Daly · 1991
John Daly wins the PGA Championship as ninth alternate
On the late afternoon of Sunday the eleventh of August 1991, on the difficult Pete Dye-designed Crooked Stick Golf Club outside Indianapolis, the twenty-five-year-old Carmichael, California-born Arkansas-tour journeyman professional John Patrick Daly, a complete unknown on the senior PGA Tour who had been the ninth-alternate-on-the-Monday-of-tournament-week (which is to say, ninth in the queue of players standing by for any withdrawal from the 144-player field after the standing qualifying tournaments had closed), drove the seven-hour overnight road-trip from Memphis to Carmel, Indiana, in his small car on the Wednesday evening of the seventh of August on the eighth-alternate-call when Brad Bryant withdrew at noon, played the Crooked Stick course for the first time in his life across the standard Thursday practice-round on the morning of the eighth (Daly had not played a single practice-round of the course before the tournament, on the strength of the late call-up), and across the four-day tournament from Thursday the eighth to Sunday the eleventh of August 1991 took the lead at the end of the first round on the strength of his prodigious driving distance (Daly carried the ball approximately 290 yards on the long Crooked Stick par-fives, the longest driving-distance on the senior PGA Tour of the year), held the lead across the second, third and fourth rounds, and finished the seventy-second hole at twelve-under-par with a three-shot winning margin over the runner-up Bruce Lietzke to take the seventy-third Professional Golfers' Association of America Championship, the central single sensational debut-win of the modern PGA Tour era and the foundational moment of the John Daly grip-it-and-rip-it Long John public legend.
A major championship is rarely won by the ninth alternate who arrived at the course on the Wednesday evening after the standard practice-rounds had finished. The 1991 PGA Championship at Crooked Stick was the central single sensational debut of the modern golf era. John Daly drove seven hours overnight from Memphis to Carmel on the Wednesday call-up, played the Crooked Stick course for the first time in his life on the Thursday morning, took the lead at the end of round one, and held the lead through to the closing whistle on the Sunday afternoon. The standing record of any subsequent senior golf tournament has not been matched.
THE ARKANSAS TOUR PRO
John Patrick Daly was born at Carmichael in California on the twenty-eighth of April 1966, only son of James Lawrence Daly, a US Army construction-and-civil-engineering supervisor on the standing post-Vietnam US Army base rotation, and Lou Lemmons. The family moved through his early years on the standard Army-construction-supervisor rotation through Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri; he was raised principally at Dardanelle in central Arkansas from his tenth year. He took up golf at four on the small Dardanelle public course (the standard Arkansas mid-century public-municipal golf-course where his father taught him the basic swing on the strength of a borrowed family driver), took the junior golf course at the Dardanelle Country Club from twelve, and won the Arkansas Junior Golf Championship at sixteen in 1982.
He took the golf scholarship to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1984 in his eighteenth year, played for the Arkansas Razorbacks senior-college golf team across 1984 to 1987 on the standard NCAA Division I rotation, left the University of Arkansas in 1987 without taking a degree, and turned professional in May 1987 at twenty-one. He worked across the next four years at the standard small-tour professional rotation on the South African Tour, the Hogan Tour (the developmental tour of the senior PGA), and the small Asian-tour rotations of the late 1980s. He qualified for the senior PGA Tour at the November 1990 Q-School in his twenty-fourth year, and entered the 1991 PGA Tour season as a tour rookie.
THE NINTH-ALTERNATE CALL
The 1991 PGA Championship at Crooked Stick Golf Club in Carmel, Indiana, opened on the eighth of August 1991 with the standard 144-player field selected through the standing PGA Championship qualifying rounds. Daly had finished the qualifying tournament on the Monday of tournament week at the Greater Buick Memphis Classic as the ninth-alternate on the standby list. The standing PGA alternate system gave the alternates a small but real chance of getting into the tournament if any of the qualified-field players withdrew across the Tuesday-and-Wednesday preparation period.
Daly was at home at the small rented apartment outside Memphis on the Wednesday afternoon of the seventh of August when the PGA Championship tournament director's call came through at approximately four in the afternoon: Bryan Bryant had withdrawn on the strength of a wife's-pregnancy complication, and the eight alternates ahead of Daly on the standby list had either withdrawn on the late timing or had not been reachable. Daly was the next-in-line. He took the call, packed his clubs and a small overnight bag in approximately fifteen minutes, took the seven-hour overnight drive from Memphis to Carmel through the Wednesday evening and the Wednesday-Thursday small-hours, and arrived at the Crooked Stick clubhouse at approximately six in the morning of Thursday the eighth of August with no practice-round behind him and the Thursday tee-time at twelve-thirty in the afternoon ahead.
THE FOUR DAYS
Daly's first round at Crooked Stick on the afternoon of the eighth of August was the central single first-round of his career. He played the Crooked Stick course for the first time in his life under tournament conditions on the standing Pete Dye difficult-major-championship setup (the Crooked Stick fairway-bunkering and the long Pete Dye par-fives were the central single difficulty of the senior PGA Tour of the year). He drove the ball with the prodigious distance that had been his Hogan Tour calling-card (Daly carried approximately 290 yards on the long Crooked Stick par-fives, the longest driving-distance on the senior PGA Tour of the year), and shot a sixty-nine to take the share of the first-round lead. The PGA media tent had not heard of him.
He shot sixty-seven in the second round on the Friday to extend the lead to two strokes at the halfway cut, shot sixty-nine in the third round on the Saturday to hold the three-stroke lead going into the final round, and shot a closing seventy-one in the final round on the Sunday afternoon to finish the seventy-second hole at twelve-under-par with the three-stroke winning margin over Bruce Lietzke. The Sunday final-round galleries had grown across the day from the standing major-championship Sunday-front-page crowd of approximately twenty thousand to the largest single PGA Championship final-round gallery to that date on the strength of the Daly grip-it-and-rip-it driving display.
THE LONG JOHN PUBLIC PERSONA
The Daly grip-it-and-rip-it public persona (the long-driving, hard-living, mullet-and-tattoo-and-cigarette aesthetic that became the central single John Daly Long John brand of the next thirty years of his career) was established across the four days of the Crooked Stick tournament. Daly took the standing PGA Tour Player of the Year recognition for 1991 on the strength of the Crooked Stick win, the standing Rookie of the Year recognition, and the standing Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year nomination. He took the Open Championship at St Andrews in July 1995 on the four-hole playoff against Costantino Rocca (the second major-championship title of his career; Daly is the only player in the modern major-championship era to have won the Open at St Andrews without ever winning a senior PGA Tour-regular event between his two majors). He has not won a third major; he has continued to play on the senior PGA Tour Champions circuit through the modern era and has remained the central single popular-marquee personality of professional golf for the four decades since Crooked Stick. The Daly name in modern American golf carries the weight of the seven-hour overnight drive from Memphis to Carmel on the Wednesday evening of the seventh of August 1991.