Daly’s career path doesn’t run through Pebble Beach

Tuesday in Pebble Beach, most of the world’s best golfers gathered for the U.S. Open, one of the world’s biggest tournaments.

Tuesday in Los Angeles, John Daly, once one of those golfers, is wielding something that looks like a nightclub microphone and swinging at the air above a golf ball that sits on the brown carpeted floor in a room heavy with the smell of cigarette smoke.

As that microphone-like club crosses the top of the ball, there is a “whoosh,” as if Daly has just walloped one of his “grip it and rip it” monster drives. Tweeting birds sound as if trying to escape being de-feathered and all the eyes in the room look at the television screen.

This is his new focus, a video game that bears his name and likeness, proving people at Sony, at least, believe he can still sell the game that made him famous -- “John Daly’s Prostroke Golf,” which is scheduled to be released in the fall.

This weekend, Daly will be playing on a real course. It won’t be the spectacular ocean-front links on the Monterey Peninsula. It will be at a Nationwide Tour event in Fort Smith, Ark., at a place called Hardscrabble Country Club.

And he isn’t embarrassed about it.

“Really, I never much liked the Open,” Daly said.

The way the U.S. Golf Assn. tightens up courses, narrowing fairways, making the grass grow long in the rough doesn’t suit Daly’s style of ready, aim, fire as far as possible. He is matter-of-fact about all these things that have brought him to a hotel room instead of the country’s best golf tournament.

“My life is no secret,” he said.

His four marriages, his issues with public drunkenness, his lack of discipline in practicing golf, his stints in alcohol rehab, these have been played out publicly.

“I’m the guy everybody can relate to,” Daly said. “I’m 44 and I’ve lived life not perfect. I’m just a guy who shops at Wal-Mart and watches sports.”

He has been with girlfriend Anna Cladakis for nearly three years. She wore a pair of black-and-white pants from Daly’s colorful clothing line -- a brand that was inescapably visible on everyone in his entourage.

While Daly continued to demonstrate his new game in one room, Cladakis moved to another and counted the ways in which Daly has tried to improve his life since he passed out at a North Carolina Hooters in 2008 and spent 24 hours in a detox lockup.

“He hasn’t had a drink of alcohol in one year, four months,” Cladakis said. “He drinks water again. He has cut back on smoking from three packs a day to a pack and a half. I can’t get him to give up all his vices.”

She can’t make him totally control his tempestuous behavior either.

At the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines last January, Daly shot a second-round 71, failed to make the cut and in the parking lot announced he was retiring. The statement was made to an interviewer as part of a Golf Channel reality series, “Being John Daly.”

“John got in the car and told me what he said,” Cladakis said. “I asked him if he was serious and he was like, ‘Of course not.’ I told him he’d better call the show’s producer, but it was too late. Of course John wasn’t retiring. Everybody knew that.”

While Daly is playing golf on the small stage this weekend, he will be at the season’s final two major championships, the British Open and the PGA Championship. He has lifetime exemptions because of his 1991 PGA title and his 1995 British Open win.

And when he’s not playing golf he’s pushing product. He is active on Twitter. He is more comfortable in the plush bus he uses to travel to domestic tournaments than in a fancy hotel room.

There might be a reason for that. When it was time for Daly to move on to another appointment Tuesday, he asked, “How far is it?” The answer was four blocks. Instead of having a car brought around, Daly had another suggestion.

“Let’s walk,” he said. “Four blocks? I can smoke three cigarettes.”

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diane.pucin@latimes.com