by John Daly
Oh, and Bettye came, too. (Just kidding!)
When we got there, they took Bettye away to get her ready. Me, I’m in the waiting room pacing around like a madman and smoking like a factory—you know, just like your average first-time father-to-be. Finally—it seemed like hours later, but it probably wasn’t—a nurse comes out and says they’re ready for me, and hands me this green scrub suit and tells me to put it on. Uh-uh, I say. No way, I’m not going in there. But this nurse is pretty clearly used to getting her way. Put this on and follow me.
Much to everybody’s surprise, especially my own, I did what she said—for once, I actually did what somebody else told me to do—and I can only thank God that I did. I stood up at the head of the bed holding Bettye’s hand during the delivery. And after they got our new daughter, Shynah, all cleaned up, I got to hold her. I cried like a baby. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. Somebody took this dopey picture of me holding her, this shit-eating grin on my face, the proud poppa.
It was one of the three most magical moments of my life, the other two being the births of my daughter Sierra and my son, John Patrick Daly II. I was in the delivery room for all of them. New life coming into the world—that’s a miracle, pure and simple. There is nothing like it, nothing like seeing new life come into being, nothing like it in the world.
And I’d never have known it if I hadn’t listened to that tough-ass nurse.
Oh, and get this: Shynah was born on June 10—make that 6/10—at 6:10 in the afternoon and she weighed 6 pounds, 10 ounces. I don’t play roulette, but if I did, you can guess my lucky numbers.
I think I know what you’re thinking: mine and Bettye’s little story sounds like some bad soap opera, especially when you look at the highlights:
December 1991: Right after Christmas, I tell Bettye to pack up and move out.
January 1992: Me and Bettye get back together, just after her divorce to the guy I never knew she was married to in the first place.
May: We get married in Vegas.
June: Our daughter Shynah is born.
August: We buy a house in Colorado.
October–November: We sort of split up.
Early December: Bettye persuades me to come back and spend our first Christmas with Shynah.
Later in December: I destroy the Colorado house.
January 1993: I go to rehab at Sierra Tucson for 18 days. Me and Bettye have—I think this is the right term for it—“conjugal visits” while I’m in treatment.
March: We buy a new house in Isleworth, Florida.
July: I file for a divorce. (But it doesn’t become final until January 1995.)
Can you believe all that?
No wonder my golf game went to hell in 1992 and 1993.
The divorce took a year and a half. We were only married a year, but she got real greedy, because now I had so much guaranteed money coming in from big sponsorship deals with Wilson and Reebok. We did it through a mediator instead of going to court. I wish now I’d taken her to court because she wouldn’t have gotten a dime, what with all her lies and shit. Whatever, I’ve been paying a ton of money every month ever since Shynah was one year old. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mind paying child support—Shynah’s my baby, and there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her. But something tells me much of the money benefits Bettye.
Fact is, I had so much money that I didn’t care. I wanted to get it over with, and she was smart. Bettye knew how impatient I can be, and she knew how deeply I cared about our daughter. She had me by the balls, and she knew it.
Boy, did she squeeze.
And yes, she left with a Rolex.
Paulette
I met Paulette at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in Palm Springs in January 1992. I was in a foursome with Bob Hope, former president Gerald Ford, and Vice President Dan Quayle. (Not bad company for a 25-year-old hell-raising college dropout from Arkansas.) We were standing on the tee box of the 10th hole at Bermuda Dunes, waiting to tee off, when I saw her.
She was Classic.
What I mean is, she was one of the three Hope girls who followed Mr. Hope around at his tournament. They’re always these gorgeous women in shorts and T-shirts with either Hope or Chrysler or Classic written across the front. That day, with play so slow, the way it always is at the Hope, they just kind of hung out with us, and clapped when Mr. Hope hit his tee shot, and went and fetched cheeseburgers and Cokes for us. For me, mostly. All day long, they’d bring me cheeseburgers when I got hungry, which was…well, pretty much all day.
