John Daly's Recipe For Success
Morley Safer Profiles Colorful Pro Golfer
May 3, 2006
(CBS) John Daly has figured out a few things at the age of 40 after a roller-coaster ride on the fairways of professional golf and in the fast lane of life.
He can drink lots of beer — as long as he doesn't drink whiskey. He doesn't need the pills doctors tell him to take. And no matter how good water is for you, that's not what his body craves .. and, besides, it makes him shoot bogeys.
Daly shares these pearls of wisdom with 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer this Sunday, May 7, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"[Beer is] the only thing I like to drink … I don't drink whiskey anymore, so thank God for that … I've conquered the Jack Daniels, that was the biggest one," he tells Safer. The whiskey cost him three marriages, got him in trouble with the Professional Golfers Association Tour and drove him into rehabilitation on three occasions.
But beer is just the thing for Daly, who keeps lots of it on ice wherever he goes. The brew fits in well with his two-packs-a-day cigarette habit and his taste for fast food, all of which makes his body a bad fit for the healthful effects of water.
"My body just doesn't … it doesn't want that. It's fighting it. 'Hey what's going on, you're putting something healthy in here?' " he says. "I am to a point not very superstitious about things, but every time I drink a bottle of water I make a bogey."
As gifted a golfer as he is, Daly's downfall is his blowing up on the course — losing his head — and for that and other problems, doctors put him on medication that included antidepressants. Daly decided that to find himself, he needed to lose his meds.
"I took myself off all this medication … that doctors were putting me on," he tells Safer, "and I looked in the mirror one day, I said, 'One thing you got to do, John, let's take care of John for now.' I used to look in the mirror and flip myself off; now I can look in the mirror and say, 'Hey, you're all right, you're all right today, man.' "
Daly is doing it his way, as he always has, for better or worse. "I'm all feel, just like my golf game, and that's the way I have been with life."
In Sunday's profile, Daly also discusses his gambling problem, which has cost him millions, as well as his checkered love life, his triumphs and tragedies on the golf course and his appeal to his fans.
<!--
The turbulent saga of professional golfer John Daly sounds a bit like a soap opera. You just can’t make this stuff up: twice suspended by the PGA Tour, three trips to rehab, four kids, millions won on the course, millions lost in gambling joints, four marriages before the age of 35, current wife in prison, drunken binges and sexual adventures.
And yet, as Morley Safer reports, he is considered one of the most gifted of players. Not for nothing is he known as "Long John Daly."
<hr width=50%>
John Daly is considered one of the most powerful hitters in the game of golf. That grip-it-and-rip-it style defines Daly and attracts a huge gallery of fans, hoping for a little magic.
Working class, chain smoking, overweight, and about as undisciplined as a professional athlete can be, Daly admits he has never taken training and staying in shape seriously.
"I hate it, to be honest with you," Daly tells Safer. "I can't stand to work out, I can't stand to do a sit up, you know, I can't stand to run."
And his diet? "It's not great," Daly admits.
He lives on a menu of fast food, soda and beer, and lives life by his own rules, which may mean no rules at all. That unrepentant attitude endears him all the more to his fans, who follow his every move, whether he’s winning — or flaming out.
Daly admits that his career has had ups and downs. "No doubt. It's all or nothing," he says.
While he is not way up on the money list, on the course he gets a gallery as big as Tiger Woods and some other top stars. What's the attraction?
"I think people relate to me because of the ups and downs I have had. I mean, I've shared a lot of strong emotions in my life, that I think maybe 'cause they believe, I'm not scared to tell everybody I'm a human being," he explains.
He's about as human as one can get — often playing brilliant golf … and just as often on the edge of self-destruction.
Daly's wild ride began in 1991. He was a nobody from nowhere when, at age 25, he drove all night to fill the last vacant spot in field for the PGA Championship. He then turned golf on its ear by winning.
Daly thinks the effect of winning that tournament so young was positive but says a lot of negatives came with the win. "I didn't know how to react to it. You know, I never saw so much money in my life come so fast," he explains.
