By Leonard Shapiro
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, March 27, 2008; 1:35 PM

The memory of the conversation remains so vivid, even now nearly 17 years later. A small gaggle of reporters covering John Daly's up-from-nowhere breakthrough victory in the 1991 PGA Championship were interviewing his then girlfriend and future second wife, Bette Fulford, as Daly walked up the 18th fairway to complete his remarkable first major championship.

Standing in the scoring area near the 18th green at Crooked Stick in the Indianapolis suburbs, Fulford couldn't have been more pleasant and forthcoming. At one point, she told a few of us that she knew 25-year-old John had the talent to achieve greatness, as long as he stayed away from his good friend, Jim Beam, and other similarly intoxicating products.

"He likes to have a good time," she said that day, and her prophetic words have stayed with me ever since.

Daly, now 41, once again seems to be going through some very hard times. On the outside, it looks as if he's having a ball, pulling Tampa Bay Bucs Coach John Gruden out of his gallery to caddy for him at the Pods Championship in Tampa a few weeks ago. During a rain delay in the first round that same week, he was seen signing autographs and drinking beer with the fans in a Hooters hospitality tent. On Saturday after missing the cut, he was doing more of the same.

An Orlando Sentinel reporter and photographer caught up with Daly at a pro-am event in Celebration, Fla., the following week. In yet another hospitality tent Daly can't seem to stay away from, the newspaper reported that the Crown Royal was flowing freely at Daly's table, and also displayed a picture of Very Big John showing off his bare stomach to what appeared to look like a bunch of partying animals egging him on.

After the Tampa event, swing instructor Butch Harmon, who apparently had been helping Daly with his game in recent months, said very publicly that he was through with him. "The most important thing in his life is getting drunk," Harmon told the Associated Press. "I thought he made a circus out of the whole (Tampa) event."

Some in the golf business wondered why Harmon threw Daly under the bus like that and grumped that it was probably Butch being typical Butch, a career self-promoter who should have walked away quietly. Others viewed his comments as Harmon's attempt to smack Daly in the face with a reality-check and make him realize he really does need to get some help.

That has to be obvious to anyone who knows Daly, or ever sees him in public these days. He's been fighting personal demons ever since he burst onto the national golf scene back in '91, burned through millions of dollars at gaming tables worldwide, been married four times, smoked countless cartons of cigarettes, consumed untold gallons of his favorite distilled beverages (not to mention Diet Coke), put on 75 or more pounds and burned more bridges than a serial arsonist.

Over the years, all manner of responsible adults have tried to get him on the straight and narrow path that might lead him to greater golf glory, not to mention a more healthy, responsible life. The late Eli Callaway, founder of the world famous golf equipment company, rescued him once and told him he'd pay him a king's ransom to endorse his products as long as he went to rehab and stayed sober. That lasted about a week, and Daly walked away not only from the rehab facility, but a lucrative contract from Callaway and a genuinely concerned friend who truly wanted to see him succeed.

Former N.Y. Giants and Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Reeves tried to help him for many years, but now Daly seems far more enamored with another football guy in Gruden, who may be the latest to try to reform Daly, but certainly not the last.

The bottom line, of course, is that Daly is ultimately responsible for taking charge of his own life. But for many years he's been unable to get a grip and help himself.

The three constants through all of this have been the people who have represented him since his PGA Championship breakthrough. John Mascatello, Bud Martin and Terry Reilly have been his long-time agents in the SFX Golf sports management company that oversees his career. Martin mostly handles Daly's day-to-day affairs now, but all of them have taken criticism in the past for being Daly's primary enablers.

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.