And I was so damned hungover I was chugging Diet Cokes like they were beers.
Like I said, Paulette was Classic. She was also absolutely drop-dead beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But I got all shy for some reason. We made eye contact, but mostly all I did all day was just look at her. The first Hope girl I actually spoke to was Hope, whose real name was Danielle, and who turned out to be one of Paulette’s friends at the time. I asked her, “Do you think she’d go out with me?” She said, “I’ll ask her.” She did, and me and Paulette started talking a little bit. We went out the next couple of nights there in Palm Springs.
She was 19 at the time. She lived in an apartment in Palm Springs. She was trying to be a model, but was working at the California Pizza Kitchen. (They make good pizza.) When I left that weekend—I missed the cut, by the way—I tried to get her to come with me to Phoenix, but she couldn’t. We saw each other now and then, but we didn’t really get together until the following summer, after me and Bettye had finally split up.
We got along great right out of the box. I mean, she was really, really beautiful. I had a bus for traveling between tournaments, and she went with me everywhere. Six months later, when my divorce from Bettye was finally done with, I missed the cut in Phoenix and I said, “Let’s go to Vegas and get married.” She said okay. Just like that.
So we drove up to Vegas and got married on January 28, 1995, at the Little Church of the West on the Strip, just down from Bally’s, my favorite casino hotel in Vegas. I didn’t want to have a big wedding, but Paulette, she invited what seemed like everybody she knew in California. Hey, that was okay—it was my third wedding, but it was only her first, so why shouldn’t she live it up?
We had a nice honeymoon in Bally’s—I lost a bunch of money, but at the time I didn’t care—and everything was cool. I bought her a Rolex.
That was the summer I won the British Open, of course, and everything was great. At least for a while. But after Sierra was born on June 1, 1995, it just kind of went downhill between me and Paulette. There was something missing between us. Paulette had 14 hours of labor with Sierra, and afterwards she began missing California, missing her mom, not caring so much about being with me.
That hurt a lot, but what hurt as much, maybe even more, was her not wanting to travel as much. She wanted to stay in Palm Springs all the time. She really didn’t like it in Memphis, even though I built us a beautiful new home right on the TPC Southwind course. It’s still one of the nicest homes I’ve ever owned. It was beautiful. But Paulette wanted to live in California, Plus, she didn’t want to travel with me except to “the good places.”
Things always seem to start going downhill when I get married. With Paulette, it got to where she only liked to go to the “nice” tournaments. She didn’t want to go to the ones that weren’t so fun for her. At first, she loved my bus. After six months or so, she hated it. And she missed her mom, too. She was so young.
Thing is, though, I’m on the road so much that I need my family to be with me. I’ve always wanted to have someone with me. I’ve never really been without a woman. In college I was, I guess. But when I turned pro it was Dale, and then Bettye, and then Paulette. Plus, when I was on the road by myself and single, I always made sure I wasn’t exactly by myself, if you know what I mean.
I’d started drinking again in the summer of 1996, and pretty soon it was getting bad for me. Because here I was, married to this gorgeous woman, who turned heads every tim
e she walked into a room, but after Sierra was born, we’d go like five or six days without having sex. We had ourselves a situation, no two ways about it.
One night, probably around 11 o’clock, in our new place in Memphis, I said, “I see we’re out of milk again. I’m going out to get some.” And I came back three days later. I drove down to Tunica and spent three days gambling at the Horseshoe, looking for a little peace of mind.
All the women that I’ve been married to, they all know that I play golf, that I gamble, and that all I want besides plenty of lovin’ is Diet Coke in the refrigerator and a clean house. And I do most of the cleaning anyway. I’m a neat freak.
What’s the problem with that?
They know who I am. They know what I do. It hasn’t changed since the PGA, except for the booze. For me, it’s golf and gambling. I’m a homebody. I don’t do anything. I don’t ever want to go out. I hate going out to eat. I never want to go anywhere unless it’s a casino. It’s the way I was when I met them, it’s the way I was when we were together, it’s the way I was when we split up, and it’s the way I’m going to be tomorrow.