He was golf’s next big thing — fans, reporters, sponsors and women all wanted a piece of him. But his volatile behavior soon began to get him more attention than his game, including a well-documented battle with alcoholism, fights, and some highly public meltdowns.
"I was a basket case, you know?" says Daly. "When I got mad, I threw clubs, you know? And if things weren't going well, I would walk off a course. I think I lost a little bit of respect, but hopefully I’ve gained that back."
"You let your personal demons run most of your life," Safer remarked.
"Everybody fights demons. Some are worse than others," Daly replied. "But I’ve conquered the Jack Daniels; that was the biggest one."
He admits it was bad for him. "Horrible. Me and Jack Daniels were best friends but, boy, too much of it. We just didn’t get along."
His "friend" Jack Daniels eventually cost him his second marriage and triggered some major problems with the PGA. So Daly checked himself into rehab, got sober, and stunned the golf world all over again by winning his second major, the 1995 British Open.
<hr width=50%>
Daly was on top of the world, but again his world was crumbling: Alcohol proved hard to shake. After running up huge gambling debts and trashing a hotel room, his third wife divorced him, two multimillion-dollar sponsors dropped him and Daly headed back to rehab.
As his life fell apart, so did his game. He seemed to hit rock bottom when he experienced uncontrollable shaking at the Vancouver Open in 1998. A lot of people thought Daly was finished.
"He was meant to be a great athlete. He just was never meant to parade this wreck of a life in front of the world," says Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly.
Reilly says Daly’s human frailties are precisely what endear him to the fans. "The reason people love John Daly is because he's so human. He's so flawed. You know, he's not Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods has a 30-inch waistband, huge shoulders, can work out for four straight hours," Reilly says. "John Daly, he's way overweight, he's addicted to too many things. He smokes too much. He's us, you know?"
He's a mixed blessing for the PGA. There are continuing dramas but he is a huge draw — television ratings soar when he is in contention.
"On one hand, he’s an embarrassment clearly, and on the other he pulls in the television ratings," Safer noted.
"Yeah, the PGA knows, they kind of need him. Because he’s a great draw," Reilly agreed. "But they’re always like, 'Oh, please don’t let me look in the newspaper today to see what happened.'"
The one place where Daly can escape all that is his hometown, Dardanelle, Ark. The son of a carpenter at the local nuclear power plant, he recently bought the golf course where he taught himself to play. It's a club, that, like Daly, has virtually no rules.
"I don't care what you wear, just, you know, cover up the private parts," Daly jokes.
He says his life began to turn around after he decided to ignore all of the advice to go back to rehab, to quit gambling and taking anti-depressants.
"I took myself off all this medication I was on, that doctors were putting me on. Prescribing, 'You gotta do this, you gotta do that.' And I looked in the mirror one day, I said, 'One thing you gotta do, John, let's take care of John for now,'" he recalls. "I used to look in the mirror and flip myself off, and now I can look in the mirror and say, 'Hey, you're alright, you're alright today, man.'"
What he found he could not, or would not, give up were gambling and alcohol. He lost yet another multimillion-dollar endorsement deal as a result. But he claims he is trying to learn from his mistakes.
"I've lost a ton of money in the middle of the 90s," Daly says.
Asked how much, Daly says "in the millions."
No matter how much it has cost him, Daly claims he’s not an alcoholic and he can still drink — but only beer. "It's the only thing I like to drink. I don't drink whiskey anymore, so thank God for that," he says.
But it's a roller-coaster life. In 2004, when the golf world had just about written him off, Daly once again came out of nowhere. He won his first PGA tournament in almost a decade, the Buick Invitational. It was "back to the future" for the kid from Arkansas…
<hr width=50%>
Asked how good Daly is and how good he could be, Reilly says, "Oh, first of all, everybody on tour knows, Daly has the best set of hands out there. What he can't do though, is persevere. He can't stick through tough times. Either he's on top and he wins — or if he's going bad, then he's last."
