My Life in and out of the Rough

by John Daly

  I’ve got this heavy-ass box with me, and everybody’s excited about seeing the oldest, grandest trophy in golf, so I make a big production out of unlocking the box and s-l-o-w-l-y opening the lid and…nothing.

  Nothing! The damned box was empty! I almost shit my pants!

  Where was the damned Claret Jug?

  My first thought, insomuch as I could think at all at the time, was that somehow somebody had stolen it the night before. But how? I’ve got a state-of-the-art alarm system, and we live in a gated community. What could have happened to it? All this shit is going through my mind, including the headline in every paper in the world the next day: JOHN DALY “LOSES” GOLF’S GREATEST TREASURE.

  “John?” It was Dandy. “John, why don’t you call home and ask Paulette if it’s there?”

  Call home? Why didn’t I think of that?

  You guessed it. The Claret Jug was sitting right where I’d put it during dinner the night before—on the dining room table.

  You know, I still wonder, what would the R&A have done to me if I had lost their Jug?

  Does the R&A Give You a Replica of the Claret Jug to Keep When You Return the Real One?

  Give? Not bloody likely, as the Brits say. When you take the real Claret Jug back the following year, the R&A lets you buy a replica for something like $6,000. Can you beat that? You win their championship and they don’t even give you a replica of their trophy. Go figure that one out.

  What’s Your Favorite Movie?

  I love Godfather 1 and 2. (Like everybody else, I hated Godfather 3.) I love all the Rocky movies. I love all the Lethal Weapons. I love anything Clint Eastwood is in. My favorite golf movie is Dead Solid Perfect with Randy Quaid. That movie is practically a fucking documentary about the Tour. Caddyshack is hilarious, but Caddyshack II was a disaster. Tin Cup is okay. My Cousin Vinny is one of the funniest movies of all time.

  You Play All Over the World. Got Any Travel Tips?

  Yeah, I’ve done a lot of globe-trotting for a redneck Razorback from Dardanelle, Arkansas.

  Australia I love, even though I’ve never played worth a shit there. And Germany I love, because my win at the BMW there in 2001 was my first win in six years and it kick-started my comeback.

  The new stop on the European Tour, the Abu Dhabi Golf Championship in the United Arab Emirates, is great, too.

  First, they’ve got a beautiful, beautiful golf course.

  Second, the people are as nice as any I’ve ever met, just wonderful. And the place is all modern and immaculate. People say the Arab world is dangerous and scary, but Abu Dhabi sure isn’t.

  Third, the Emirates Palace may be the most luxurious hotel I’ve ever been in. They say it cost something like $3 billion. It’s got to be one of the top hotels in the world. We were treated like kings. My suite was maybe 1,800 square feet. I asked them what it would cost if we were paying for it ourselves. Want to guess? Try $8,000 a night. It took me 19 hours to get there and 26 hours to get back because of kick-ass headwinds, but I’d go again in a heartbeat.

  Do You Have Any Hobbies?

  I’m a neat freak. I love to clean. I can’t stand a messy house. I can’t stand a messy bus. Hell, I can’t stand a messy anything. And sometimes, because I’m me, I take it to extremes. My wife doesn’t know how lucky she is.

  What Else Do You Do When You’re Home Besides Clean?

  Usually I play with Little John for a couple of hours. We’ll hit some golf balls together, and then go off to McDonald’s or Burger King to get lunch. Then we’ll come back and he’ll go down for his nap. Then, depending on how I feel, I might drive down to Tunica to the casino. Or me and Sherrie might watch a couple of movies and eat some barbecue from A & R’s. I work so hard when I’m on the road, either playing golf or working for my sponsors, that when I’m home I specialize in doing as little as possible.

  What’s Your Fondest Childhood Memory?

  That’s easy. When I was eight, I made it all the way down to the Punt, Pass & Kick regionals at the Superdome in 1974. Me and my mom and dad were on the elevator in the Dome, and the first person we see is Archie Manning. That was a huge thrill for me. I won, and then went to Washington, D.C., for the semifinal, where I got beat by a little Cowboys kid by about 2 or 3 inches.

  What Was Your Childhood Ambition?

