Can Daly Straighten Things Out?

How far can John Daly hit it? Past the airplane, over the rainbow, beyond the pale?

Once Daly hits it, that golf ball doesn’t need dimples, it needs a passport.

And one thing John Daly wants us to know, pretty soon he will be able to say exactly where the ball is going each time he whacks it.

It might even happen this week.

“I’m hanging in there,” Daly said Tuesday at Riviera, where he hopes to hang in there right on through the Nissan L.A. Open.

It will be Daly’s first tournament in the United States since January, when he played in Tucson and Phoenix, missing the cut in each tournament.

Since then, Daly has been in Australia, where he missed the cut twice, but closed fast at the Australian Skins Game, finishing as runner-up to Peter Senior and winning about $22,000.

But Daly isn’t taking anything for granted at this stage, mainly because he isn’t playing well enough to do so.

“I’m looking to play decent,” he said. “It’s an important week, but it’s important every week. But I will tell you I’m hitting it better than I was the first week out.

“I am focused a lot more than I ever have been. It just takes a good day or two to get the confidence back. I haven’t got it yet.”

Daly is trying to learn patience, which does not come easily to someone as impulsive and strong as he is.

After a stormy first marriage, Daly, a recovering alcoholic at 28, said he is hoping to have a more normal life. He married Paulette Dean, 23, two months ago in Las Vegas and they’re expecting a baby.

And so far, Daly is happy.

“It’s the first time in my life when I can worry about my golf game and not everything else,” he said.

It was the everything else that stuck Daly in the rough behind a tree on more than one occasion. He and PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem agreed it would be best if he sat out the last four months of the 1994 tour. Daly said it was his decision because of back problems. Finchem hinted it was more of a penalty for Daly’s questionable conduct.

At any rate, the year ended for Daly as it had begun. He didn’t play until March because of a 4 1/2-month suspension for picking up his ball during a tournament in 1993.

He won the BellSouth Classic in Atlanta in May, but caused a controversy before the British Open when he intimated that some of his peers were substance abusers. Then he got into a fight with the 62-year-old father of golfer Jeff Roth at the NEC World Series of Golf after the elder Roth accused Daly of hitting into his son’s group.

Is anyone waiting for more of the same?

“John Daly is good for golf,” Corey Pavin said. “It’s just that John has to learn to control the rest of his life. That’s been the problem.

“It would be a shame to see anything bad happen and he’d end up getting kicked off the tour again.

“He’s learning. Let’s just hope he learns fast enough.”

The Daly on the golf course is not swaggering down the fairway, looking to pick up the pieces of some poor ball that he smashed about 300 yards back.

It is not a brash person who says, “Hopefully I can play well.”

But if there is a Daly resurgence in the works, it wouldn’t be totally out of the question for it to happen at Riviera, which is one of his favorite courses. He knows where he can pull out his driver, potentially the most potent weapon in any bag on the tour.

The key to Riviera, where the rough is taller than usual this week, will be to keep the ball on the fairway. This probably means golfers will have to be patient.

Pavin thinks there are signs that Daly is acquiring that virtue.

“Look at the way he plays some courses now, hitting irons a lot more, which is a sign of being patient, and not listening to the gallery yelling for him to use the driver,” Pavin said.

Paul Azinger came back from cancer, which required a great deal of patience, he said. And if he could learn it, he said, Daly can too, for different reasons.

“You just do it,” he said. “You take a four-day attitude the first day and a whole-year attitude the first month.

“Saying two good shots in a row or a good round or two will do it, that’s probably a good approach. You know, it’s easier to work on a two-shot theory instead of revamping your whole game.”

Daly burst onto the big-time golf scene four years ago when he won the PGA Championship, and Azinger said Daly was ill-prepared to handle it all.

“He went from virtual obscurity to the most famous golfer on tour,” Azinger said.

Daly said he wouldn’t mind another little dose of obscurity for a while, but only if it didn’t affect his fans.

“They help me so much, even when I’m struggling,” he said. “I threw away a lot of shots because I was mad.

“But right now, I’ve got no expectations. Just come out and play and get through a full year. And I want to just get my game going. Hopefully it will happen soon.

“The things I want driving me crazy are the chances to win, not ‘What am I doing out here?’ ”