John Daly's success more random than powerball drawing -- haha

[Insipid549]

I can't help rooting for the guy, but wow is he unpredictable. Thought this was a funny commentary http://www.sperts.net/article.php?page=137

[faldo]

More about our "FAV"..........

FEB 17, 2004 TORONTO STAR PAGE: E06
Everyman for every golf fan
Prodigious drives aside, Daly relates to common folk Favourite food:
Biscuits with chocolate gravy
He plays with Dunlop irons and golf balls any duffer can buy at a department store.
He smokes a couple of packs a day on the golf course, gambles with abandon,
gulps Diet Coke by the caseload and is working on his fourth marriage; this
one to a woman accused last year of laundering drug money.
It's hard for the average golf fan to relate to a Davis Love III, but most
everyone loves the long-hittin', hard-drinkin' (but not now, he insists)
John Daly, whose motto is "grip it and rip it," who says he's "damn proud"
to be a redneck and who lists his mom's "biscuits and chocolate gravy" as
his favourite dish.
When Daly won the Buick Invitational in San Diego on Sunday, he was asked
what comes next: "I'm going to eat me some good food, I know that," he said.

This from a guy who won the British Open in 1995 and said he owed it all to
a man hawking muffins on the 10th hole: "You know those Otis Spunkmeyer
chocolate-chocolate chip ones you can get at the Shell stations back home,"
he drawled. "Well, these were even better than those."
Daly has said he suffers from "cross-addictions" and that over the years he
has been dependent on everything from peanut M&M's to cola to, especially in
his early days, vast quantities of Jack Daniels. "Lithium, Prozac, Xanax,
Paxil, I was on anything you can think of," the California-born,
Arkansas-raised Daly said at one point of the anti-depression medications he
has taken. "Everybody was saying I was manic-depressive."
Daly's marital troubles are as legendary as his big drives. He has been wed
to two models, a hotel worker and a woman who peddled used cars.
A day after winning more than $1 million (U.S.) in Las Vegas on the slots in
July 2001, Daly married Sherrie Miller at Bally's Hotel and Casino. Things
appeared to be going well, but Daly said Miller tried to "beat the sh--" out
of him in public and that they once got into a row in front of three
strippers at a charity golf event. Another clash took place in front of
members of Hootie and the Blowfish, a band that last year helped Daly record
a country-tinged CD that includes the song "All My Exes Wear Rolexes."
Last July 23, Sherrie gave birth to John Daly Jr. Five days later, she and
her parents were indicted on federal drug and gambling counts, charges that
still haven't been proved in court.
"I stand by her," Daly said at the time. "Of course, if she gets 20 years in
prison I'll have to end the marriage."
The public seems to enjoy watching the soap opera, but real fans of the game
can only sit back and wonder at what might have been.
Daly won the PGA Championship in 1991 as a rookie. He was the last alternate
but gained an entry, drove all night to make his starting time and didn't
have time for a practice round on a course he had never played. But he beat
all the top names for a victory that helped earn him rookie of the year.
Three years and many incidents later, the PGA Tour announced Daly had agreed
to sit out the last few months of the 1994 season. He returned to the
circuit in January and six months later won the '95British Open.
By the end of 2000, he had collapsed all the way to No. 507 in the world
golf ranking. But Daly has made a career out of bouncing back and, in
September 2001, he won the BMW International in Germany.
He hit rock bottom last year. Following news of his wife's legal problems,
Daly's behaviour became increasingly bizarre. He withdrew from the Bell
Canadian Open in Hamilton and later alleged Sherrie had tried to choke him
with a gold chain outside his $1.4 million motorhome, a charge she denied. A
week or so later, he was hyperventilating on a course in Pennsylvania and
had to withdraw.
Sunday's victory will help a bit with Daly's well-documented financial
problems. He is now sixth in earnings on the PGA Tour at more than $903,000.

And his 10-year exempt status on the PGA Tour, garnered from the British
Open victory, will be extended through 1996 because of the San Diego win.
His recent success on the course, which began late last year with Daly's win
in the Korean Open on the Asian Tour, has moved him strongly up the world
rankings to 85th.
The 37-year-old Daly, who will play this weekend at the Nissan Open in Los
Angeles, where Canada's Mike Weir is the defending champion, has said he
understands his appeal to the duffer. "I think people associate with me, you
know. Whenever people are down, hey, I've been there."

[faldo]

Still more about out "FAV".........

