Golfweek - Golf News Magazine

Note: These excerpts appeared in the May 6 & 13, 2006 issues of Golfweek.

Sex, booze and rock and roll. In his new book, “My Life In & Out of the Rough,” the big man gives an uncensored peek into his roller-coaster life on and off the course. In this exclusive excerpt from the book, co-written by Glen Waggoner and due out May 8, Long John talks about his junior days and troubled early years at the University of Arkansas. Whiskey, smokes and bad behavior set the tone for some turbulent years to come.

Finding my way home

Until my junior year in high school, when I needed to be out there to be recruited, I never played in many junior tournaments, because we couldn’t afford the entry fees and the travel expenses. But I’ll always remember my first tournament, when I was 10. I shot an 89, and the kid I was playing against shot a 96. I kept his score, he kept mine, just the way we do on the PGA Tour. But the little bastard flat-out cheated: he said he “lost” my scorecard, and that I’d shot a 97. His father was running the tournament and naturally took his son’s word over mine. Mom was really upset. So was I, but she was practically crying. I had to calm her down. I told her, “Never mind, Mom – he’ll never make it, and I will someday.”

(Turns out I was right.)

Those AJGA tournaments, when you get a little older – say, 15 or 16 – are every bit as tense as the PGA Tour events. They’re where college coaches come to do their recruiting. Play good and you could get a scholarship. Play bad and you better hope your parents have the money to put you through college.

When I was in 16 we were living in Jefferson City, and I heard about this AJGA tournament in Hudson, Ohio. We had cousins in Hudson, so if I could get in, we could stay with them. As I said, that was important because we couldn’t afford a lot of traveling to golf tournaments. Back then, I think if you were from out of state you had to send a letter requesting to play. So I wrote this letter saying how much I wanted to play in their tournament, told them what my handicap was, and that I played out of Jefferson City Country Club, where our golf team practiced. All that. Usually parents write those kinds of letters, but I guess they thought it was kind of cool that I was taking care of my own business. Anyway, they let me in. Well, I ended up beating Billy Mayfair, who I now play with on the PGA Tour, to win the tournament.

The next year, I returned to Hudson as the defending champion. Like before, we stayed with our cousins. This time, though, I played just horrible. Dad was ragging on me pretty hard, really bitching at me because I’d played so bad. So I just left the house, right in the middle of this heavy rainstorm, and started walking. Walked for about an hour. It was a strange town to me, and I wasn’t paying attention, and I got lost. Raining like hell, soaked to the bone, and I didn’t have a clue where I was. Finally, Dad and my cousin, who’d been driving around looking for me, picked me up and took me home.

That same year, at the Junior World tournament in San Diego at Torrey Pines, I finished second behind Stuart Hendley. Make that, I would have finished second, except that I got a two-stroke penalty for grounding my club in a hazard, and finished sixth. We were staying with my aunt and uncle. When we got back to their place, I threw the sixth-place trophy on the ground and broke it. Mom got all over me. She asked me, “Did you do your best?” “Yes, ma'am, I did, but I choked at the end.” “But you did your best, John, so what do you have to complain about?” Mom always knew the right thing to say, even if I didn’t understand that at the time.

Matter of fact, I don’t think Mom’s lesson ever sank in far enough. I’ve always had a tendency to brood about my game when I’m playing bad. Brood, and get really, really mad at myself. Sometimes I’ll just kind of explode inside while I’m on the course. Sometimes I’ll lose it altogether, just go haywire, and beat the s--- out of a motel room or something.

Mom was right: if you do your best, try your hardest, then you don’t have any cause to beat up on yourself. Mom was right, and I was wrong not to pay more attention to her.

My last junior tournament was the AJGA championship in Atlanta when I was 17. I probably shouldn’t have even bothered playing in it, because I’d already decided I was going to Arkansas the following year, but I did, and it ended pretty ugly. The night before the final round, me and a few guys went out partying, and I got s--- -faced drunk. The next morning, there I was, in the toilet stall at the golf course, puking my guts out. I barely made my tee time. I played just awful, and I stank to high heaven from the booze, so one of the officials pulled me aside to check me out, and he found a bottle of Jack Daniels in my golf bag. DQ on the spot.

Frankly, I didn’t much give a s---, what with it being my last AJGA tournament and all, and I was there mainly to have a good time, and me and my buddies had seen to that. But my parents, they were really pissed off. They laid into me pretty good.