While players like Vijay Singh and Tiger Woods spend hours conditioning themselves, Daly hates to practice. Weight loss, he says, hurts his swing. Twenty Diet Cokes and two packs of cigarettes a day seem to get his heart started.
"I am to a point not very superstitious about things, but every time I drink a bottle of water I make a bogey," he says. "So my body just doesn't, you know, it doesn't want that. ... It's fighting it. 'Hey what's going on, you're putting something healthy in here?'"
Despite his history, Daly is not a poor man. He has turned his "redneck rebel" image into a multimillion-dollar brand. Where other players endorse luxury cars and fancy watches, Daly has a deal with — of course — Hooters. And Hooters patrons line up to meet one of their own. Most agree he attracts a whole new crowd to the royal and ancient game.
"He even has the NASCAR-style trailer at tournaments where they sell his hats and shirts and sweaters," says Reilly. "He's bringing NASCAR to golf. Has there ever been a match made in hell like Daly and Hooters? I love it."
Love is a problem for Daly. But his turbulent love life has given him ample material for his other side — the country music singer.
Daly released a CD of songs that detail his turbulent love life, including that ode to lost love, "All My Exes Wear Rolexes."
Why do so many women find him so attractive?
"I think women have this Red Cross thing in them," says Reilly. "They think they're gonna save him, you know? He's kind of a human hurricane. We can calm you down. We can take care of you. Because he really is lovable."
Daly's fourth wife is currently in jail. That wife, Sherrie, married him after a seven-week courtship. But two years later, she was indicted — accused along with her parents of laundering money for a drug and gambling ring. It had nothing to do with Daly, and she is now serving a five-month sentence in federal prison.
Asked why he is so unlucky in love, Daly says, "I don't know, I think it’s a two-way street, it’s fifty-fifty. It's a tough life. It's not as glamorous as people think it is. It's a lot of traveling. Tons of traveling."
"But there's a lot of temptations as you say, on the tour. A lot of groupies, correct?" Safer asked.
"Just tons of temptations in life, period," Daly replied.
Asked if his current marriage is for keeps, Daly says, "Oh, we take it day by day, you know? It's been a rocky road. But we've hung in there."
<hr width=50%>
For now, he’s a single father while his wife serves her time. He’s been traveling the Tour with their 2-year-old son, John Jr., in tow. He's another Daly who grips it and rips it.
Like just about everyone else who has problems, Daly has written a book, titled "In and Out of the Rough."
Safer noted the book is overwhelmingly honest about booze and sex. "Have you pretty much given up all of that bad behavior?" he asked.
"Well, I've never given sex up. I mean, it's been very difficult where my wife is right now. I mean, I got to wait five months. I mean that's, I'm a nympho, I'm not scared to say it," Daly admitted.
And every now and then he reminds the fickle gods of golf of just how good he can be. Last fall, he found himself in a sudden-death playoff with Tiger Woods. But Daly's diehard fans were disappointed yet again when he missed an easy three-foot putt. Even Tiger said it was no way to win.
"You know, I did blow it," Daly admits. "Hopefully I'll have some other opportunities. I'd love to — me and Tiger in a major championship, walking. It'd be a highlight of my life."
After that loss, he flew straight to Vegas, and in less than five hours blew $1.6 million.
"Is it simply that you have no discipline? You respond to whatever whim takes you at a given moment?" Safer asked.
"I'm all feel, just like my golf game. And that's the way I have been with life. But I make so much better decisions on the golf course now, and in life. Having my kids has really, really made me grow up," Daly replied.
"Do the children remind you, in a certain way, that you're not gonna be here forever?" Safer asked.
"I don't think I want to be here forever, Morley. Life's too tough, man," Daly answered.
At age 40, Daly doesn't much resemble the young upstart who stunned the golf world. Even so, the Daly magic, the triumph and the failure, the fallibility and the talent are still there, for all the world to see.
