Castrodale: Love him or hate him, John Daly has never deceived us

There are two rows of golfers standing in front of St. Andrews’ famed Royal and Ancient clubhouse, stiffly arranged like a windswept second grade class. Most of the men fall into either category: Royal, like Sir Nick Faldo, or Ancient, like 87-year old Roberto De Vicenzo, who has ear hair older than your parents. Their names are all engraved on the British Open’s claret jug but only a handful are immediately recognizable, even to people whose golf experience is limited to playing barroom games of Golden Tee until they either run out of quarters or coordination.
One of the most familiar mugs belongs to John Daly, who stands in the back row with another — Tiger Woods — on his left. Despite their matching Q-scores, nothing illustrates their differences better than this picture. Daly has a do-it-yourself haircut and a retina-searing sportscoat, the double-breasted equivalent of a solar eclipse. Tiger is in a somber black suit, giving the kind of pained-looking smile you get from undertakers or oil executives. Actually, the men with the BP logo on their business cards are the only ones who have had a worse year than Woods has. Or who have killed as many crabs.

After today’s first round, both Daly and Woods are hovering near the top of the leaderboard. Daly carded a six-under 66, while wearing a pair of psychedelic purple pants that looked like a Jerry Garcia stool sample. Woods strolled into the clubhouse an hour later after signing off on a 67. Both of them have made out with the claret jug on the St. Andrews grounds, Daly in 1995 and Woods in 2000 and 2005, but the crowd was just buzzing over one of them today, the one with the tangled love life and the unfinished divorce and the endless emotional problems. The one named John Daly.
It shouldn’t be this easy to pull for Daly. In his nineteen-year PGA career, he’s been suspended from the Tour six times, accumulated fines worth over $100,000 for his behavior, and has twenty-one incidences of “failure to give best efforts”, which is the Association’s attorney’s way of saying he’s walked off the course mid-round. Daly is just two ex-wives short of a six pack, he’s gambled away an admitted $50 million and has struggled equally with Jack Daniels and Jack-in-the-Box. But maybe that’s part of his appeal; he’s never had a fall from grace because he never had it to start with.
Or maybe it’s the fact that he’s been honest about his problems, never hiding behind scripted soundbites or salaried PR representatives unlike someone else who walked the gorse-lined fairways this afternoon. Although Tiger’s car wasn’t totaled when he landscaped his neighbor’s yard with his Escalade, his persona was. In the weeks that followed November’s pre-dawn disaster, we learned more about Tiger Woods than he’d said in ten years worth of press tent appearances, revealing himself through Spectravision-caliber text messages he’d sent to a number of women with euphemistic-sounding occupations.
We’d been had. Everything we thought about Tiger Woods was a lie, save for the fact that he golfed like he’d challenged the Devil to a Par-3, “Winner-Takes-Soul” style contest. John Daly, for all of his faults, hasn’t ever misled us. He’s always portrayed himself as Larry the Cable Guy with a caddie and a scorecard, speaking his mind even when his words may have been slurred. Yeah, he has more problems than that Jay-Z song, but they’ve been largely self-inflicted and always self-destructive. Tiger, by contrast, just looks selfish.
Lazy journalists refer to Daly as an “everyman”, which isn’t accurate unless you finish the sentence with “everyman who is familiar with the afternoon shift at the Pole Katz Strip Klub,” but it’s easier for most of us to relate to Daly’s approach and almost accidental golf career. Tiger was raised to be a champion, subsisting on a steady diet of approach shots and lag puts, perfecting his swing before he was potty trained. Daly taught himself the game on a scruffy Arkansas muni course, playing with the used balls he’d pull out of the water hazards.
When Tiger debuted on tour, it was planned, calculated, sponsored. “Hello world,” he said in his first press conference, his sentences already ending in Nike swooshes and dollar signs. When he won his first major, it was impressive but expected, like Lindsay Lohan’s STD collection. Daly crashed at countless Days Inns on the Nationwide Tour before qualifying for the PGA in 1991 and — improbably — winning the PGA Championship later that year. When he found out he’d made the field (as the ninth alternate), he spent all night driving odd-numbered interstates from Memphis to Indiana. He changed shoes in the Crooked Stick parking lot and proceeded to leave his footprints all over the field.
“I don’t have anybody to blame for this win but me,” he said after his victory, and he’s carried that same attitude out of the locker room and into his life. The wins haven’t come as often — and not at all since 2004 — but he’s continued to hack away, even though most of the names from the ’91 leaderboards have swapped their three irons for 2.5 kids and a life away from the Tour.
Off the course, Daly has long since filled his “Nobody to Blame But Me” file cabinet. He’s been married in a casino, remained committed to the mullet hairstyle and was arrested outside a North Carolina Hooters, successfully completing the white trash trifecta.

Surprisingly his ruddy-cheeked Forsyth County mugshot (where he looked disturbingly like Janet Reno in an orange jumpsuit) wasn’t his lowest point. For that, he could pick between being allegedly stabbed by his estranged wife, selling his own memorabilia across from the entrance to Augusta National or recording a country album with half of Hootie and the Blowfish. By the time he launched his own clothing line — one that featured a lion as a logo — Daly looked less like the King of the Jungle and more like an aging attraction at a nature preserve.
But he’s still out there, still trying, even though he’s long since lost the sponsors for his clubs and golf balls. In the past five years, he’s missed more cuts than he’s made, but he’s making an effort to leave some of his bad habits in a roadside bunker. He still chain smokes and pounds Diet Coke, but since having lap band surgery he no longer sweats sawmill gravy. Daly has dropped over one hundred pounds so far — the equivalent of that surly girl from the Twilight series — so he and Tiger Woods both weigh in at 185 pounds.
“Who will [Daly] be?”, Sports Illustrated asked in 1991 after his Carl Spackler-approved, “outta nowhere” PGA Championship win. At times — incredible, near-perfect times like today — he looks just like who he was, with a game as loud as his pants. He can still launch the ball over three hundred yards and still has a supersized swing, one where he takes the club so far past parallel that his driver droops like Gandalf’s ‘nads.
After today’s round, Daly is tied for third place, behind Northern Ireland’s young Rory McIlroy whose record-setting 63 put him on top. Tiger Woods is part of a nine-way tie for eighth place — and that’s probably not the first time his name has preceded the word “nine-way”. With two previous Open wins at St. Andrews, Woods is playing against history and against the memories of what he used to be and what we thought he was.
Daly is — as always — competing against himself. I hope he wins.
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Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers. Contact her at jacastrodale@gmail.com.
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