Chasing my dream

Ever since my father taught me to holler “Ooooo, Pig! Soooie!,” I’d been a huge Arkansas Razorbacks fan. Since we were firstgraders, me and Donnie Crabtree would spend whole afternoons after school doing play-by-play of Arkansas/Texas football games. The Hogs always won, usually in the last few seconds, when me or Donnie would catch the winning touchdown pass or plow through a bunch of Longhorns into the end zone.

(Oh, yeah – we played in all those games, too.)

So now, going off to college to play golf for the Arkansas Razorbacks? Man, I figured I’d died and gone to heaven. Only better.

• • •

If we’d stayed in Jeff City, I suppose I would have gone to the University of Missouri and played golf there, which wouldn’t have been half bad. I’d won the Missouri Amateur when I was 16, so I had a reputation in the state. But it wouldn’t have been the same.

Anyway, it turned out to be a great half year all around. Me and Jamie had the house pretty much all to ourselves while Mom and Dad were off in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, where Dad was working at the time, and we were throwing all those hellacious parties. And all the while, I was getting more and more psyched about my dream coming true – playing for the Razorbacks, only this time for real.

The moral to this story is that you better be careful what you wish for. I went to Arkansas, all right, but I didn’t play for the Razorbacks, at least not my freshman year.

See, our coach, Steve Loy, must have hated me.

Let me put that another way: Coach Loy acted like he hated me. Hell, I can’t know what he really felt about me. I do know one thing for sure though: Steve Loy made me hate myself.

The day we all showed up for our first team meeting, Loy said to me, “You have to lose 60 pounds if you want to play for me.” Period, end of story. At first, I was like, okay, he wants me to lose some weight, I’ll lose some weight. At the time, I weighed about 235. Up some from the spring, when he recruited me – what the hell, I’d spent pretty much the whole summer drinking beer at the parties me and Jamie threw. But lose 60 pounds? No way. He had to be exaggerating to make his point.

But he was dead serious. And so I got serious, too.

At first, he had me on this bulls--- diet of salad with no dressing and vegetables, which I hated, and fruit and nothing, absolutely nothing, fried. And he weighed me every day. I mean, s---, I grew up on my mother’s fried chicken and her biscuits and chocolate gravy, and when I was a teenager I practically lived on hamburgers and fries. It didn’t take long for me to come up with my own diet.

The first thing I did was change my drinking habits. Beer was mainly what had fattened me up over the summer, so I quit it altogether and switched over to Jack Daniels exclusively. Pretty soon I was averaging a fifth a day, usually straight from the bottle – no glass, no ice, no water. I hardly ate anything. Next I started smoking. I hated cigarettes, couldn’t stand them. My mother smoked. It was the only thing I didn’t like about her. Driving in a car, she’d keep the windows up so the smoke would be all around her. I hated that.

But Coach Loy said it would kill my appetite. And so I started smoking. Pretty soon I was up to three packs a day. I bumped up my drinking of Jack Daniels because I didn’t want to eat the diet Coach Loy had me on: boiled chicken, a little bit of rice, dry salads, no burgers, that sort of thing. Oh, and I switched over to Special K for breakfast. I used to eat Frosted Flakes and all those sugar cereals, but I got used to the Special K. That was my best meal.

Coach Loy also made me switch from Coke to Diet Coke. That was tougher than learning to smoke: it must have been three weeks before I could get used to the taste.

Eventually, it got to the point I just wouldn’t eat hardly anything. I’d just sit in my room and drink straight out of a Jack Daniels bottle, then go practice for three or four hours, come back, and start drinking.

Some of the guys got worried, but I wanted to play. If Coach Loy said I had to lose weight to play for him, fine, but I’d do it my way: cigarettes, a little dry popcorn, and plenty of JD. And the pounds were peeling away.

Then, one week late in October, I went something like three days without eating anything at all, and drank four fifths of Jack. I got the dry heaves and passed flat out in my room. Next thing I knew, I was coming to in a hospital in Fayetteville. It was my first visit to an ER with a whiskey overdose. I made another one later that fall. Of course, it wouldn’t be my last.

But you know what? My cigarettes-popcornwhiskey diet worked. The pounds just peeled right off. By Christmas, I’d lost 65 pounds.

I probably ought to have written a diet book or something.

• • •

I just couldn’t figure Coach Loy out. I could understand why he wanted me to lose some weight, but he was always, always on me about it. Like when I left for Christmas break my freshman year, I was down to 172, but I came back 4 pounds heavier because I’d spent the break eating Mom’s cooking. What’d he expect? It was the Christmas holidays.