-->
Morley Safer Profiles Colorful Pro Golfer
May 3, 2006
(CBS) John Daly has figured out a few things at the age of 40 after a roller-coaster ride on the fairways of professional golf and in the fast lane of life.
He can drink lots of beer — as long as he doesn't drink whiskey. He doesn't need the pills doctors tell him to take. And no matter how good water is for you, that's not what his body craves .. and, besides, it makes him shoot bogeys.
Daly shares these pearls of wisdom with 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer this Sunday, May 7, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"[Beer is] the only thing I like to drink … I don't drink whiskey anymore, so thank God for that … I've conquered the Jack Daniels, that was the biggest one," he tells Safer. The whiskey cost him three marriages, got him in trouble with the Professional Golfers Association Tour and drove him into rehabilitation on three occasions.
But beer is just the thing for Daly, who keeps lots of it on ice wherever he goes. The brew fits in well with his two-packs-a-day cigarette habit and his taste for fast food, all of which makes his body a bad fit for the healthful effects of water.
"My body just doesn't … it doesn't want that. It's fighting it. 'Hey what's going on, you're putting something healthy in here?' " he says. "I am to a point not very superstitious about things, but every time I drink a bottle of water I make a bogey."
As gifted a golfer as he is, Daly's downfall is his blowing up on the course — losing his head — and for that and other problems, doctors put him on medication that included antidepressants. Daly decided that to find himself, he needed to lose his meds.
"I took myself off all this medication … that doctors were putting me on," he tells Safer, "and I looked in the mirror one day, I said, 'One thing you got to do, John, let's take care of John for now.' I used to look in the mirror and flip myself off; now I can look in the mirror and say, 'Hey, you're all right, you're all right today, man.' "
Daly is doing it his way, as he always has, for better or worse. "I'm all feel, just like my golf game, and that's the way I have been with life."
In Sunday's profile, Daly also discusses his gambling problem, which has cost him millions, as well as his checkered love life, his triumphs and tragedies on the golf course and his appeal to his fans.
<!--
The turbulent saga of professional golfer John Daly sounds a bit like a soap opera. You just can’t make this stuff up: twice suspended by the PGA Tour, three trips to rehab, four kids, millions won on the course, millions lost in gambling joints, four marriages before the age of 35, current wife in prison, drunken binges and sexual adventures.
And yet, as Morley Safer reports, he is considered one of the most gifted of players. Not for nothing is he known as "Long John Daly."
<hr width=50%>
John Daly is considered one of the most powerful hitters in the game of golf. That grip-it-and-rip-it style defines Daly and attracts a huge gallery of fans, hoping for a little magic.
Working class, chain smoking, overweight, and about as undisciplined as a professional athlete can be, Daly admits he has never taken training and staying in shape seriously.
"I hate it, to be honest with you," Daly tells Safer. "I can't stand to work out, I can't stand to do a sit up, you know, I can't stand to run."
And his diet? "It's not great," Daly admits.
He lives on a menu of fast food, soda and beer, and lives life by his own rules, which may mean no rules at all. That unrepentant attitude endears him all the more to his fans, who follow his every move, whether he’s winning — or flaming out.
Daly admits that his career has had ups and downs. "No doubt. It's all or nothing," he says.
While he is not way up on the money list, on the course he gets a gallery as big as Tiger Woods and some other top stars. What's the attraction?
"I think people relate to me because of the ups and downs I have had. I mean, I've shared a lot of strong emotions in my life, that I think maybe 'cause they believe, I'm not scared to tell everybody I'm a human being," he explains.
He's about as human as one can get — often playing brilliant golf … and just as often on the edge of self-destruction.
Daly's wild ride began in 1991. He was a nobody from nowhere when, at age 25, he drove all night to fill the last vacant spot in field for the PGA Championship. He then turned golf on its ear by winning.
Daly thinks the effect of winning that tournament so young was positive but says a lot of negatives came with the win. "I didn't know how to react to it. You know, I never saw so much money in my life come so fast," he explains.