What’s so hard to understand?
I just got the sense from Paulette that she didn’t want me around. I just think she felt like maybe she made a mistake in her life, marrying me too soon. Or whatever. But it’s got me thinking that maybe she was in it for the money. I got her out of a stupid job. Actually, I shouldn’t say stupid. The California Pizza Kitchen’s got good food. But I took her away from that. I took care of her and we had a baby together. I was totally in love with her, madly in love with her. It was probably the way she looked more than anything. She was a sweet, soft-spoken woman. You wouldn’t think she’d have a mean bone in her body.
But boy, when it got time to get a divorce, holy shit!
It wasn’t long and delayed and drawn out, like it was with Bettye, but it wasn’t easy either. The thing in Ponte Vedra Beach at the 1997 Players Championship, where she accused me of destroying our hotel room, that was the worst, because all I did was fall into a door to the kitchen and smash it in. Bust up our room? No way. Bust up our marriage? Well, it didn’t take much by then.
That was when I went off to the Betty Ford Center on my own.
Paulette filed divorce papers on me soon after I got out.
She got her Rolex and a lot more.
Almost Ex No. 4
I met Almost Ex No. 4—let’s call her Leslie—in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel in Austin in October 1998. The Four Seasons in Austin is a great hotel. It’s right on Town Lake, dead south of the state capitol, and just before dark, you can sit out back and watch about five million bats fly out from under this bridge where they sleep during the day. It’s really weird, but it’s great.
I was doing an outing down there for Duck Soup. They used to be like the official band of the PGA Tour—a cover band that played at just about all our stops back in the 1990s, only not so much anymore. I was good friends with them. So one day Sam, the lead singer, called up and asked me, “You want to come to Austin for a little bit of money?” I said, “Damned right. I need it. Yeah, I’ll be there.”
Anyway, it was sort of a strange night in Austin. I was upstairs in my room with another girl I’d met, one of these one-night-stand things. And I got this call from Sam, “There’s a girl downstairs who really wants to meet you, man. You need to come down here and meet this girl right now.” And I said, “Sammy, I got a girl up here right now.” And he said, “Just come down for a little bit. Tell the one you’re with you’re going to take a walk.”
Well, I went down and Sam introduced me to this girl and I’m like, “Good God almighty!” She had this tight skirt on and a low-cut blouse. Young and gorgeous. Young and gorgeous! I found out later that she was a former hurdler and very athletic. She worked out all the time, just a complete workout nut. Dark complexion, beautiful body, kind of auburn hair, and just out-of-this-world gorgeous.
Hel-lo, Leslie. Pleased to meet you.
We talked for a little bit, and we swapped cell numbers, and a couple of weeks later I called her and asked her to come out to Palm Springs for the Shark Shootout. (I had to explain to her that the Shark Shootout was Greg Norman’s great Silly Season tournament.) She flew out to California—she’d never flown first class before—and we spent some time in Palm Springs, and then went on to the Shootout, and she enjoyed it a lot.
We were together for the next two years.
Now, the interesting thing about Leslie was that she liked girls as much as she liked guys, if you know what I mean. She loved wine, and she liked to come out and watch me play golf. She was the total package.
And a beautiful package it was.
She also loved to hang out at titty bars. A lot of men are going to think this was another dream come true, but let me tell you, it cost me a lot of money to take her to those joints. I mean, she would get more lap dances than I would.
At the 2000 Masters, I shot 80–73 and missed the cut, but I had to do a charity event with Hootie & the Blowfish somewhere real close to Augusta the following Monday. So me and Leslie decided to hang around town for the weekend. Some guy had rented an entire big bar downtown for the week, and he’d brought down a bunch of strippers from Atlanta to entertain the guests. So naturally, we go down to check it out.
There’s this huge room, with a dance stage and couches, and a big, long bar, and I say, “Can I get a private room? My girlfriend wants a private room. Just bring three or four girls down.”