Anyway, he said that’s it, I wasn’t playing until I got down to 170. Can you believe it? We hadn’t even been walking the course yet because it was too cold even to practice outside, and he’s worried because I’d gained 4 pounds over the holidays? S---, being around Mom’s chocolate gravy and her biscuits for 10 days, it’s a wonder I hadn’t put on 40.

Coach Loy was tough on all the guys, but he especially had it in for me. I mean, I was probably one of the hardest-working guys on the team. I practiced all the time. And all the guy could talk about was how much I weighed.

We had a dozen guys on the team, but only five could play in an NCAA tournament, with the best four scores counting for the team total. (Other tournaments, it might be six and five.) So if we had a tournament coming up, we had a qualifier – that is, the 12 guys would play 18 or 36 holes a day for two or three days. Stroke play. Theoretically, the five or six guys with the best scores would be picked for the tournament squad. Unless one of them was on the coach’s s--- -list for being too fat.

One time I’m leading by, God, I don’t know how many shots. On the tee of this par 4, Coach Loy says to all of us as we come up to hit our drives, “If you hit it left, you’re out of the tournament.” (I guess he was trying to teach us something about course management or something. Nobody ever asked, and he never said.) Anyway, I’m trying to shoot the course record, and I don’t want to set up for a fade and risk hitting it way out into the driving range on the right like everybody else. So I play my usual tee shot, a long draw, and it takes a bad bounce and kicks about a foot into the left rough. No problem. I knock it on the green and two-putt for my par. Meanwhile, the teammate I’m paired with blows it way right and ends up making six. And who do you think got picked for the tournament squad? Not the guy who missed breaking the course record by one shot.

My way or the highway – that was Coach Loy’s coaching philosophy.

Another time, during a qualifier, my brain froze or something and I hit this really s--- bunker shot. I mean, it was the kind of shot I’d been puring since I was 15, and I was steamed. So I threw my sand wedge towards my bag. Not good golf etiquette, I know, but no worse than you see a dozen times every Saturday and Sunday morning on every golf course in every state in the entire United States of America. Coach Loy didn’t say anything. Instead, he picked up my club, and when I walked up to get it, he swung it hard against my right leg. Not a word, just this hellacious whack. I still have the scar on my shin to prove it.

That’s what I took away from my freshman year under Coach Loy. A fifth-a-day drinking habit, a cigarette jones, and a f---ing scar.

I got to play a lot my sophomore year, because two of our best guys, Mike Grob and Mike Schwartz, had finished school, Coach Loy didn’t have much of a choice. We finished third in the Southwest Conference. I never won a college tournament. I finished second, third, and fourth a ton of times. I could have taken a lot more chances to try and win a tournament individually, but I wanted to make sure the team did good, so sometimes I wasn’t as aggressive as I wanted to be. I was a good team player.

Coach Loy had us all playing scared. He had us in a “don’t go for birdie because you might make bogey” mentality. We couldn’t really show our talents. We were probably the longest-hitting golf team in NCAA history. All of us could knock the s--- out of it. But, he had this hand signal for 1- iron off the tee, another for 2-iron, and so on. Let me just say, we hit a lot of irons off a lot of tees.

Bill Woodley took over in 1986 after Coach Loy left. They were as different as night and day. Totally different. We were all in shock. While Coach Loy only wanted things done his way, Coach Woodley let us play. Coach Loy was all about discipline. Coach Woodley was all about trying to win golf tournaments – how you did it was up to you.

Under Coach Woodley, we got to play to our strengths. My strength is hitting driver. The courses we played were generally pretty short, so I was driver, L-wedge on just about every par 4. And now, nobody was flashing hand signals telling me to hit 2-iron. As a team, we were a lot closer together and played a whole lot looser.

My junior year, golf became fun again.

We were closer as a team, but I didn’t hang out with my teammates much off the course. Every now and then, we’d get together and shoot some pool or drink a few beers, but frankly I think some of the guys might have been a little scared to hang around me because of my partying ways.

You’re not going to believe this, maybe, but I was a pretty good student in college. My freshman year, I always went to class, paid good attention, and kept my GPA around 2.5. That tailed off some in my sophomore year, and in my junior year, when I was pretty sure I was going to quit and turn pro, I didn’t go to class at all my second semester. But, hell, three years of college with a GPA safely over the 2.0 needed to retain his eligibility from somebody who hated school as much as I did? Not half bad, especially considering I didn’t even buy books after my freshman year.

