Editor’s note: these quotes are from a 2001 interview published in Golf Monthly
John Daly’s life and career has been a wild ride. The American won two Majors – the 1991 PGA Championship at Crooked Stick and the 1995 Open Championship at St Andrews – and notched three other PGA Tour titles (plus the 2001 BMW International Open on the DP World Tour).
He’s made over $10m on the PGA Tour and supplemented that with more than $2.5m in earnings on the PGA Tour Champions, where he won the 2017 Insperity Invitational.
In 1997, the Wild Thing was the first PGA Tour player to average more than 300 yards off the tee over the course of a full season, with his iconic long backswing and ‘grip it and rip it’ attitude winning him fans all over the world.
However, his life and career has also been riddled with low points and controversy. He’s battled addiction at various points during his life and he’s been divorced on four separate occasions.
In a 2001 interview with Golf Monthly, he opened up on heading to rehab at the behest of the PGA Tour, accusations (that were later dropped) of domestic abuse, how his college years shaped him and his relationship with God.
"I really did not want to go to rehab. It just seemed that the whole Tour was against me. I felt like, not really killing myself, but I just wanted to drive and drive and never stop driving. Skip the rehab and just go to the mountains and hide."
But that pales in insignificance to what Daly calls "the worst thing that has ever happened to me” – the December day in 1992 when his second wife, Bettye Fulford, "accused me of hitting her, and she just lied. And there were 20 people there who know I never touched her. I was called a wife-beater, which was such bull•••t.
“There were so many witnesses. Then, of course, she drops that because she knew she was lying. Comes out in a little clip in the paper the next day. That makes me so mad. Something like that never even happened and I get accused. I don't even hit my kids when they act up."
'Black coffee and Jack Daniels'
Daly’s family moved to Dardanelle, Arkansas when he was four and he began playing golf the following year. When he was ten, they moved to Locust Grove in Virginia, and at the age of 13 Daly won the club championship at Lake of the Woods Golf Club.
Before he attended the University of Arkansas in 1984, there were further stops in Louisiana and Missouri before a return to Dardanelle.
Daly’s childhood was somewhat atypical and that could go some way to explaining why he struggled to fit in at the University of Arkansas.
Daly says he was forced to lose weight if he wanted to play and gave up food altogether, existing on black coffee and Jack Daniels. Back then, Steve Loy, Phil Mickelson’s long-time agent, business partner and close friend, was Arkansas’ head coach.
"Steve was so mean to me. It's like he wanted me to play for Arkansas but yet he didn't. In my freshman year, I was winning qualifying and he wouldn't take me on a trip. I have no idea what it was.
"But he really made my self-esteem go down. And all the guys on the team would wonder 'Why isn't John playing? What is going on?' I mean, I lost 60lbs for that man. My mom and dad to this day think he killed my self-esteem."
From experiences like this came Daly's belief that people "put you up and they love to bring you down, then they build you back up and bring you down. That's what I've learned through everything."
His journey between finishing college and now has been a fascinating one, with on-course brilliance and off-course shenanigans combining to make him as unique a character as professional golf has produced.
In 2001, as he contemplated his career and life to that point, he wondered if a divine being was responsible for guiding him through the rocky times.
"I'm not a real religious man, but I know God has helped me an awful lot. I mean, I should have been dead a lot of times. At a real young age. I didn't know anything. He's got me to love everybody and he's keeping me alive for something."
In 2025, Daly continues to be a figure of great interest, owing to his openness, his swashbuckling style and his unconventional nature. It remains to be seen what’s next for him, but his quotes from almost 25 years ago show just how much he’s dealt with to get to this point.