Golf gives Daly more than he deserves
Game's loveable loser has squandered talent, many chances


Cam Cole
National Post
When Dan Jenkins, the world's funniest golf writer, penned The Money-Whipped
Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist, his novel's protagonist was named Bobby
Joe Grooves, but really, it could have been John Daly.
Maybe only the steer-job doesn't fit. Daly doesn't steer too many of his tee
shots, he just lets them rip and they go wherever the hell they go, and then
he finds them and hits them again.
But money-whipped? Yes, he has been all of that, probably still is.
You don't acquire four wives and jettison three of them -- the fourth is on
waivers, awaiting trial on cocaine trafficking and gambling charges -- along
the road to multi-millionaire status without losing the multi part. You
don't gamble away millions and drink your way into rehab twice without
experiencing bank-account shrinkage. You don't win two major championships
and then drive around the PGA Tour in a Winnebago, in your mid-30s, parking
it at country saloons and shopping malls and turning every tour event into a
J.D. Junk Sale, if you haven't lost most of what you ever won.
Three-jack? Oh, Big John has done considerably better than that. He
six-jacked right in front of Jack one time, at Nicklaus's Memorial
Tournament, just to prove he doesn't pick his spots.
Give-Up Artist? Daly is golf's Van Gogh Home.
Five months after winning the 1995 Open Championship at St. Andrews, at the
season-ending Johnnie Walker World Championship in Jamaica, Daly shot 80-80
and was all set to take a hike with his $58,000 appearance fee when they
reminded him that there was no cut and he had to play all four rounds. He
shot 84-80 on the weekend, 40-over-par for the tournament.
The week before the '96 Masters, he was in seventh place in Atlanta after 34
holes, then made a 12 on the 35th, and missed the cut.
"All I know is, I needed a calculator to add it up," said Daly. "It was just
one of those things. It was a real honest 12. It was just one of those deals
where, once you're in it, you can't get out. I took two drops that I thought
were smart, I tried to hit one wedge only about 20 yards just to get it back
into play, and it hit the only branch around and came right back at me. Then
I whiffed twice trying to hit it left-handed, and before I knew it, it was a
12."
Two years later, he made an 18 at the par-five sixth hole during the final
round of the Bay Hill Invitational, Arnold Palmer's tournament. No. 6 is a
543-yarder around a lake, and he drowned his first six tee shots -- "Tin
Cup!" yelled the fans -- plugged the seventh in a hazard and had to take a
one-stroke penalty for his 14th shot. After that, it was routine.
Two more years, and it was the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. On the 18th hole,
the first day, with former NHLer Dan Quinn on his bag, Daly was
three-over-par when he teed it up on the par-5 18th, made a 12 in a
significant fog. He hit his first drive out of bounds right, two
provisionals in the ocean left, a ninth shot that again went in the ocean, a
left-handed shot in the bunker, a blast out, and two putts -- and withdrew
on the spot.
But somehow, the more the Give-Up Artist surrendered to his demons, the more
golf refused to give up on him. Fellow touring pros who should have resented
his lack of professionalism and self-control still pulled for him to turn
his life around. Players who would have killed for half of John Daly's
God-given talent never seemed to hold it against him that he squandered his.

