Golf Needs a Player Like This

Golf, which has been starved for a hero for lo! these many years, finally got one this summer.

Or did it?

He was blond (shades of Jack Nicklaus!), chunky (shades of Jack Nicklaus!) and he hit the ball higher and farther than any one of his contemporaries (shades of Jack Nicklaus!)

So, was he Jack Nicklaus? Not since the young Nicklaus had burst on the tour in 1962 had anyone made the dramatic debut John Daly did.

Like Nicklaus, who won the Open for his first pro victory, Daly won the PGA for his. The parallels were remarkable, comparisons inevitable.

Golf was beside itself with joy. The game, which had always had a Jones, or a Snead, Nelson, Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus--a king, in short--had been having to make do with generations of guys who couldn’t beat each other with any regularity. A leader board was often like a Warsaw phone book--you didn’t know anybody in it. Golf was as anarchic as a chicken coop. Nobody was in charge.

So, the game fell all over John Daly. So did the media. So did the advertisers, the sponsors.

It wasn’t what he did--the PGA is the only pro tournament John Daly has ever won, which leaves him 83 behind Sam Snead and 70 behind Nicklaus. It was the way he did it.

You see, the American public loves the big hitters, the grand flourishes. Kids at night never dream of bunting home the winning run in a World Series, making the critical block, running out the clock, outjabbing the champ, playing the baseline or sinking a tap-in on the 18th green.

Kids at night dream of driving the 18th green, hitting a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, blasting baseliners off the court with 150-m.p.h. aces, heaving an 80-yard bomb in a Super Bowl, sinking a three-pointer from midcourt for the victory at the buzzer.

The public loves the pugs named “One Round” or “Kayo” or “Ernie the Rock.” Nifty boxers may pin their ears back or make their punches whistle harmlessly overhead, but the public doesn’t care. Everybody wants to be a puncher.

In baseball, the crowd loves the homer hitters--even if they strike out a lot. Ty Cobb couldn’t hit enough singles to overtake Babe Ruth in popularity. In tennis, it was guys named “Big Bill” they adored, not guys named “Bitsy.” In basketball, they want the fast break, not the half-court offense.

John Daly fed this appetite, fueled those dreams. He didn’t so much play a golf course, he obliterated it.

A golf course is like a pitcher in baseball, a counterpuncher in boxing, a linebacker in football. It is there to blunt your offense.

Just as pitchers love big swingers in baseball, golf courses love the guys who try to make 2 on every hole. That’s why they put doglegs in them, why they undulate the fairways, grease the greens.

John Daly simply knocked the ball right over all the trouble in the PGA at Crooked Stick last August. He reduced the subtleties to irrelevancies. He fed the Walter Mitty in every man. He hit these incredibly long, high tee balls; he crushed mid-irons; he reduced a 7,000-yard hall of horrors to a pool table. It was the most awesome display of power golf since the young Nicklaus.

The public also likes the story of the unknown who drops out of the clouds to take over a sport--the pony being led on a rope to the Kentucky Derby by an old Indian, the “Rocky” story, the backup quarterback who wins the Rose Bowl. Surefire box office.

So was John Daly. He was the ninth alternate to draw into the PGA, and the public had this picture of him showing up at Indianapolis with a bag of mismatched clubs and a ham sandwich in his pocket and a putter he got out of a remnant barrel and shoes with cleats missing.

Nice image. But John Daly had already won $165,600.05 on the PGA Tour for the year when he came to Crooked Stick. He had finished fourth in a Honda Classic, third in a Chattanooga Classic. The tour knew he could play. Like Nicklaus in 1962, he was no secret.

Still, he was outside of the tour locker rooms. And if anyone had told John Daly as he drove most of the night to get into Indianapolis at 1:30 in the morning on the night before the PGA that, before the year was out, he would be playing in the Skins Game at Palm Desert against three guys who had won seven U.S. Opens, six PGA’s and six Masters among them, he probably would have edged away from the fellow before he became violent.

“No, I wouldn’t have believed it,” John Daly admitted Tuesday as he paused in Los Angeles on his way to PGA West and the start of the Skins Game against Jack Nicklaus, Curtis Strange and Payne Stewart this weekend.

He was chosen only partly because he won a major. He was chosen because he was the American dream, the hero of everyone who ever dreamed of someday lopping 30 strokes off his game and stunning his partners by suddenly beginning to boom 260-yard drives, hit 180-yard seven-irons and make these long, incredible, two-break putts.

He doesn’t lag puts, feather five-irons, cut a drive into a position lie. He goes for the course’s jugular.

Golf needs him to win 20 or 30 more tournaments, to get a nickname, give the game somebody’s ball to play off, someone to say to the rest of golf, “You’re away.”

He has the game. Some people can’t wait till he gets to Augusta with those wide fairways waiting to be orbited.

He’s handling the media rush well, even though the authors are chronicling every beer he ever drank, every class he ever cut, every putt he ever yipped, his former marriage, his childhood and his 360-degree swing, which they gloomily predict will unravel.

Daly doesn’t mind. “I think it’s all kind of neat,” he said. Only a year or so ago, he was breaking clubs on the Hogan Tour, sweating out his tour card at the Q school--he finished safely 12th--and ranging as far afield as Africa and the Far East looking for fields he could beat and prize money he could use.

For now, he’s “the New Nicklaus,” and Golf looks to him to lead it out of its proletarian present to a more aristocratic future. After all, any game needs stars, and it is hoped Long John will one day rank in the game’s lore with the Golden Bears, the Joneses, the Hawks, the Slammers and the Arnolds, with his own army.