Daly Still Having Trouble Avoiding the Hazards

In the spirit of full disclosure, I've known Mascatello since Daly's PGA Championship victory. He's a neighbor, belongs to the same local tennis club and while we don't socialize all that much, he's always been honest and open whenever I've approached him professionally about Daly or any other of his now burgeoning stable of clients.

He preferred not to comment on Daly for this column, but I can tell you he and his colleagues have agonized over the years on how to handle this very troubled man. They've stood by him for a lot of reasons, the main one being that when Daly was one of the hottest properties in golf in the 1990s, he easily could have switched to any number of larger sports management firms trying to steal him away from their then boutique operation.

But Daly loyally stuck with Mascatello and his partners then, and the Reston-based company has just as loyally stayed with Daly now, even though it would be so easy to drop him and focus on far more responsible clients like Masters champion Zach Johnson, Ryder Cup star Scott Verplank and up-and-comer J.B. Holmes, among more than 50 players they represent on the PGA, LPGA, Nationwide and Champions Tour.

Still, Daly also has been told the company will only go so far with him, and will not condone his actions when he behaves badly, which seems to be occurring with increasing frequency in the last few months.

All of the governing bodies of golf are always talking about "the good of the game" and a healthy Daly at the top of his breathtaking game surely would be good for both him and all of golf. But the PGA Tour, at least publicly, has taken a mostly hands-off approach, typical of its often-repeated philosophy that it does not get involved in the off-the-course lives of the so-called "independent contractors" on its tour.

This year, the PGA Tour has started to test for performance enhancing drugs, but what's the penalty for performance debilitating excess alcohol? Daly generally has been allowed to mostly slip-slide away from any significant disciplinary action from The Lords of Ponte Vedra, who surely could exert plenty of pressure on him to go get some help and tell him not to come back until he does.

But there are plenty more Daly enablers in this continuing sad saga of extraordinary talent gone to terrible waste.

I was talking to a long-time tournament director last week at Doral who told me that he's seriously going to think twice about inviting Daly to play in his event this year, even though his presence in the field usually bumps up the total paying customers by as many as 5,000 a day on Thursday and Friday, when everyone knows he'll still be gripping it and ripping it before the cut is made.

"Maybe if we stopped letting him play, he might get the message he needs to go get some help," he said.

Still, that's mostly a minority opinion these days. Daly now plays almost exclusively on sponsor's exemptions, and most tournament directors apparently are happy to have him on the premises. Never mind that he hasn't posted a top-10 finish since 2005 and finished No. 193 on the 2006 money list and No. 188 last year.

This season, he's played in seven events, missed three cuts and was disqualified two weeks ago from the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando when he missed his tee time in the pro-am, claiming he'd been given the wrong information when he called in to check the day before. He apologized profusely. Then again, he always does.

Clearly, he still has a huge following, and when he does show up, everyone wants to be his friend. They mob him for autographs, laugh at his antics from the gallery, egg him on to hit driver every time he tees it up and buy him drinks and slap his back when he's done for the day and winding down at the closest available Hooters, one of his corporate sponsors that ought to be ashamed of itself for taking advantage of his self-destructive behavior in the first place.

The media also needs to take some responsibility. The TV types ooh and aaah over his prodigious drives, generally make light of his off-the-course activities and rarely talk about the train wreck of his life. In his increasingly rarer appearances in our press rooms, we in the print media have been known to laugh at his comments, ask him leading questions to elicit humorous responses and then rip him the next day for all his wretched excesses.

Daly, not surprisingly, appears to be in complete denial about his problems, the classic pattern for anyone with chemical or alcohol dependency. The fans love him, he often says, because "I'm human."

Last week, he told a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel that "once I start playing great golf again, everything will be all right. Now I'm getting poured on, but when I'm playing great, everybody talks about how great I am. That's the way it's always worked...(Last) Tuesday was the best day of my my life (because) I got MacGregor clubs that Greg Norman made. I'm hitting the ball great. I'm close now. New Orleans is going to be a great week."

Yes, he's close now, but mostly close to hitting bottom, if he's not already there. He tees off in the Zurich Classic today, and if it's really going to be a great week, Daly would be wise to withdraw from the tournament, check himself into the best rehab facility his Hooters money can buy and once and for all get the help he truly needs to fulfill the promise we all saw at Crooked Stick so many years ago.

Leonard Shapiro can be reached at Badgerlen@hotmail.com or Badgerlen@aol.com.