AVONDALE, La. — Two weeks ago in an Augusta, Ga., Hooters, John Daly sat hobbled on a barstool behind tables of his merchandise. Lines went out the door, people desperate to take shots of whiskey with the bad boy of golf, to which he always obliged. Just a mile away, the pinnacle event in golf took place. But John Daly is not a golfer anymore. He’s a spectacle.
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An off-duty sheriff provided security to control the chaos that rarely slowed down across seven days of the Masters tournament. Daly, 56, struggled to move around, eventually needing the help of two men to gingerly make his way down two steps to his waiting RV.
And two weeks later, Daly played in a PGA Tour event. No, really.
He remains the exact picture you have in your mind. A ridiculously long white beard that goes down to his chest and a shaggy head of hair. A bulbous stomach that cascades over his belt line and hangs over his garish pants. A cigarette in his hand that shifts to his mouth while he putts on each hole.
He drove up to the first tee in a golf cart — that he uses in all tournaments due to osteoarthritis in his knee — with the wind carrying his beard in the air, ready to play the Zurich Classic in New Orleans, the tour’s lone two-man team event. He and 51-year-old former Open Championship winner David Duval received sponsor exemptions to play, the event clearly wanting to add some name recognition to an event trying to survive in an era of LIV Golf and elevated PGA Tour events.
Then they shot a 75 on Friday — in the best ball format. Then they shot an 83 in Saturday’s alternate shot format, including a 45 on the front nine. By the time they finished, they were the only group over par — 14 shots over par, 30 shots behind the leaders.
Is this what the PGA Tour wants to be? The tour’s primary argument in its war against the rival LIV Golf is quality. It boasts having star-studded fields compared to — in their view — weak LIV fields primarily filled with old timers and has-beens. It’s raising purse amounts to unprecedented amounts and stacking fields in those elevated events to put the best in the world against each other, much of that because it’s trying to improve the television product and ask for more money.
And we are off! Getting some featured group love! https://t.co/8t8JkVl3ti pic.twitter.com/8ao7Wkaz5d — Brendan Porath (@BrendanPorath) April 21, 2023
And the Zurich Classic is not some joke of an event. Despite unfortunate scheduling — few golfers will play three weeks in a row, and it comes after the Masters and the elevated RBC Heritage event — it still has some of the biggest stars in the game with teams of Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa and Max Homa, Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim, Sam Burns and Billy Horschel, Sahith Theegala and Justin Suh and so on.
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Yet guess who was one of the exclusive featured groups shown on the tour’s PGA Tour Live product Friday morning? John Daly and David Duval.
They’re selling this. It’s understandable, on the surface. Don’t forget the aforementioned crowds at Hooters during the biggest golf week of the year. The Daly-Duval team attracted possibly the largest gallery of the day Thursday, maybe only behind LSU alumnus Burns. People flocked to get a look at the strange sight in the oft-buttoned-up sport. They nudged their buddies over beers and said, “That’s John f—— Daly!”
They wanted to see the spectacle, which is really what the entire decades-long fascination with Daly, who regularly plays in the PGA Championship and Open Championship as a former champion but otherwise was making his second PGA Tour start in the last two years, is about. They love the hellraising manic depressive with gambling and alcohol addictions who beat cancer and has been married four times. He’s the guy who once destroyed a hotel room in Jacksonville while pouring down shots and while being carried to an ambulance was asked by Fuzzy Zoeller if he was OK, to which he said, “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.” That came from his 2006 autobiography, in which he also claimed to drink 514 gallons of Diet Coke and smoke 14,600 Marlboro Lights a year.
We’ve always loved rock stars, and we’ve always been bad at letting them go.
Take the Daly-Duval team’s second shot on 18 on Friday. Duval put his drive in front of a left-side fairway bunker. Daly tried to lay up over the bunker and back into the fairway. His shot flopped in the air and went just 16 yards. The crowd roared in the rain, cheering on the nonsense of this disastrous round. They weren’t following Daly and Duval to watch great golf. They were there to see foolishness.
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Is this what the PGA Tour wants?
Maybe the answer is yes. Zurich Classic tournament director Steve Worthy talked at length Wednesday about that struggle to survive in this era. The tournament already switched from a traditional 72-hole stroke play event to a team event in 2017 because it needed to stand out, and it’s worked. It gets far better fields than it did in the 2010s. It’s not trying to be the WM Phoenix Open, per see, but it’s trying to be a fun, casual New Orleans party.
“I mean, John Daly and David Duval was a great get.” Worthy said. “In our market, I’ve probably gotten more questions about them than any other team. We’re excited to have them here.”
The same goes for them being the featured group on PGA Tour Live. Maybe this is all making too much of the early draw on the second day of a low-priority event. Maybe it’s fine for there to simply be a little fun on the back end of a thin field.
But golf is also a sport defined by the thinnest of margins. Guys are scrapping every day to get tour cards, with the difference between the 100th-best golfer and the 500th being a few shots. Daly and Duval were 14 shots worse than the second-worst team. At one point, Duval left a par 3 shot 65 yards short. To use these sponsor exemptions on Daly and Duval is watering down a product that didn’t require it.
After Daly missed a putt on 11 on Friday, he made his way to his golf cart, threw himself into his seat and began to drive. Then a young boy held up an empty beer bottle asking Daly to sign it. Daly declined. It was just one more moment to remind us this is all a little messed up.
(Top photo: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)