"Peter Jacobsen told me, he said, 'No matter what happens, John, the talent
never goes away.' That stuck with me for a long time," Daly said.
As he trudged up and down the fairways of hilly Torrey Pines on Sunday,
chain-smoking, belly jiggling -- the absolute antithesis of the modern,
fitness-consumed PGA professional -- Daly looked as though he might just pop
a vein, trying to control his nerves as he came down the stretch with the
lead at the Buick Invitational.
It had been nearly nine years since his win at St. Andrews, and he'd been in
the gutter so often in that time, and around the lead so seldom, no one knew
if he could remember how to finish.
"John does not spit the bit in these situations," CBS's Lanny Wadkins said,
but it sounded more like a hope than a prediction.
And that was a typical sentiment. Everyone not named Luke Donald or Chris
Riley, it seemed, was praying for Big John. The galleries were raucously in
his corner, and even those of us who never quite "got" the whole Daly
phenomenon -- who never fully understood what it was about this soft, lazy,
demonized slugger that so captivated golf fans -- found ourselves living and
dying with his mammoth tee balls and delicate bunker shots on the last few
holes.
And in the sudden-death playoff, when he stood over his second shot to the
par-five 18th, 262 yards away, water on the left, after both Donald and
Riley had laid up, and he pulled the 3-wood from his bag, was there a viewer
alive in the golf world who didn't have a grin on his face?
"Don't go Tin Cup on us now, J.D.," I whispered.
Instead, he hit it to the proper side of the flag and into the back bunker.
Facing him was a 100-foot sand shot, needing about 50 feet of carry, running
downhill, with the lake looming behind the flagstick.
Daly, the home-run hitter with an artisan's deft touch, lofted the ball out,
coaxed it down the slope to within six inches of the hole, and tapped in for
birdie. The crowd was wild.
"All week they've been unreal. The drunk ones and the sober ones, I love
them all," said Daly.
Donald and Riley both missed six-foot putts -- Riley's doing a U-turn around
the back of the cup -- and it had the feel of fate. Despite a final-round
75, Daly had his first PGA Tour win on U.S. soil in a decade.
He buried his face in his hands and cried. And that, too, is John Daly.
At that moment, he probably wasn't thinking about all the lives he has left
behind -- what were all their names? Bettye, Paulette, and ... can't
remember the first one -- or that he will certainly be leaving another one
soon, if Sherrie Miller Daly goes to jail.
Or about all the hundreds of pounds he has lost, and found again. Or the
time he busted up the hotel room at the Players Championship, or the time,
before his first stint in rehab, he was charged with assault of his second
wife. Or the time at the Air Canada Championship, a few years back, when he
got the shakes so bad, he couldn't grip the club and he began to cry, and
had to be taken off the course on a golf cart. Four months ago, something
similar happened at the 84 Lumber Classic.
Or about playing 22 events last year, and only making it to the weekend six
times.
Or about ranking 507th in the world not so long ago, 299th going into last
week, 85th today.
Or maybe he was thinking of all of it, the three kids he has had by three
different wives, the mess he has made, only to find himself with this chance
-- one more chance, after blowing so many -- to make it right.
He had talked to his daughter on the phone Saturday, when he left the course
with a one-shot lead.
"She was almost in tears. She said, 'Daddy, you've got to win,' " Daly
chuckled. "I said what are you doing, Shauna, are you betting with the kids
at school or what?"
I remember talking to Daly one day at Augusta in 1996. He'd been asked when
he was going to win the Masters. Everyone thought Augusta National was
perfect for him. He could hit it anywhere and there was no rough, and he had
a great short game and a lovely putting stroke.
"This golf course sets up for me, off the tee. But somebody said there's not
a golf course I can't play.
"The whole game's up here, anyway," he said, pointing to his head. "I guess
I just don't have a whole lot of brain."

[LobWedge]

More about our "FAV"..........

FEB 17, 2004 TORONTO STAR PAGE: E06
Everyman for every golf fan
Prodigious drives aside, Daly relates to common folk Favourite food:
Biscuits with chocolate gravy
He plays with Dunlop irons and golf balls any duffer can buy at a department store.
He smokes a couple of packs a day on the golf course, gambles with abandon,
gulps Diet Coke by the caseload and is working on his fourth marriage; this
one to a woman accused last year of laundering drug money.
It's hard for the average golf fan to relate to a Davis Love III, but most
everyone loves the long-hittin', hard-drinkin' (but not now, he insists)
John Daly, whose motto is "grip it and rip it," who says he's "damn proud"
to be a redneck and who lists his mom's "biscuits and chocolate gravy" as
his favourite dish.
When Daly won the Buick Invitational in San Diego on Sunday, he was asked
what comes next: "I'm going to eat me some good food, I know that," he said.

