The John Daly saga

Just about everyone, even non-golfers, know who John Daly is and his reputation precedes him every where he goes. He is the idol of "the common man" and plays to that image. He played college golf at the University of Arkansas and lives in Dardanelle, Ark., just four miles across the Arkansas River Bridge from the town I came from when I took the teaching job at MCC and moved to McCook.

Most people have heroes; people they admire, people they look up, people they try to emulate.

We respect people who can do things we can't do, often overlooking their shortcomings because they do those things so well. But John Daly is a different kind of cat and the hero worship he commands from the common, everyday man is getting harder and harder to understand.

Daly's PGA Tour disciplinary file was recently made public and it reads like a pulp fiction novel. The file is 456 pages long and notes that Daly has been suspended five times and cited 21 different times for not giving his best effort on the golf course. He has been placed on probation six times, ordered to go to counseling or alcohol rehab seven times, cited for conduct unbecoming a professional 11 times and fined nearly $100,000. He has not had his full PGA Tour card since 2006 and has been playing mainly on sponsor exemptions that keep other, perhaps more deserving, players from being able to play.

Butch Harmon, Daly's former swing coach and one of the two or three top swing coaches in the world, quit Daly in 2008, saying "The most important thing in John Daly's life is getting drunk."

He has been married and divorced four times. He was charged with third degree assault for throwing his second wife against a wall (sounds familiar) and got into a fight with his fourth wife in a Memphis, Tenn., restaurant. He said she later that night came at him with a knife and when he went to the course to play the next day, he had several scratches on his face and arms. She ultimately ended up pleading guilty to federal drug charges and was sentenced to prison.

He also is a compulsive gambler, telling how he lost millions of dollars in Las Vegas in his autobiography, "My Life In and Out of the Rough."

He doesn't work out because he says they won't let him smoke in the health club.

So back to the hero worship thing. Daly is a chronic smoker, abuses alcohol, commits domestic violence, doesn't give his best on the course, gets suspended, gets put on probation, gets fined and is a habitual gambler and of all the pros on tour, this is the guy most people admire? A recent pool on Foxsports.com indicated that 72 percent of the people taking the poll say they are a fan of John Daly and only 28 percent said they weren't.

This perplexes me. This isn't a guy to look up to. This isn't a guy to admire or respect. In fact, except for his now mostly lost skill on the golf course, he's never done anything exemplary in his life. I doubt most of you would want your sons to grow up to be anything like John Daly at all. I suppose a lot of people relate to him because he has some of the same failings they do and that makes him more human than the country-club types we are accustomed to on the PGA tour.

The trouble is while you may be able to connect with him personally because he has a problem or two that you have, he has all the problems rolled into one person. And he's doing very little to fix any of them.

Now he has a new reality television show on The Golf Channel that is making an attempt to rehabilitate his image and it's one of the most popular shows on that particular network.

He co-stars with a woman that I suppose will eventually become his fifth wife.

But a television program can't rehabilitate John Daly. He has to do that all by himself and so far it's not happening.

Maybe John Daly should take a long look at the man in the mirror. And maybe we should too if he's the kind of guy we like and admire.