Tamed 'wild man' may not capture crowd's heart

A remark recently passed by the England rugby union coach, Clive Woodward, may go some way to explaining why John Daly will not feel that he has the golf course to himself when he sets off today in the first round of the Open Championship at Royal Lytham.

Woodward, as I recall it from an article that appeared in one of the Sunday prints, was going on about the importance of encouraging gifted individuals to express themselves when he came up with the term "crowd pleaser'' which is not in great use today and usually a pejorative description. The truth, of course, is that sports performers who are pleasing on the eye and gamblers in application are rarely those who encourage you to lunge in at the limit made available by bookmakers.

Add the troubles Daly has known, the depths he has plumbed since defeating Costantino Rocca in a play-off for the 1995 Open at St Andrews, and you have a golfer on whom it hasn't been advisable to risk the contents of a piggy bank, never mind the mortgage money.

To say that Daly has gone from bad to worse and then some, is an understatement. In an orgy of self-affliction, Daly careered from one crisis to another. If the drink didn't get him, it was the gambling (one night in Las Vegas he lost $150,000 playing the slot machines). His second marriage went, then his third, the alimony crippling. Sponsors disappeared along with his savings.

Inevitably, his game went too, many felt forever. With a contorted swing that remains the despair of golfing purists, Daly could still hit the ball out of sight (at an average of 301.4 yards he led the US Tour last year in driving distance), but the self-confessed "wild man" from Dardanelle, Arkansas, wasn't going anywhere on the leaderboard. He dropped into 188th place on the money list, winning $115,460, and missed seven consecutive cuts. Daly's tantrums caused fellow pros to turn away in embarrassment.

When Daly is announced on the first tee at Lytham today it will be almost 10 months since he last tasted alcohol. But since the Open victory six years ago, Daly hasn't won, his best finish coming in the Scottish Open at Loch Lomond last week when he came joint third.

So what is it that guarantees Daly a large gathering at Lytham? First, his power off the tee. The adage "drive for show, putt for dough'', may be as relevant today as ever it was but length is the most earnest desire of all golf enthusiasts. Two years after Daly came bursting out of nowhere to win the 1991 US PGA Championship as an "alternate'' he stood on the fifth tee in the Open at Sandwich, pondering club selection. When Daly chose a long iron over his driver, the gallery groaned in disappointment. Daly smiled. "I know what you all want,'' he said, "But you aren't going to get it.''

Then there is Daly's flawed nature, what is going on in his head, can he continue to fend off the demons? Will he demolish the course or crack in the attempt? "Watch the people who follow Daly,'' a veteran golf watcher said this week. "There is a lot of morbid curiosity in their faces. Part of them wants him to win, another part waits for him to explode.''

With renewed faith in his old touch around the greens, Daly believes that he is on course to win again. "It's been a long time,'' he said this week, "but I feel I'm getting closer. As long as I can avoid beating myself up, as long as I don't let one bad hole carry over to the next I think I've got a good chance out there.''

Daly admits that his worst behaviour was precipitated by "horrible golf''. "Whenever I played badly I'd get drunk. I'm such a hell of a competitor that I couldn't handle the disappointments. Booze became my only comfort.'' He still gambles, still gets mad on the course and makes no claim to serenity. He also happens to be more than three stones lighter.

When told before one Open that the wind would get up on the morrow, Daly joked about sending his ball into the next county. That was in his crowed-pleasing days, when he gave the ball a belt and to hell with the consequences. Pleasing the galleries this week is not one of his priorities.