Like always, I was just plain bored by school. I stayed eligible, but that’s about it. In college, just like in high school, it was, “Let’s get to the weekend and party.” Only the way I was drinking in college, it was kind of a party every night, even if I was sometimes the only one there.

I didn’t know a lot of people. But once you got hold of a fake ID and got into a couple of bars, and the bartenders got to know you, it didn’t matter whether you knew a lot of people. You can make a bunch of new friends every night.

Money was never a big problem. Don’t get me wrong – we weren’t rich or anything, and my folks sure weren’t sending me any allowance. But for a long time I’d been able to pick up a little cash by scrambling. That’s what we called it. Other people called it hustling. But whatever you call it, it was the same thing: playing other guys for money, usually men at the local golf clubs who thought they were better than they were, and who figured they could kick this fat kid’s ass. That’s the way I spent my summers (and a lot of weekends during the school year) when I needed a few bucks. Think of it as my permanent part-time job.

Remember, making my own spending money dates all the way back to wading in the pond for balls at Bay Ridge. Later, we always lived near a golf club in all the places we moved to. My parents made it clear to me: you stay out of trouble, and we’ll get you close to a place to play golf. So I could always count on a little scrambling money to go along with what I made in my ball retrieval business. Plus, junior memberships at the clubs I played at were pretty cheap.

There’s one chunk of change that to this day I do regret passing up. It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I learned I could have collected $500 for incidental expenses – laundry and stuff like that – my freshman year as part of my half scholarship. Five hundred bucks! That would have been drinking money for a couple of months!

I’d been thinking for a while about not coming back for senior year, but I didn’t make my final decision until early August. I called Coach Woodley and asked him if I was getting a full ride that fall, and he said, no, only a half scholarship, like before. That pissed me off, because some of the guys on full boats couldn’t even qualify for a tournament squad. He said he was sorry, that if I’d come to him in the spring he could have done something about it, but that there was nothing he could do now. So I said, Coach, I understand, I should have talked to you earlier, but I believe I deserve a full ride, and I think what I’m going to do is leave school and turn pro.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Long John bottoms out and finds himself in therapy – again. But with a little help from friends who have been there, done that, Daly is able to find some positives in his life. If only he could find his way out of the casinos. This week’s excerpts from Daly’s new book conclude with revelations about the extent of his gambling problem, which prompted PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem to call Daly at the Wachovia Championship to discuss an “ongoing need to uphold the image and standards of the PGA Tour.” But Daly has never been much on standards. As he says on the book’s jacket, “The only rules I follow are the Rules of Golf.”

• • •

The harder you fall

I started drinking again in August 1996 in Sweden.

At the British Open that year, I played like a defending champion the first three rounds – 70-73-69 – then threw up all over my shirt in the final round: 77. What the hell, I still had some nice appearance-fee checks to cash at tournaments in Europe, which is why I found myself in Sweden yielding to temptation.

Since I came out of rehab, my agents always told the hotel staff wherever we were traveling to make sure all the alcohol was removed from the minibar in my suite before we arrived. Out of sight, out of mind – I was cool with that. This time, the hotel staff forgot to do it, because I discovered when I went to get a Diet Coke that the damned thing was fully stocked with beer and booze.

That night, I drank five beers. I can’t even remember what kind. I was by myself, and I got hammered, because European beer is a lot stronger than American beer.

And because I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol for four years.

• • •

Back up a little. It took a while to get from winning the British Open in 1995, to falling off the wagon in 1996, to drinking myself senseless at the Players Championship, losing my Wilson and Reebok sponsorships, and spending 30 days in the Betty Ford Center, all in the space of six weeks in 1997.

So let’s rewind the tape . . .

The first major thing me and my crew did after I won at St. Andrews was shave our heads. The Monday before the tournament began, I’d bet Bud, Blake, Donnie, and Mike Boylan of Wilson, who’d become a good friend, that if I won the thing, we were all going to shave our heads. They said, sure, fine, whatever you say, John. Much as they believed in me, though, I don’t think any of them thought they were going to have to be going to a barbershop anytime soon.

Hey, I was as serious about that as I was about the new Mercedes I told a car dealer friend back in Memphis to have in his showcase and ready to roll for me if I won.

