GOLF: Jon Swift
IT WAS hard to equate John Daly, the man who held the claret jug aloft at St Andrews last weekend, with the red-eyed rebel who had to be carried shirtless, rubber legged and near comatose to his room at the Sun City
But then, they are surely not the same person. This Daly has shaken the devils from his cloak. That Daly was consumed by them.
Daly has made one of the most difficult journeys imaginable, from the Everest of his totally unexpected win in the 1991 US PGA to the Hades of an overwhelming addiction and back to the peak of another of the four pinnacles which adorn world golf.
He is, one would hazard to say, perhaps the most unlikely of all the winners of the British Open Championship. He simply does not fit the mould. But he is the central character in two of golf’s most amazing Cinderella stories.
As in his personal life, Daly has shaken off the image of the man who tees it up with the smell of death in his nostrils. The driver remains his biggest abberation.
On the tee he still reaches for it with the same robotomy you would expect between a child and a safety
And while Daly remains a prodigious golfing talent — and, one would argu,e now a mature one — there remains the touch of a child about him.
Witness his huge intake of Diet Cola, his prediliction for candy and chocolate muffins and the still largely uncomplicated way he goes about his business. Allow Daly, if you will, these echoes of infancy.
The more dangerous of his infantile habits have seemingly been put behind him. He no longer arrives glassy-eyed as he now admits he did during his PGA triumph, when he drove through the night psyching himself up on adrenalin and Dutch courage to take up the ninth reserve’s slot vacated by Nick Price.
“I don’t think I hit a shot sober,” says Daly of the way he flattened the field at Broken Stick. It is a quite staggering admission and says much about the man as he was, the man he is trying so hard to be now.
As a self-confessed recovering alcoholic, Daly will bear the scars of his lack of control over the habit for a long time. His personal battle is far from over.
He will also have to carry the scarred reputation of a man who trashed hotel rooms and residences, a wildman whose violence necessitated more than one call to the local law enforcement officers.
And, forgiving as the sporting public is to winners, these unsavoury scars will probably last far longer than the memory of Daly’s bouts with the bottle. The outbursts may well have been the outward manifestation of Daly’s inward look at the bottom of a myriad bourbon
These outbreaks, which all but destroyed the career of the 29-year-old, were more public, more widely reported than the alcoholic appeasement of the inner demons which gnawed holes in his psyche.
In the face of all this, Daly has scaled the peaks on the course, bearded the monster of St Andrews. It is no mean feat in itself, winning a British Open at the home of golf.
It is made more momentous for the fact that Daly has had to fight the enemy within as well as the opponents without. It is a battle he faces each waking hour. And one he has proved to himself and to the world that he is man enough and golfer enough to face down.