This from a guy who won the British Open in 1995 and said he owed it all to
a man hawking muffins on the 10th hole: "You know those Otis Spunkmeyer
chocolate-chocolate chip ones you can get at the Shell stations back home,"
he drawled. "Well, these were even better than those."
Daly has said he suffers from "cross-addictions" and that over the years he
has been dependent on everything from peanut M&M's to cola to, especially in
his early days, vast quantities of Jack Daniels. "Lithium, Prozac, Xanax,
Paxil, I was on anything you can think of," the California-born,
Arkansas-raised Daly said at one point of the anti-depression medications he
has taken. "Everybody was saying I was manic-depressive."
Daly's marital troubles are as legendary as his big drives. He has been wed
to two models, a hotel worker and a woman who peddled used cars.
A day after winning more than $1 million (U.S.) in Las Vegas on the slots in
July 2001, Daly married Sherrie Miller at Bally's Hotel and Casino. Things
appeared to be going well, but Daly said Miller tried to "beat the sh--" out
of him in public and that they once got into a row in front of three
strippers at a charity golf event. Another clash took place in front of
members of Hootie and the Blowfish, a band that last year helped Daly record
a country-tinged CD that includes the song "All My Exes Wear Rolexes."
Last July 23, Sherrie gave birth to John Daly Jr. Five days later, she and
her parents were indicted on federal drug and gambling counts, charges that
still haven't been proved in court.
"I stand by her," Daly said at the time. "Of course, if she gets 20 years in
prison I'll have to end the marriage."
The public seems to enjoy watching the soap opera, but real fans of the game
can only sit back and wonder at what might have been.
Daly won the PGA Championship in 1991 as a rookie. He was the last alternate
but gained an entry, drove all night to make his starting time and didn't
have time for a practice round on a course he had never played. But he beat
all the top names for a victory that helped earn him rookie of the year.
Three years and many incidents later, the PGA Tour announced Daly had agreed
to sit out the last few months of the 1994 season. He returned to the
circuit in January and six months later won the '95British Open.
By the end of 2000, he had collapsed all the way to No. 507 in the world
golf ranking. But Daly has made a career out of bouncing back and, in
September 2001, he won the BMW International in Germany.
He hit rock bottom last year. Following news of his wife's legal problems,
Daly's behaviour became increasingly bizarre. He withdrew from the Bell
Canadian Open in Hamilton and later alleged Sherrie had tried to choke him
with a gold chain outside his $1.4 million motorhome, a charge she denied. A
week or so later, he was hyperventilating on a course in Pennsylvania and
had to withdraw.
Sunday's victory will help a bit with Daly's well-documented financial
problems. He is now sixth in earnings on the PGA Tour at more than $903,000.

And his 10-year exempt status on the PGA Tour, garnered from the British
Open victory, will be extended through 1996 because of the San Diego win.
His recent success on the course, which began late last year with Daly's win
in the Korean Open on the Asian Tour, has moved him strongly up the world
rankings to 85th.
The 37-year-old Daly, who will play this weekend at the Nissan Open in Los
Angeles, where Canada's Mike Weir is the defending champion, has said he
understands his appeal to the duffer. "I think people associate with me, you
know. Whenever people are down, hey, I've been there."


Still more about out "FAV".........

Golf gives Daly more than he deserves
Game's loveable loser has squandered talent, many chances


Cam Cole
National Post
When Dan Jenkins, the world's funniest golf writer, penned The Money-Whipped
Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist, his novel's protagonist was named Bobby
Joe Grooves, but really, it could have been John Daly.
Maybe only the steer-job doesn't fit. Daly doesn't steer too many of his tee
shots, he just lets them rip and they go wherever the hell they go, and then
he finds them and hits them again.
But money-whipped? Yes, he has been all of that, probably still is.
You don't acquire four wives and jettison three of them -- the fourth is on
waivers, awaiting trial on cocaine trafficking and gambling charges -- along
the road to multi-millionaire status without losing the multi part. You
don't gamble away millions and drink your way into rehab twice without
experiencing bank-account shrinkage. You don't win two major championships
and then drive around the PGA Tour in a Winnebago, in your mid-30s, parking
it at country saloons and shopping malls and turning every tour event into a
J.D. Junk Sale, if you haven't lost most of what you ever won.
Three-jack? Oh, Big John has done considerably better than that. He
six-jacked right in front of Jack one time, at Nicklaus's Memorial
Tournament, just to prove he doesn't pick his spots.
Give-Up Artist? Daly is golf's Van Gogh Home.
Five months after winning the 1995 Open Championship at St. Andrews, at the
season-ending Johnnie Walker World Championship in Jamaica, Daly shot 80-80
and was all set to take a hike with his $58,000 appearance fee when they
reminded him that there was no cut and he had to play all four rounds. He
shot 84-80 on the weekend, 40-over-par for the tournament.
The week before the '96 Masters, he was in seventh place in Atlanta after 34
holes, then made a 12 on the 35th, and missed the cut.
"All I know is, I needed a calculator to add it up," said Daly. "It was just
one of those things. It was a real honest 12. It was just one of those deals
where, once you're in it, you can't get out. I took two drops that I thought
were smart, I tried to hit one wedge only about 20 yards just to get it back
into play, and it hit the only branch around and came right back at me. Then
I whiffed twice trying to hit it left-handed, and before I knew it, it was a
12."
Two years later, he made an 18 at the par-five sixth hole during the final
round of the Bay Hill Invitational, Arnold Palmer's tournament. No. 6 is a
543-yarder around a lake, and he drowned his first six tee shots -- "Tin
Cup!" yelled the fans -- plugged the seventh in a hazard and had to take a
one-stroke penalty for his 14th shot. After that, it was routine.
Two more years, and it was the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. On the 18th hole,
the first day, with former NHLer Dan Quinn on his bag, Daly was
three-over-par when he teed it up on the par-5 18th, made a 12 in a
significant fog. He hit his first drive out of bounds right, two
provisionals in the ocean left, a ninth shot that again went in the ocean, a
left-handed shot in the bunker, a blast out, and two putts -- and withdrew
on the spot.
But somehow, the more the Give-Up Artist surrendered to his demons, the more
golf refused to give up on him. Fellow touring pros who should have resented
his lack of professionalism and self-control still pulled for him to turn
his life around. Players who would have killed for half of John Daly's
God-given talent never seemed to hold it against him that he squandered his.