  To make birdie and beat Jack Nicklaus by one stroke on the final hole to win the U.S. Open. Of course, I also loved football, baseball, basketball, soccer, and tennis—I played everything—and so I had my dreams about them, too. But golf was the hardest for me, at least at first, so that’s what I went after. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be practicing and say to myself—sometimes out loud, if nobody else was around—“Okay, I got to make this chip to beat Jack to win this tournament.” And then: “Yes! He made it!”

  What’s Your Favorite Restaurant in Memphis?

  You mean besides Celebrities, which I own a piece of, and A & R Barbeque? Well, a couple of nights after Christmas, I took Sherrie to Ruth’s Chris for a steak dinner. I like the meat, the bartenders know the brand of beer I drink, and it’s only about 15 minutes from where I live. Plus, people around here are really nice. A few ask for autographs, but mostly they don’t make a fuss and leave us in peace.

  But usually I hate going out to dinner. I don’t like to wait. I want to go in, eat, and get out. Nothing against fans or anything, it’s just the way I’ve always been. That’s why 90 percent of the non-home-cooked meals I’ve eaten in my life have come from drive-thrus.

  But I got brownie points from my wife for that night at Ruth’s Chris. It was the first time I’d taken her out to eat in a restaurant in about a year. We had a reservation for 7:00, but we didn’t get there until 8:30. We were late because we were fighting over what was going to be in this book.

  What Do You Think About Pro-Ams?

  You’re talking about a five-hour round, minimum, usually five-and-a-half. I’d rather spend one hour on the practice range and four hours relaxing back in the bus. Frankly, none of the guys on Tour really like the pro-ams. But pro-ams raise a shitload of money for the charities our tournaments support, and we’re required to play in them by the Tour, so there’s no point in bitching about them.

  I try to make the best of them. Not for me, in terms of learning about the course or working on my game, but by helping the amateurs I’m paired with have a good time. I mean, these guys are paying a lot of money just to play a round of golf, and they’re doing it for a good cause. My job, the way I see it, is to see that they have fun. Most of them are worried about embarrassing themselves, so I just try to get them to relax and remember that what they’re doing beats hell out of working.

  I don’t volunteer golf tips or anything. The worst thing you can do to a guy who’s already scared shitless about shanking one into the gallery is to tell him without being asked that his alignment is all fucked up. But if someone asks me something about his swing or how to play a shot, I’ll give him my best advice, taking into account what kind of golfer he is.

  Mostly, though, I try to get them involved in the competition, no matter what their games are like. That’s the great thing about the handicap system in golf: with the right handicap, a guy who can’t break 100 can kick the shit out of Phil Mickelson. I’m always saying things like, “Let’s go kick some ass,” trying to get everybody involved in winning. That’s the point, after all. And it’s damned sure the best way to have fun.

  One of the big differences between pros and amateurs is how they react to a bad shot. A pro will do his best to forget about it and move on. Your average amateur will still be cussing himself out three holes later. So I try to keep guys from getting their dobbers down after they hit a bad shot. And if a guy has just made five or six horrible shots and only one or two decent ones on a hole, what I do is congratulate him on his good shot as we leave the green, and try to get him thinking about that and only that by the time we get to the next tee.

  Sometimes it’s hard, but usually I’m able to
find something good in a guy’s game to point out. You can’t play golf if you go all negative on yourself, so I try my damndest to get my pro-am partners thinking positive.

  You also have to be loose to play decent golf, so I clown around a little, get a little outrageous sometimes, whatever I have to do to get guys to loosen up. You can’t believe how tense amateurs get playing in pro-ams. They’re smart guys, usually, but somehow they get it in their heads that they’ve got to impress the pro they’re playing with. Trust me, save your strength.

  Four or five years ago, at the Sony Open in Hawaii, I got the best compliment I ever had from a pro-am partner. Our group was walking up the 18th fairway, and one of my teammates, a lean, athletic-looking guy with his hair in a ponytail like a hippie, comes over and starts walking beside me. He was the best golfer in the group (besides me, of course). Played to an eight or a nine, something like that. Probably could have been scratch if he played more, but he was CEO of an outfit called GameStop, a big-ass chain of video game stores that was spreading all over the country, and he didn’t get to play all that much. Really sweet swing. Hit the ball a long way. Decent short game. So-so putter.