Well, we get the room, and the next thing I know, Leslie’s naked as a jaybird except for high-heel shoes, and she’s dancing on this pole as they wheel in all this beer and liquor for all my buddies that are coming to the party.
Then these two girls come into the room, and Leslie gets one of them over on the couch, and she starts…well, all I’m going to say is that she was having a good time, and so was I. After a while, Leslie brings the next girl over, and it’s the same deal. This goes on for like four or five hours. We all got hammered and had a great time.
When I go out to settle, the place is jammed with people partying hard. I make my way to the bar, and this old country boy down at the end hollers out, “Hey, Daly—man, I wish you’d have made the cut.” I tell him, thank you, brother, and ask the guy in charge to tote up my bill.
The guy at the end of the bar, he’s drunk out of his mind, really having a good time, and he says, “I got your bill, buddy. I got your tab. Don’t worry about it.” I tell him, “Brother, you don’t want my tab. We’ve been here a while. We’ve had probably twenty dancers. There’s no telling what I owe.” The guy goes, “Naw, fuck it, it’s on me.” And they start toting up the bill. “You do not want this bill,” I say again to the guy. “Thanks, but this is a big ’un, and you really shouldn’t.” He goes, “Oh, fuck it, man. I love you, John. I’ll take care of it.”
By now, Leslie’s just laughing her butt off, and I’m like, I don’t want to cause a big scene by not letting this guy do what he wants to do. Finally, the guy who’s running the joint goes over to the old country boy with the bill and says, “That’ll be $9,700.” Now the old country boy kind of flinches, and he looks at his buddy, and he looks at the bill, studying it, and finally he says, “Fuck it. Put it on my credit card.” And one last time I say, “No, no, man—you don’t have to. Just buy me a beer or something.” And he says, “Please, John. I want to.”
And so I let him pay the damned bill.
Me and Leslie, we had us some really good times. She was really something when it came to sex. She was always ready to go out and party. She liked to travel with me. She got along with my friends. She watched pretty much every round of golf I played while we were together. Plus, she stuck up for me.
One time I was playing some tournament, and she was standing beside the green while I was waiting to putt. A couple of drunks come up and stand next to her, not knowing who she was or anything, and one nudges the other, nods towards me, and semiwhispers, “Can you im
agine anyone fucking that?” Leslie, she turns around and says, “Hey, pal—you think they call him ‘Long John’ just because of his driver?”
Now there’s a woman standing up for her man.
Eventually, I proposed to Leslie mainly as an excuse to get her a five-carat engagement ring, because she wanted one after two years together, and she wouldn’t get off of me about it. That’s okay in a way, because she deserved one as much as, if not more than, the others. But on the other hand, I should’ve never done it, because I really never planned on marrying Leslie. I loved all the fun we had together and stuff, but marriage was never on my mind.
Leslie was a semester and a little from getting her degree, so in the summer of 2001 she went back to college to take some courses, with the plan to finish up in the fall. I bought her a car, and I got her an apartment. (I’d already got her a Rolex.) I told her, go back and get your degree and stay out of them damn titty bars.
Things might have worked out for us, at least for a little while longer, except for one thing:
That summer, on June 10, 2001, in Memphis, Tennessee, I met Sherrie Allison Miller.
EIGHT
THE DALY NUMBERS
They count everything on the PGA Tour. It’s gone way beyond the obvious stuff: stroke average, driving distance, number of putts, that sort of thing. They keep tabs on how many times a guy follows a bogey with a birdie (bounceback). They calculate how you rank on putts 3 feet and under, right rough tendency, scrambling from the rough, shit like that. They tabulate the number of up-and-downs everybody has, birdie conversion percentage, and proximity of the hole. How many times does a guy hit the Port-A-San? I bet the Tour office can tell you.
At the end of the day, of course, the most important stat is scoring average. Top that list at the end of the season and it means you (a) won a pile of money, (b) won some tournaments, and (c) get to keep the Vardon Trophy for a year.