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.
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.”
Daly won the PGA Championship in 1991
(Image credit: Getty Images)
‘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…
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