KEY POINTS:
Take a good look at the ample frame of John Patrick Daly as he plays in this weekend's Target World Challenge golf. It may not be the last time you see him but it is open to real question whether golf's wild child will be seen in such
exalted company again.
Daly has made more comebacks than Muhammad Ali but, after yet another annus horribilis when he was injured and out of form, he needed Tiger Woods' friendship to make the Challenge field - this is Woods' tournament, where 16 world-class golfers face off for a US$1.35 million prize, with even the last placegetter winning US$170,000.
Daly needs the money. In his recent book, My Life In and Out of the Rough, he details how he lost US$60 million gambling over a 10-12 year period, remarkable in itself but also because he earned only US$9 million from golf.
He has kept himself afloat performing all sorts of corporate and endorsement work. Incredibly, he is still among the most popular US sportsmen. In a society that values winners above all else, Daly is a spectacular loser but still commands a loyal following of fans.
John Daly ended up 193rd on the PGA money list last year and did not win his card for the 2007 PGA Tour. That's a big fall for a man with two majors to his credit.
In a year pockmarked with injury and yet more personal drama, his best finish was a tie for 17th at the Accenture Match Play Championship, when he beat one golfer and lost to the next. With no card and no entry to any PGA tournaments, Daly wrote a letter to every tournament director asking for an invitation to play in their event next year.
"It was a wake-up call having to write all the letters but at the same time, it has been very gratifying and humbling to see the response," he said. Every tournament in the next two months on the US west coast invited him to play. It was John Daly, after all.
Daly doesn't deserve to be alongside Padraig Harrington, David Howell, Paul Casey, Colin Montgomerie and defending champion Luke Donald. But it's Tiger's tourney and he had no hesitation in handing an exemption to the 40-year-old Daly. "John is an asset to any tournament," Woods said.
Perhaps the best insight into Daly comes from his book, which is approaching 500,000 copies sold since its release this year. It is the most frank, unabashed and downright odd story of any sportsman. It is the laying bare of a life - unusual in sports biographies which tend to re-hash material already known and/or allow the sportsman involved to recount history according to his or her own perspective.
Daly is a fascinating character - a sportsman almost the complete antithesis of an athlete. He is fat, with his belly flowing over his belt like a burst river bank, he is undisciplined, has more addictions than the entire patient list of the Betty Ford centre (he named a daughter Sierra, after the Sierra Tucson rehab centre) and a seeming will to self-destruct.
He once drove through 17 successive red lights and said in his book: "I ran this one red light and pretty soon I'm like, f*** it, and I just kept going."
He is or was addicted to bourbon, cigarettes, Diet Coke, M&Ms (he would graze through as many as six bags on one hole), women (he has just completed his fourth divorce), gambling and, it seems, interior design - he was also addicted to trashing hotel rooms.
Of all those demons, gambling seems to be the worst. He lost a playoff to Woods by missing a simple one-metre putt in the Amex Championship last year, drove to Las Vegas and dropped US$1.5 million in one session on a US$5000 slot machine.
In the part-confessional, part-reality check that is his book, he admits he hasn't yet beaten the gambling addiction. "Here's how my sick mind analysed the situation," he said. "My sponsorship payments would be coming through... so I'd be able to pay everything off and get back to even by the beginning of the new year. Everything's fine. Everything's OK. No problemo. Hell, yes, there's a problemo."
Neither, it seems, has he quite mastered the women problem. His latest marriage, to Sherrie, ended when he divorced her after she served a prison sentence for a money laundering scheme she neglected to tell him about.
But after divorcing her - his book has passages devoted to his wives, sexual conquests and divorces, some in a chapter entitled 'My Exes All Have Rolexes' - Daly was on the phone to Sherrie, seeing if they could get back together.
So, for the Target Challenge, they will be aboard Daly's US$2 million converted bus (he doesn't fly) with children from various liaisons, trying to put this train wreck of a life together one more time.
As ever, Daly seems a complex mixture of naivete and hooliganism but even that doesn't tell the full story.
In 1991, he gave US$30,000 to the family of a man killed by lightning at Crooked Stick when he was a rookie and $30,000 meant something to him. He met the victim's daughters last year - both had completed a university education because of Daly.
He raises US$60,000 a year for youth movements in Arkansas and the John Daly Foundation has raised US$5 million in the past 12 years.
His popularity continues, no matter what, it seems. He perhaps best describes it: "I guess it goes back to the feeling people have that I'm just like them. I dress like them, I talk like them, I smoke like them, I get divorced just like them, I have ups and downs, just like they do. They call me the Wal-Mart golfer. People identify with me."
He's come a long way from the depressed kid threatened by his father, described in his book. "Dad got up and stumbled into his bedroom. We thought he was going to bed but all of a sudden, he stumbles back out of the bedroom with a big, old pistol in his hand and he points it at me, about six inches from my head.
"I'd had it with him. I said to him: 'Go on, just shoot me.' Looking back, I can see my relationship with my dad was complicated."
It will be interesting to see what happens to John Daly now the only person holding the gun to his head is himself.
