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John Daly

Ever since his astonishing victory in the 1991 PGA Championship, John Daly, known affectionately on the PGA Tour as "Big 'Un," has enthralled fans with his big drives, bigger personality, and "Grip It and Rip It" approach to golf — and to life. Long John, usually seen with a Marlboro Light dangling from his lip, is the unchained, unpredictable, unapologetic bad boy of professional golf. "The only rules I follow," JD likes to say, "are the Rules of Golf."

Daly's play-it-as-it-lays approach drives My Life in and out of the Rough, a thrillingly—and sometimes shockingly—candid memoir of a larger-than-life athlete battling assorted addictions (alcohol, gambling, chocolate, sex), his weight, and, perhaps worst of all, divorce lawyers. (He's been married four times.)

A two-time major winner before he turned thirty, John Daly is one of the most popular athletes in the world. Taking readers with him off the fairway and into his $1.5-million motor home for a rollicking ride through his life — an ever-churning world of booze, burgers, casinos, country music, and breathtaking moonshots — Daly reveals how a down-home Everyman from Arkansas managed to rise to the peak of the golf world, escape from the depths of abject depression, and, finally, take control of his life. Well, sort of.

I was born in Carmichael, California, near Sacramento, on April 28, 1966. I don't remember much about California, though, because when I was four years old, my father, Jim, moved my mother, Lou, my sister, Julia, my brother, Jamie, and me to Dardanelle, Arkansas. That's where I learned to play golf.

Dad was a construction worker who helped build the Unit One nuclear power plant right outside Russellville, just on the other side of the Arkansas River from Dardanelle. Dad was always being yanked back and forth between the day shift and the night shift, and he was always being called away to work on some other plant in another state when they had an outage or something. Sometimes he'd be gone two months or so at a time. Then, when he came back, it seemed like he'd always be catching the night shift and sleeping days. My brother, sister, and I really didn't get to spend a lot of time with Dad when we were growing up.

Dardanelle's a town of about 5,000 people located right in the middle of the state - 35 miles west of Little Rock, 75 miles east of Fort Smith, just south of the Ozarks. The Arkansas River runs through it. Russellville, on the other side of the river, has a population of about 35,000.

Our family wasn't rich or anything, but Dad always had work, and by the time I was a teenager, he was making decent money. He was tight, though. He didn't like to spend it. When Jamie or I wanted something, we always went to Mom. Or we'd go to Woodson's, this clothing store in Dardanelle, and we'd charge jeans, shoes, shirts, whatever. When Mom would see the bill, she wouldn't get mad or anything, but Dad, he'd sometimes have a shit-fit.

We were a close family, I guess, but in a kind of distant way. Dad wasn't around much. Mom was, until me and Jamie got to be teenagers, and then she started spending a lot of time with Dad when he was called away on some job. We never really talked about any problems we might have had. I guess we all sort of figured that if you had some kind of problem, you'd work it out by yourself. We kind of went our separate ways.

I know I never talked about my problems with anybody, except maybe Mr. Don Cline and Judge Van Taylor over at Bay Ridge Golf Club, when I was a teenager. Seems like I was the one who was always asking everybody else if they were okay. I kind of let my own problems build up, I guess. If I was hurting inside about something, I kept it to myself.

Me and my brother Jamie were tight as ticks when we were growing up, even though we were real different. He was always working on cars and building things. I didn't have anything to do with any of that stuff. I was into sports. The only sport he cared about enough to do was waterskiing. He's 14 months older than me, and as teenagers, we always got along. But when we were little kids, we got into our fair share of fights, and it usually came down to a choice: get a whupping from Dad or put on the boxing gloves and fight it out in the backyard. We always went for the backyard.

Our house in Dardanelle was close to the Bay Ridge Country Club. Back then it was your basic country nine-hole track. It didn't even have a bunker at the time. But it's located on a great piece of property. From one point, on the fourth hole, you can see maybe 25 miles, all the way to Mount Nebo and Lake Arkansas. It's a beautiful place. (Today, it's got 18 holes and a new name: Lion's Den Golf Club. I bought it in the fall of 2005.)

I got teased a lot when I was a teenager because of my size. I was chunky. Not really fat, but definitely chunky. Hell, I ate too much. I loved Mom's fried chicken and mashed potatoes and hot biscuits, and I loved hamburgers and French fries and chocolate shakes. I hated vegetables. I tried all of them, too, because Dad made me sit at the dinner table until I did. But every time I'd eat spinach or green beans or peas or any of that stuff, I'd go running to the bathroom and throw up. I hated seafood, too. Even now, when I go to pro-am banquets at tournaments, they always have shrimp and salmon and lobster and crap like that, and I practically puke.

Other kids used to pick on me for playing golf Back then, kids in rural Arkansas didn't play golf; it was an old man's sport. Hey, Johnny, you're so fat you got to play golf! I heard that a lot. I also got teased for these two big front teeth of mine. Even when I smiled, I tried to hide my teeth. I was embarrassed. Truth is, I wasn't much to look at.

