Daly Still Has a Long Way to Go

Golf, which sure can use one, has anointed John Daly Instant Hero.

That’s fine. His PGA victory will perk up ratings, draw attention to the dog days of the sport (the majors are over) and it will give us a home-grown hero to brag about (after all, Greg Norman is an Australian.)

Golf is always fanning the horizon for a new star. The first was probably Bobby Jones, the rich kid from Atlanta with the swing so slow and sweet it looked as if it came out of maple trees.

Then along came Snead. Sam had the swing perfected by looping long twigs at round pebbles in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, and he hit balls farther than anyone ever had thought possible before. Sometimes, he hit them in places no one had ever thought possible before, too, but that was Sam.

Hogan was a hook-fighter all his life, but he overcame it by sheer application of the most grim determination seen in sports. Ben didn’t play a golf course, he stalked it. He was remorseless. No one ever engineered a round of golf the way Ben Hogan did.

Palmer was next on stage, and he went after a golf course like a caveman with a club. He grabbed it by the hair and dragged it back to the cave. He didn’t even read it its rights. He was the most exciting player there ever was. Arnold went after a golf course like Dempsey after Firpo.

Nicklaus was the longest, straightest driver anyone had ever seen. Jack is probably the best who ever played the game. You got pictures of Palmer playing off rocks in the Pacific Ocean or Seve Ballesteros playing out of a parking lot at Royal Lytham, but you never saw Jack Nicklaus anywhere but on a fairway or on a green. He has spent his whole life saying “You’re away” to people.

Nicklaus’ career was as carefully tracked as a space shot. The game saw him coming. He won two U.S. Amateurs, no less, when he was still a teen-ager, and he should have won the 1960 Open at age 20. No less an authority than Ben Hogan himself was quoted as saying at the conclusion of that tournament at Cherry Hills in Denver (Palmer won) that “I played with a kid who should have won by 10 shots if he had a brain in his head.”

Nicklaus had plenty of brains in his head by the ’62 Open. The first pro tournament he won was the Open.

Sometimes, stars creep up. When Lee Trevino finished fifth in the 1967 Open (he was so broke, he went to dinner every night in his golf shoes), people thought he was Italian.

They knew what he was when he won the next year’s Open and one three years after that.

So, now we have John Daly. John is the most instant celebrity in sports. He has won exactly one golf tournament, but already he is part-legend, the leading man of a hundred admiring jokes. (“Did you hear about John Daly’s ball coming down in the middle of a foursome on the eighth hole? Someone asked why he didn’t yell ‘fore!’ before he teed off. He did. He teed off the day before.” “Why can’t John Daly play golf across Rhode Island? ‘Because Connecticut is out of bounds.” “Did you hear about John Daly’s unplayable lie? ‘The ball came down with snow and ice on it.” “Did you hear John Daly hit a tee shot--and two tracking stations picked it up as a satellite and the Air-Force fighter command scrambled an entire squadron to intercept it?”)

John Daly is a legend before his time. John Daly never won the U.S. Amateur--as Palmer, Nicklaus and Bobby Jones had done. John’s high-water mark was the Missouri Open, the Arkansas State Amateur. He won one tournament on the Ben Hogan Tour.

Big hitters have long fascinated the sporting public. Fighters named the Manassa Mauler sell more tickets than those called Gentleman Jim. The Brown Bomber fills more seats than someone called Sonny.

Golf has always feared those big hitters, guys they felt might start to drive the par-four greens and make a travesty out of the game.

The facts of the matter are, long hitters are usually like one-punch fighters, exciting but ineffective.

There have been long hitters in the past. The Aussie Jimmy Thomson used to drive the ball out of sight long before Greg Norman came along. George Bayer hit a ball as far as any man who ever played. Mike Souchak was a bomber with a one-wood. None of them won consistently till they throttled back their swings.

It’s nice to be able to smoke the ball 50 yards ahead of the field, to have an eight-iron to the green where a partner has a four-wood. But when the fairways narrow and the doglegs are impenetrable--when finesse counts for more than brute strength, players win tournaments, not freaks.

They tell the story of Hogan playing with a precocious amateur whose drives were in the 320-yard range all day, flying past Hogan’s. Hogan, as usual, played in stony silence. The kid couldn’t stand it. He finally blurted, “Mr. Hogan, what do you think of my game?” Startled, Hogan replied, “What part?” The kid couldn’t wait. “‘My drives,” he said. “Your ball runs too much,” Hogan sniffed.

John Daly’s ball may not run too much. But the bulk of the evidence is, he found a golf course that couldn’t be more uniquely suited to his game if he sat up all year designing it.

Anyone can win with aces, and Crooked Stick golf course kept dealing them to young Master Daly. It’s winning with deuces and treys that’s art. Winning at golf, in the long run, is an art. Just ask Greg Norman. He lost a British Open once by hitting a tee shot as far as he could hit it. Too far. It landed in a fairway bunker 300-plus yards out. Hogan wouldn’t have gotten the ball there if he could.

Everyone hopes John Daly is a budding superstar. But there are 14 clubs in the bag. The No. 1 wood is only one of them. You use it 14 times a round, maximum. You use the putter 25 on a good day, 36-40 on a bad. You may use a wedge twice on every hole.

I won’t throw my hat in the air till I see Mr. Daly walking up to a green for his fifth PGA title as Nicklaus did. Or his first Open. He has had a great start. But everyone knows golf is 18 holes--and 20 years.