  Anyway, he goes, “John, I’ve played in half a dozen pro-ams, and this has been far and away my most enjoyable experience.” He thanked me for “keeping everybody in the game” and “showing genuine interest” in all his partners. He said some other shit, but by this time I’m too embarrassed and too tongue-tied to say anything.

  It was nice, really nice, but I guess I’m not so good at accepting personal compliments, maybe because deep down I’m not sure I deserve them. Also, I saw it as nothing special, just doing my job.

  But I’d still rather be spending the time back in my bus, watching a movie and relaxing.

  Music’s a Big Deal in Your Life, Isn’t It?

  Life wouldn’t hardly be worth living if it wasn’t for music. Since I can remember, I’ve loved music, starting with the stuff my parents listened to: Perry Como, Burl Ives, Lawrence Welk on eight-tracks and TV. Then I moved on to country and southern rock. Ray Price, Jim Reeves, Merle Haggard. Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, George Jones. Willie Nelson, of course. Johnny Lee, he’s one of my best friends now.

  But shit, I liked it all, practically. Creedence and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Alabama and The Band. Dylan. I love Dylan. Hootie & the Blowfish. Stevie Ray Vaughan, all the good pickers. Buck Owens and Roy Clark on Hee Haw. Glen Campbell. Kris Kristofferson. Blues and R&B, too: Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, B.B. King.

  And Elvis. Oh, hell, yes! There’s an all-Elvis station on satellite radio that I listen to a lot. Some of his later stuff was shit, but the early stuff, it doesn’t get any better.

  I take my music with me wherever I go. I’ve downloaded a ton of CDs to my computer. And then the satellite radio has opened up a whole new world of stuff. I go to a foreign country, I don’t understand a fucking word they’re saying most of the time, but it’s music, man. It’s music.

  I pick a little, usually when I’m on the road. That’s another great thing about the bus, I know I can pick and sing and play my music pretty much as loud as I want to without bothering anybody or anybody yelling at me to turn it down.

  But you can’t do music in a half-assed way the way I do and get any good. I love it, but I’m not trying to fool myself that I’ll ever be able to do anything more than fool around on the guitar.

  What I do like to do, but only when something comes to me, is write lyrics. That’s pretty much what I did in putting together my CD. I wrote down some stuff—I even wrote down one of my songs on a pizza box—and Johnny Lee and Darius and some of my other music friends who know what they’re doing helped me find music to put it to.

  More than anything, I wish I could make music like those guys.

  Think You Have a Chance to Make the 2006 Ryder Cup Team?

  Damned right I do. I believe in my heart I can play my way onto it. If I didn’t, I shouldn’t even bother teeing it up this year.

  Playing on a Ryder Cup team is my biggest unfulfilled goal in golf, bigger even than winning a Masters. And I hope that if I do make a Ryder Cup team, this year or the next time, I can help change the nasty rivalry thing that’s grown up in the last 15 years. I remember Fuzzy telling me how much things had changed. “Fuck, man,” he said, “I used to go out drinking with these guys the night after we played. We were having a great time.”

  Then the Europeans started winning, and everything got really tense, really combative, like the other side was the enemy or something. The etiquette of golf went out the window at Ryder Cup time. Guys started saying nasty things about each other. Rather than cheering good shots, no matter who made them, the way they always used to do, fans started booing the other team. These guys from Europe are friends. I want to beat them every time I play them, sure. But I want to laugh and celebrate with them afterwards, too.

  Really, this rivalry thing has gotten totally out of hand. The Ryder Cup got started as a friendly international competition. Now it’s more like a world war.

  As I said in a Q&A in Golf Digest last year, I’m not saying our guys don’t like to have fun, and I’m not saying we all ought to go out and drink a bunch of beer. But I do think we need to loosen up. Both sides, but mainly ours, need to loosen up and have us some fun together.

  Look, if I ever play on a Ryder Cup or a Presidents Cup team, I’d even wear a tie. I know there are a bunch of dinners you have to go to, and I can’t stand wearing a tie. But I’d wear one for my country, even though I’d rather have a rope around my neck and be hanging from a tree.

