Daly Book: Gambling Losses Top $50 Million

John Daly has his own reality TV show, fans, endorsements, a motor home, two major golf championship titles and one mammoth gambling problem.

That’s according to Daly, who revealed he has gambled away between $50 million and $60 million, according to his autobiography “John Daly: My Life In and Out of the Rough,” due out Monday.

Daly, who turned 38 on Saturday, said he is addicted to gambling and if his estimates are accurate, his losses far outweigh the $8.7 million he has won on the PGA Tour since he turned pro in 1987.

Daly wrote that he has spent the last 10 years trying to pay off debts from his gambling.

“If I don’t get control of my gambling, it’s going to flat-out ruin me,” he said in the book, which is co-written with Glen Waggoner and published by HarperCollins.

He recounted one episode in October, when he lost in a World Golf Championship playoff to Tiger Woods at Harding Park in San Francisco, but still earned $750,000. He drove to Las Vegas and lost $1.65 million in five hours, mostly at $5,000 slot machines, Daly said in the book.

Such admissions have not gone unnoticed. PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem met with Daly on Monday at the Wachovia Championship in Charlotte, N.C., the Associated Press reported.

Finchem said no PGA Tour regulations were broken because of the book, but he also said Daly has “significant personal challenges.”

Finchem said he has told Daly that he needs to uphold the image and standards of the PGA Tour.

Daly has a long and checkered history dealing with gambling and drinking and each episode seems to have ended poorly. He signed a multimillion-dollar endorsement contract with Callaway Golf in 1997, two years after he won his second major title at the British Open. But there was an incident at the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, N.C., where Daly made an 11 on the par-four eighth hole and received a two-shot penalty for hitting the ball while it was still moving.

His primary sponsors decided Daly was having problems. As part of his deal with Callaway, which paid him upward of $1 million annually in fees and incentives, there was a stipulation involving drinking and gambling that meant Daly would have to seek rehabilitation.

Instead, after spending one day at a rehab center in Orange County, Daly fled, violating his endorsement contract, even after the equipment maker had agreed to pay off his gambling debts of more than $2 million.

Daly had spent time at the Betty Ford Clinic after trashing his hotel room at the 1997 Tour Championship at Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., home of the PGA Tour.

But Daly’s golf talent reappeared. He broke a 10-year victory drought at Torrey Pines in La Jolla in 2004 and returned last January as a popular former champion. Daly shot a first-round 69, the day after his fourth wife, Sherrie Miller Daly, turned herself in at jail in Lexington, Ky., to serve a five-month sentence on a federal charge involving a drug ring and an illegal gambling operation.

Daly was not implicated in his wife’s legal problems.

How Daly has dealt with his alcohol and gambling issues may test his popularity and and have an effect on book sales. Daly has won five PGA Tour events, but only once in 11 years, since his victory at St. Andrews in the 1995 British Open.

Daly has a website and a new sponsorship deal with equipment maker TaylorMade. Called JD by his fans since he won the 1991 PGA Championship as an alternate, Daly wrote that he no longer drinks JD, or Jack Daniels.

“I don’t beat up on hotel rooms and cars as much,” he said. “Only gambling remains a problem.”