"Peter Jacobsen told me, he said, 'No matter what happens, John, the talent
never goes away.' That stuck with me for a long time," Daly said.
As he trudged up and down the fairways of hilly Torrey Pines on Sunday,
chain-smoking, belly jiggling -- the absolute antithesis of the modern,
fitness-consumed PGA professional -- Daly looked as though he might just pop
a vein, trying to control his nerves as he came down the stretch with the
lead at the Buick Invitational.
It had been nearly nine years since his win at St. Andrews, and he'd been in
the gutter so often in that time, and around the lead so seldom, no one knew
if he could remember how to finish.
"John does not spit the bit in these situations," CBS's Lanny Wadkins said,
but it sounded more like a hope than a prediction.
And that was a typical sentiment. Everyone not named Luke Donald or Chris
Riley, it seemed, was praying for Big John. The galleries were raucously in
his corner, and even those of us who never quite "got" the whole Daly
phenomenon -- who never fully understood what it was about this soft, lazy,
demonized slugger that so captivated golf fans -- found ourselves living and
dying with his mammoth tee balls and delicate bunker shots on the last few
holes.
And in the sudden-death playoff, when he stood over his second shot to the
par-five 18th, 262 yards away, water on the left, after both Donald and
Riley had laid up, and he pulled the 3-wood from his bag, was there a viewer
alive in the golf world who didn't have a grin on his face?
"Don't go Tin Cup on us now, J.D.," I whispered.
Instead, he hit it to the proper side of the flag and into the back bunker.
Facing him was a 100-foot sand shot, needing about 50 feet of carry, running
downhill, with the lake looming behind the flagstick.
Daly, the home-run hitter with an artisan's deft touch, lofted the ball out,
coaxed it down the slope to within six inches of the hole, and tapped in for
birdie. The crowd was wild.
"All week they've been unreal. The drunk ones and the sober ones, I love
them all," said Daly.
Donald and Riley both missed six-foot putts -- Riley's doing a U-turn around
the back of the cup -- and it had the feel of fate. Despite a final-round
75, Daly had his first PGA Tour win on U.S. soil in a decade.
He buried his face in his hands and cried. And that, too, is John Daly.
At that moment, he probably wasn't thinking about all the lives he has left
behind -- what were all their names? Bettye, Paulette, and ... can't
remember the first one -- or that he will certainly be leaving another one
soon, if Sherrie Miller Daly goes to jail.
Or about all the hundreds of pounds he has lost, and found again. Or the
time he busted up the hotel room at the Players Championship, or the time,
before his first stint in rehab, he was charged with assault of his second
wife. Or the time at the Air Canada Championship, a few years back, when he
got the shakes so bad, he couldn't grip the club and he began to cry, and
had to be taken off the course on a golf cart. Four months ago, something
similar happened at the 84 Lumber Classic.
Or about playing 22 events last year, and only making it to the weekend six
times.
Or about ranking 507th in the world not so long ago, 299th going into last
week, 85th today.
Or maybe he was thinking of all of it, the three kids he has had by three
different wives, the mess he has made, only to find himself with this chance
-- one more chance, after blowing so many -- to make it right.
He had talked to his daughter on the phone Saturday, when he left the course
with a one-shot lead.
"She was almost in tears. She said, 'Daddy, you've got to win,' " Daly
chuckled. "I said what are you doing, Shauna, are you betting with the kids
at school or what?"
I remember talking to Daly one day at Augusta in 1996. He'd been asked when
he was going to win the Masters. Everyone thought Augusta National was
perfect for him. He could hit it anywhere and there was no rough, and he had
a great short game and a lovely putting stroke.
"This golf course sets up for me, off the tee. But somebody said there's not
a golf course I can't play.
"The whole game's up here, anyway," he said, pointing to his head. "I guess
I just don't have a whole lot of brain."

And your point is...?

[NoBack]

[Evil Chris]

I think John is really focused this year. It's nice to see.