Daly wasn’t so lucky. Poet W. H. Auden once wrote, “All we are not stares back at what we are.” In Daly’s case it’s a long look.