John Daly: Fans still flocking to see golf hellraiser at Hooters Augusta, talks of a biopic

This is John Daly, who is now 56 – an age many people didn’t think he’d ever get to. He has survived manic depression, addiction (gambling and alcohol), cancer, four divorces and being ejected from the Australian Open in 2011 when he ran out of balls, having hit seven consecutively into a water hazard on the same hole.

His experiences at Augusta – as a golfer – are another snapshot of his life. On the eve of the 1993 Masters, he was served divorce papers and he still finished tied for third. He missed the 1997 tournament because he was in rehab for alcohol addiction. When he was playing in the 2004 Masters, his (fourth) wife was simultaneously in court entering a guilty plea to charges of laundering drugs money.

It says something about humanity that it is 28 years since he won his second of two majors, yet people still make this trip to Hooters to see him: non-stop hordes of them, an ever-replenishing line of groupies and devotees queuing up in the name of buying preposterously overpriced Daly tat. But they’re really there for the chance to meet him for the 30-odd seconds that it takes him to sign a driver head cover that says “John F*cking Daly” or a ball-marker that says “F*ck U Cancer!” or a “Grip ‘n Rip It” T-shirt or, in my case, his book.

His autobiography, it turns out, has an interesting numbers section which includes the following: 514 – the number of gallons of Diet Coke he drinks a year; 14,600 – the number of Marlboro Lights he smokes a year; and dollars 55 million (pounds 44 million) – “My approximate net loss at casinos in the last 15 years. It could be a little more.”

I also once bought a CD of his music, having heard him play at the Cavern Club on the eve of the 2006 Open at Royal Liverpool (he missed the cut). On that occasion, he sung Lost Soul, his raw, self-reflective country number in which he squeezes into a single verse the death of his mother, his father putting a gun to his head, losing his best friend and that aforementioned fourth wife being locked up.

Those numbers from his book should no longer be trusted because the publication date is 2006 and, most significantly since then, he has had bladder cancer (2020) – after which he promised to address his appetite. That said, his day-long signing shifts in Hooters involve copious cigarettes and when the more sycophantic punters bring a shot of whisky, he isn’t one to say no. But we’ve all aged in different ways, haven’t we? Woods once said of Daly that: “He is an everyday reminder for me that I can’t screw up in my personal life.” Well, that didn’t go too well, did it?

Of particular note in the postscript to the book is this: he writes of a trip to Nashville to talk music and other projects and signs off with a lasting ambition to “make a movie about my life”. This is notable, now, because that film may finally be in the offing.

There is already a Hollywood name – Jonah Hill – who is keen to take on the lead role. Initial discussions about working with Hill’s production company, Strong Baby Productions, did not come to fruition. However, the project is now being led by Happy Maddison, which is the production company of Adam Sandler who, of course, has one of the very few decent golf movies ever made to his name – Happy Gilmore.

The idea of a Daly film is intriguing: what would it look like? Daly’s life could so easily be knocked into an

Animal House-type comedy: the hellraising years, all those women, the club-breaking, the club-throwing, the young man who stuck up two fingers to the game’s authorities and then won two of its biggest tournaments. That’s probably the easier way at it.

The more honest version, though, is one that embraces the darkness and attempts to relate his extremes and excesses to the catalogue of addictions and personal problems that he has somehow managed to survive; one that takes seriously the way that the golf establishment handled him, which was always at arm’s length and holding its nose.

There is a story he tells in his book about an epic drinking event with his mate Fuzzy Zoeller, the 1979 Masters champion, in which he has trashed a hotel room, emptied ludicrous quantities of Jack Daniels down his throat and is being taken on a stretcher to hospital with Zoeller asking: “Are you gonna be OK?” and Daly answering: “No Fuzz, I’m not. I’m fixing to lose my wife and I ain’t playing worth a shit and I’m drunk all the time.”

Does Sandler play that for laughs? Or does he add the next three sentences when Daly says to Zoeller: “I wish somebody would just kill me. Why don’t you grab that cop’s gun and just f*cking kill me. I can’t live like this any more.”

When I asked Daly about the film and which version of his life it would portray, he said it was neither one nor the other: “It’s everything, it’s the ups and the downs. It’s like a f*cking lie-detector test.”

Well that’s a version that sounds worth watching. It is this – this Daly in totality – that has these queues of punters lining up for him. Daly can be to anyone whatever they want him to be. He can be one of sport’s greatest hellraisers, he can be that golfer in all of us who wanted to snap their clubs and sling them in the water, he can be the great survivor, the man who accumulated demons and fought them all, and he can be the man who survived cancer.

Here in Augusta, he is something else too. He is the absolute polar contrast to the golf course that all these people have been visiting every day. The Augusta National is genteel and refined, it is your perfect Disneyland where everything is just right and completely an escape from normality. The punters leave the course and walk 15 minutes down the road to their reality check: Daly, still overweight, still sporting a long white Santa beard, still happily greeting anyone and everyone as he has, here, for – can you believe it? – 26 years.

Augusta is golf’s vision of perfection. Daly is a more honest take, a man riddled with complications and imperfections, many played out in the public arena and here, now, for a discussion once a year at Hooters. And that is astonishingly popular too.

Ask yourself: what other player would ever draw crowds like this, year after year, decades after they were last relevant as a golfer? Daly stands alone; he always has done.

Originally published as John Daly: Fans still flocking to see golf hellraiser at Hooters Augusta, talks of a biopic