He was golf’s next big thing — fans, reporters, sponsors and women all wanted a piece of him. But his volatile behavior soon began to get him more attention than his game, including a well-documented battle with alcoholism, fights, and some highly public meltdowns.
"I was a basket case, you know?" says Daly. "When I got mad, I threw clubs, you know? And if things weren't going well, I would walk off a course. I think I lost a little bit of respect, but hopefully I’ve gained that back."
"You let your personal demons run most of your life," Safer remarked.
"Everybody fights demons. Some are worse than others," Daly replied. "But I’ve conquered the Jack Daniels; that was the biggest one."
He admits it was bad for him. "Horrible. Me and Jack Daniels were best friends but, boy, too much of it. We just didn’t get along."
His "friend" Jack Daniels eventually cost him his second marriage and triggered some major problems with the PGA. So Daly checked himself into rehab, got sober, and stunned the golf world all over again by winning his second major, the 1995 British Open.
<hr width=50%>
Daly was on top of the world, but again his world was crumbling: Alcohol proved hard to shake. After running up huge gambling debts and trashing a hotel room, his third wife divorced him, two multimillion-dollar sponsors dropped him and Daly headed back to rehab.
As his life fell apart, so did his game. He seemed to hit rock bottom when he experienced uncontrollable shaking at the Vancouver Open in 1998. A lot of people thought Daly was finished.
"He was meant to be a great athlete. He just was never meant to parade this wreck of a life in front of the world," says Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly.
Reilly says Daly’s human frailties are precisely what endear him to the fans. "The reason people love John Daly is because he's so human. He's so flawed. You know, he's not Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods has a 30-inch waistband, huge shoulders, can work out for four straight hours," Reilly says. "John Daly, he's way overweight, he's addicted to too many things. He smokes too much. He's us, you know?"
He's a mixed blessing for the PGA. There are continuing dramas but he is a huge draw — television ratings soar when he is in contention.
"On one hand, he’s an embarrassment clearly, and on the other he pulls in the television ratings," Safer noted.
"Yeah, the PGA knows, they kind of need him. Because he’s a great draw," Reilly agreed. "But they’re always like, 'Oh, please don’t let me look in the newspaper today to see what happened.'"
The one place where Daly can escape all that is his hometown, Dardanelle, Ark. The son of a carpenter at the local nuclear power plant, he recently bought the golf course where he taught himself to play. It's a club, that, like Daly, has virtually no rules.
"I don't care what you wear, just, you know, cover up the private parts," Daly jokes.
He says his life began to turn around after he decided to ignore all of the advice to go back to rehab, to quit gambling and taking anti-depressants.
"I took myself off all this medication I was on, that doctors were putting me on. Prescribing, 'You gotta do this, you gotta do that.' And I looked in the mirror one day, I said, 'One thing you gotta do, John, let's take care of John for now,'" he recalls. "I used to look in the mirror and flip myself off, and now I can look in the mirror and say, 'Hey, you're alright, you're alright today, man.'"
What he found he could not, or would not, give up were gambling and alcohol. He lost yet another multimillion-dollar endorsement deal as a result. But he claims he is trying to learn from his mistakes.
"I've lost a ton of money in the middle of the 90s," Daly says.
Asked how much, Daly says "in the millions."
No matter how much it has cost him, Daly claims he’s not an alcoholic and he can still drink — but only beer. "It's the only thing I like to drink. I don't drink whiskey anymore, so thank God for that," he says.
But it's a roller-coaster life. In 2004, when the golf world had just about written him off, Daly once again came out of nowhere. He won his first PGA tournament in almost a decade, the Buick Invitational. It was "back to the future" for the kid from Arkansas…
<hr width=50%>
Asked how good Daly is and how good he could be, Reilly says, "Oh, first of all, everybody on tour knows, Daly has the best set of hands out there. What he can't do though, is persevere. He can't stick through tough times. Either he's on top and he wins — or if he's going bad, then he's last."