  Democrat or Republican?

  I played golf with President Clinton twice—the first time was in Arkansas, when he was still Governor Clinton and was just learning the game; the other time was in Canada, when he’d learned the game well enough to say “mulligan” a lot. He was fun to play with.

  I played golf with President Ford and Vice President Quayle at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in 1992 when I was so hungover I could barely stand up. They were good playing partners. And while I didn’t make the cut, I did meet a future Mrs. John Daly.

  I never played golf with President Bush Sr., but he and his wife, Barbara, always come out to see me when I play in Houston and give me a big hug. I know I’d like to play with him, because I hear he likes to play real fast.

  I never played golf with President Bush Jr. either, but I did have the privilege of talking with him in the White House. In 2004, when I was in the D.C. area for the Kemper Open, I got word that he would like to meet me, and I jumped all over it.

  Sherrie, Shynah, and Bud went with me, and when we were ushered into the Oval Office, I was like, wow, this is really it. We stand there a minute, and I’m nervous as hell, and then we see President Bush coming along the porch towards those glass doors on the other side of the room. He comes through the doors and walks over to us with that half smile on his face that he has, and he sticks out his hands and says, “Hiya, buddy! You still off the sauce?”

  That broke the ice. We all laughed, and I introduced everybody, and we all shook hands. The president asked Bud what his connection was with me, and I piped up and said he’s my agent. President Bush’s eyebrows jumped up the way they do, and he cocks his head a little and says, “You’ve got a heckuva job there, Bud. You got any spare time? I think we could use a fellow like you around here.”

  (Don’t think Buddy doesn’t remind me of what President Bush said every time some problem comes up that I call on him to to deal with.)

  Then we all sat down and shot the shit for a while. He asked Shynah about school. He congratulated me on winning in San Diego. And then he talked some about his golf game. Someday, I hope to get to play with him. From what I hear, he’s a better golfer than his dad but not as good as Clinton.

  (In case you were wondering, I didn’t wear a tie when I met President Bush. He wore one, and Bud wore one, but not me. As you may have heard, I hate ties.)

  Mostly, although I’ve liked the politic
ians I’ve met personally, I’m not really into politics. If you want to know the truth, I think most of them only care about getting elected. Most of them tell you what you want to hear, then they do what they want to do.

  The last two elections, I’ve been for Bush all the way. The Republicans, the way I see it, they finish the job. The Democrats, all they want to do is tax your ass off.

  But as I said, I’m not really into politics.

  Are You Going to Play on the Champions Tour?

  For the answer to that, maybe you better talk to my godson, John Michael Sisinni, who knows his way around a golf course. John Michael’s just 14, but he’s been playing since he was 6, when his daddy took him to watch me play at the FedEx–St. Jude Classic in Memphis. He took lessons from a pro at 7 and won the first tournament he ever entered at 8—against kids ranging in age from 8 to 11. He was Mississippi State Champion in his age group at 9 and 11, and runner-up in Tennessee and Mississippi when he was 10. He finished fourth in his age bracket in the USJGA Tour Championship in 2005, which brought together the top 88 junior players in the country.

  What I’m saying is that we may be talking about the 2015 Masters champion here in Mr. John Michael Sisinni.

  Anyway, me and John Michael and his dad were sitting around talking and he says to me, “JD, do you know who’s going to be the greatest Champions Tour player of all time?” I say probably Tiger, if he wants to be. And John Michael says, “No, it’s going to be you. They say that as you get older, your swing shortens some. That means by the time you’re 50, your swing could be parallel.”

  Are You Ever Going to Stop Partying?

  I could be a wiseass and tell you only when they pry that icy Miller Lite out of my cold, dead hand. Instead, let me tell you a couple of little stories. (Truth is, they amount to the same thing.)

  Story number one took place one night a year or so ago, when my good friend John Sisinni—a top executive down at the Horseshoe Casino in Tunica—hired this big stretch limo and about 10 of us piled in and went out to paint the town. (Memphis, that is. Painting Tunica would mean just holing up in a casino, and that would get costly quick.)