We moved around a lot: Locust Grove, Virginia (between Culpeper and Fredericksburg), where I went to school from the seventh through the ninth grade; Zachary, Louisiana (near Baton Rouge), for the first semester of my sophomore year in high school; Jefferson City, Missouri, through the first half of my senior year; and then back to Dardanelle for the second half of my senior year, so I could graduate from high school there and qualify for in-state tuition at the University of Arkansas.

All I wanted to do as a kid was play sports. There's a picture of me at one of my first birthdays holding up one of my father's putters. The first time I swung a golf - club I was four and we were still in California — I hit a cut-down 7-iron about 30 yards on a beeline and smashed one of our living room windows. The first nine holes of golf I played at Bay Ridge — I think I was six, maybe seven - I shot 42. Of course, that was from the ladies' tees. My first score from the men's tees was 56.

That pretty much set the stage for everything that was to come. When we first got to Dardanelle, Dad played golf when he could, which wasn't all that often. But he liked the game, and we always had Golf Digest around the house, which played a major role in my golf education. We didn't belong to Bay Ridge, but it was a semiprivate course, so Dad would take me to play with him from time to time.

That's pretty much where I grew up, if you want the truth of it. I spent so much time there, I guess you could call me Bay Ridge's unofficial mascot. Mom would drop me off after school, and I'd spend an hour or so wading in the pond, fishing out golf balls. I'd sell half of them to the club for spending money. The rest I'd put in my shag bag. Then, when I had a mess of 'em, I'd take Dad's driver over to the local Little League baseball park, which had three fields. And I'd find a free field and start hitting golf balls. At first, I'd just get up there and hit everything as hard as I could - that's how "grip it and rip it" got started.

When I was six, Dad bought me a used set of Jack Nicklaus MacGregors. Men's clubs. He once asked me if I wanted him to cut them down for me. I said, no, I liked them the way they were. That's why my swing's so long. When I'd swing one of those clubs back, the head would almost hit the ground. (By the way, I played with those old Nicklaus MacGregors all the way through grade school until we moved to Virginia. There I got a set of used Spalding Executives. The first set of new clubs I ever owned was a set of Ben Hogan Directors that I won when I was in the ninth grade at a scramble, at Lake of the Woods, the golf course near where we lived in Virginia.)

From my first hacks with those old Nicklaus MacGregors, people have always tried to change my swing or weaken my grip or shorten my backswing or something. They'd tell me I'd never amount to anything as a golfer unless I did. I just wanted to prove 'em all wrong. When I was little, there wasn't really anybody around to teach me, and later, I didn't want to be taught.

A little later on, I started studying those old Jack Nicklaus instructional drawings that used to run in Golf Digest. I learned pretty much all the golf basics from those drawings — proper alignment, how to hold the club, that sort of thing. You could say that Jack Nicklaus himself taught me how to grip it, and that I picked up the rip it part on my own.

On the Little League ball field, once I got a little older, I'd set up at home plate, and I'd chip to first base, second base, and third base, and then I'd hit flop shots to the pitcher's mound, though I didn't know to call 'em flop shots at the time. Following those Nicklaus lessons, I taught myself how to hit a cut down the right-field line, a draw down the left-field line, and a straight shot to center. It was like having my own practice range.

The one sports lesson that Dad ever gave me — or at least the only one that I listened to — was to build up my left arm. When I played tennis, he had me shift my racket from right hand to left rather than hit a backhand. When I played Ping- Pong with him, we both played left-handed. He always told me to work on my left-handed shot in basketball. When I was nine years old, he had me hitting chip shots and putting with just my left hand. I've been doing stuff like that left-handed all my life, and it's helped. To this day, when I'm loosening up before a round in a tournament, I'll always hit a few chips and a few putts with just my left hand. And sometimes, when I'm practicing, I'll hit a couple of hundred one-handed wedges. That's the key to my short game.

As a general rule, they wouldn't let kids play at Bay Ridge unless an adult was with them, but sometimes I'd go out on Sundays and play the one o'clock scramble with Mr. Ken Brett or Judge Van Taylor or Mr. Don Cline. Funny, all the time I was growing up, I was comfortable being around adults. Most kids weren't. But adults seemed to accept me, and I enjoyed being around them - in part, no doubt, because I obviously loved golf and they could see I was good.

After a while, Mrs. Shirley Witherell, whose daughter Jane was the teaching pro at Bay Ridge, would sometimes haul me around in her electric cart, and we'd play 50 or 6o holes. Mrs. Witherell was a real sweet lady. Still is, as a matter of fact: she's in her 8os now, and I see her every now and then when I go back home.

As I got older, I started spending more and more time at Bay Ridge, hitting and chipping for hours and hours, always making sure to stay out of the way when somebody was playing through. My favorite practice place was on the fourth hole, which had this really wide fairway where I could practice hitting draws and fades.

Once, when I was maybe eight or nine years old, I said to Mrs. Witherell and Judge Taylor, "You know, one of these days I'm going to own this golf course." They kinda laughed about it, as you can imagine. Well, the sale went through in August 2005. Yep, I bought my old golf course. Jamie, who has a construction business in Dardanelle, did a lot of work on it. It reopened this year as the Lion's Den Golf Club. Best real estate deal I ever did.

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