While players like Vijay Singh and Tiger Woods spend hours conditioning themselves, Daly hates to practice. Weight loss, he says, hurts his swing. Twenty Diet Cokes and two packs of cigarettes a day seem to get his heart started.
"I am to a point not very superstitious about things, but every time I drink a bottle of water I make a bogey," he says. "So my body just doesn't, you know, it doesn't want that. ... It's fighting it. 'Hey what's going on, you're putting something healthy in here?'"
Despite his history, Daly is not a poor man. He has turned his "redneck rebel" image into a multimillion-dollar brand. Where other players endorse luxury cars and fancy watches, Daly has a deal with — of course — Hooters. And Hooters patrons line up to meet one of their own. Most agree he attracts a whole new crowd to the royal and ancient game.
"He even has the NASCAR-style trailer at tournaments where they sell his hats and shirts and sweaters," says Reilly. "He's bringing NASCAR to golf. Has there ever been a match made in hell like Daly and Hooters? I love it."
Love is a problem for Daly. But his turbulent love life has given him ample material for his other side — the country music singer.
Daly released a CD of songs that detail his turbulent love life, including that ode to lost love, "All My Exes Wear Rolexes."
Why do so many women find him so attractive?
"I think women have this Red Cross thing in them," says Reilly. "They think they're gonna save him, you know? He's kind of a human hurricane. We can calm you down. We can take care of you. Because he really is lovable."
Daly's fourth wife is currently in jail. That wife, Sherrie, married him after a seven-week courtship. But two years later, she was indicted — accused along with her parents of laundering money for a drug and gambling ring. It had nothing to do with Daly, and she is now serving a five-month sentence in federal prison.
Asked why he is so unlucky in love, Daly says, "I don't know, I think it’s a two-way street, it’s fifty-fifty. It's a tough life. It's not as glamorous as people think it is. It's a lot of traveling. Tons of traveling."
"But there's a lot of temptations as you say, on the tour. A lot of groupies, correct?" Safer asked.
"Just tons of temptations in life, period," Daly replied.
Asked if his current marriage is for keeps, Daly says, "Oh, we take it day by day, you know? It's been a rocky road. But we've hung in there."
<hr width=50%>
For now, he’s a single father while his wife serves her time. He’s been traveling the Tour with their 2-year-old son, John Jr., in tow. He's another Daly who grips it and rips it.
Like just about everyone else who has problems, Daly has written a book, titled "In and Out of the Rough."
Safer noted the book is overwhelmingly honest about booze and sex. "Have you pretty much given up all of that bad behavior?" he asked.
"Well, I've never given sex up. I mean, it's been very difficult where my wife is right now. I mean, I got to wait five months. I mean that's, I'm a nympho, I'm not scared to say it," Daly admitted.
And every now and then he reminds the fickle gods of golf of just how good he can be. Last fall, he found himself in a sudden-death playoff with Tiger Woods. But Daly's diehard fans were disappointed yet again when he missed an easy three-foot putt. Even Tiger said it was no way to win.
"You know, I did blow it," Daly admits. "Hopefully I'll have some other opportunities. I'd love to — me and Tiger in a major championship, walking. It'd be a highlight of my life."
After that loss, he flew straight to Vegas, and in less than five hours blew $1.6 million.
"Is it simply that you have no discipline? You respond to whatever whim takes you at a given moment?" Safer asked.
"I'm all feel, just like my golf game. And that's the way I have been with life. But I make so much better decisions on the golf course now, and in life. Having my kids has really, really made me grow up," Daly replied.
"Do the children remind you, in a certain way, that you're not gonna be here forever?" Safer asked.
"I don't think I want to be here forever, Morley. Life's too tough, man," Daly answered.
At age 40, Daly doesn't much resemble the young upstart who stunned the golf world. Even so, the Daly magic, the triumph and the failure, the fallibility and the talent are still there, for all the world to see.
-->
