He walked uncertainly into the tiny airport terminal a week ago Friday, looking much like any other soon-to-be divorced father picking up his visiting daughter. John Daly passed unrecognized through the crowds and worked his way over to check on the 12:10 flight from Orlando. It was on time.
Daly leaned on the counter and tried to affect aplomb. It wasn’t working. He had not seen his daughter, Shynah, who is not quite 2, since October. Would she recognize him? Would she cry? Would she have grown?
“He is really nervous,” said Daly’s friend, Hank Fried. “Really nervous.”
Two parts of John Daly’s life are coming back together at the same time. This weekend at the Honda Classic in Ft. Lauderdale, he’s playing a PGA Tour event for the first time since he was suspended in November. About his return, he is calm and confident. On this day, in the midst of a difficult divorce from his wife, Bettye, he is being reunited with his daughter, and about that he is a jumble of nerves.
“That’s it right there,” Daly said, pointing to a commuter plane touching down on the runway. “It’s landed.”
Earlier that morning, Daly, 27, was sitting easily on the sofa at Fried’s condominium, laughing, joking and reflecting on the suspension that, in retrospect, might have been the best thing that could have happened to his career.
When he picked up his golf ball before finishing his round at the Kapalua International last November, his world was spinning a little too fast. Daly realizes now that he wanted to get off, and that subconsciously this was his way of letting everybody know that.
“I’d been going crazy everywhere for almost two years since winning the PGA,” he said, referring to the tournament victory that made him an overnight phenomenon, the 1991 PGA Championship. “For two years, I never even sat back and worked on my game for a good solid week, much less 2 1/2 months.
“I think the whole suspension was a big blessing.”
During his forced exile from the PGA Tour, Daly re-evaluated his life and his priorities. He worked harder than at any time in his career, beating balls near his winter home at Mission Hills in Palm Springs, Calif. In one stretch, a few days after he was suspended Nov. 7, he embarked on an eight-day binge of practice, going at it for 6 1/2 hours a day. He wanted to get his trademark draw back in his irons, and he kept at it until his shots were flying right to left on cue.
He has begun sessions with sports psychologist Bob Rotella, and there is a peace about him now, a sort of equanimity that was non-existent during the frenzied year of 1993, a year in which Daly was disqualified from the Kemper Open in May, withdrew in midround from the Southern Open in October and then was suspended for the Kapalua incident. Through it all, the one thing Daly, an admitted alcoholic, did not do was return to drinking.
“I’m just going to basically say there was no 1993,” Daly said. “The best thing about it was I made one year sober. That was one big goal and maybe why I got complacent on the golf course. The hardest part, I think, is when everybody drinks out on tour, the fans and everything.
“It was hard. You smell it, you see it. The temptation was really there. It was really tough.”
Daly has retained some replacement addictions. He smokes “about four packs” of Marlboro Mediums a day, drinks 14 to 16 Diet Cokes (caffeine-free) a day and still gobbles the occasional bag of M & M’s and pint of chocolate yogurt. But his weight is a fairly trim 190, which is 25 pounds lighter than it was in February 1993. His eyes are clear, and his hands are steady.
“Last year, I cried a lot,” he said. “You go through some things that some of us go through, and you’ve got to cry. But I think I handled it a lot better last year than I did when I didn’t think I had problems. It actually was a good year for maturity. I didn’t trash anything. I think I handled it really well.”
When he looks ahead, Daly is resolute, determined to approach 1994 on his terms. He plans to reduce the number of Monday outings from the 20 he did last year to about six or eight. He will play 20 tournaments-including the next four in a row-on the PGA Tour and probably another six overseas. There is a golf-course-design project in Myrtle Beach, S.C., that he’s involved in with Fuzzy Zoeller and Clyde Johnston. He has mapped out what he wants to do, and he will say no when he has to; of that he is certain.
“You can’t worry about what other people are thinking,” he said. “You can’t please everybody. It’s time to start taking care of me. I’m going to do the things that John Daly wants to do. I’m going to live where I want to live, play where I want to play.”
Daly is building a new home in Memphis. His home on the road will be his 40-foot American Eagle bus, where he can escape from crowds after the day’s play and practice playing guitar, the instrument he picked up and is trying to master at the suggestion of fellow touring pro Larry Rinker.
Although Daly still is a mid-to-high handicapper on the frets of his Fender Stratocaster, he is working hard at improving, approaching the guitar the way he does everything else.
“I just feel like I’m really relaxed,” he said. “I’m going to try to stay positive no matter what happens. That’s tough to do. The relationship that Bettye and I had was really tough. It just didn’t work out. We could not get along. Now the most important thing is Shynah. Shynah’s got to know her daddy, and that’s what Bettye wants too.”
Back at the airport, a tiny, blond girl appeared in the doorway of the commuter plane. Daly’s face brightened. “There she is,” he said, walking toward the door. The little girl toddled across the tarmac in front of her nanny, taking little steps up the walk and into the terminal.
As she approached, Daly bent down and called her name. At first, she stopped and turned away. “This is what we were afraid of,” Fried said in a low voice. But then she turned back and stepped into Daly’s arms. He picked her up and walked from the terminal, smiling, one part of his life back together and another soon to follow.