Sure enough, the next day after the British, by the time Blake had to get to the airport to return home, me and him were bald as billiards. But nobody had to go to a barbershop: I shaved Blake, and Blake shaved me. Mike and Donnie, they chickened out. And Bud, he must have thought he dodged the bullet, because we raced off to Holland for a tournament before I could do him, and we both spent the week running full-speed, me playing golf and basking in the glory of being British Open champion, and Bud shaking and baking, talking deals with what seemed like everybody in the world of golf.

By now, Bud probably figured I’d forgotten about the bet.

No way. On Sunday night, at 2:30 A.M., about eight hours before we were scheduled to leave for Sweden and another tournament, I knocked on Bud’s door – with scissors, a can of shaving cream, and a razor on a tray. Room service!

I returned to the States in August to play the PGA, but I needn’t have bothered: 76-73–cut. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of my regular season: 30th, T-67th, cut, T-67th, WD.

I can’t say that I particularly gave a s---. I was the 1995 British Open champion. Anything else that came my way that year was pure gravy. And there was a lot of that.

• • •

Any notion I might have had coming out of the gate at the top of my game in 1996 now that I had my second major got knocked in a cocked hat by mid-May: five missed cuts in my first 10 tournaments. The summer wasn’t much better than the spring. I did make seven straight cuts and had the best U.S. Open of my career (T-27), but I had only one top 10 finish (T-10 at the Kemper).

That’s what I had to look back on when I sat down in front of that loaded minibar in Sweden.

On Friday night, after the second round of the tournament, I called one of my agents, who was in Sweden with me at the time and asked him to come up to my suite to have dinner.

“You’re playing great, John,” he said as he walked in the door. “This could be what turns you around. You could win this thing.”

“Thanks, man, I think so, too,” I said. “But sit down. There’s something I want to tell you.”

Then I went over to the fridge, pulled out a beer, and popped it open.

“No! No! No!” was all he could say.

And then I told him.

“Johnny, I had five when we got here on Tuesday. I didn’t have any Wednesday night because I had an early tee time yesterday. Thursday night, here by myself, I drank six or seven.”

He looked like he was in shock. He didn’t ream me out or get mad or anything, but I know my drinking again – even if it was only beer – really, really hurt him.

I finished T-18 in the tournament. I played really good. If I’d made a few more putts, I could have won the thing.

It was my best finish of the year. But what I was proudest of that week was that I told John the truth. I didn’t hide what I’d done. I could have gone on like that, sneak drinking by myself, for I don’t know how long. I could have become a closet drunk. And then I probably would have become an alcoholic.

My philosophy then, and my philosophy now, is that “it is what it is.” You do what you do, and you accept responsibility for it. Anything else, and you’re just fooling yourself. Anything else, and you’re not a man.

Back home, starting with the PGA, I picked up where I’d left off: I missed the cut in my first four tournaments. After a month like that, it was pretty clear that my decent finish in Sweden hadn’t meant a damned thing.

But the beers I drank there, they did.

Rumors started flying all over the place about me being seen drinking in public, which I had been, so in October my agents put out a statement over my name: It is true that I have had a few beers on several occasions this summer, but I have not been involved in any alcohol-related incidents. I have not been drinking to excess, and this has not been the reason the level of my play lately has been below my usual standards. In fact, I have put more time and effort into my golf game than I have at any time in the past.

Back home in Dardanelle, my buddies were like, thank God, we got our John back. They meant that in a positive, supportive way. They wanted me to be me. Their main concern was “What are you drinking? Are you drinking whiskey?”

I told them, “No way, man. I’ll never drink that s--- again.”

Even then, I knew that “never” is a word I should probably never use. The truth is, since coming out of rehab that first time in 1993, I’ve had maybe 40 or 50 mixed drinks with whiskey, and I never drank all of them. I don’t like the taste or even the smell of it now. I’m not going to say I’ll never drink it again, but I’ll tell you this: as of right now, this minute, I do not like the stuff.

The following year, 1997, started off sweet: four of my five rounds at the Hope were in the 60s and I finished seventh. Then everything went sour: two missed cuts and three middleof- the-pack finishes in my next five tournaments. Then came the s--- storm at the Players Championship.

For almost two years, me and my wife Paulette had been splitting up and getting back together, splitting up and getting back together. The only constant in our relationship was the fighting. I was miserable and pissed off all the time. Was I drinking? Hell, yes. That was the only way I could stay sane.

When we went to Ponte Vedra Beach for the Players, everything came to a head. She wouldn’t come out on the course with me. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And at bedtime, none of that either. Then I went out and shot a f------ 76 in the first round. And it wasn’t even one of those “if I’d made a putt here, a putt there” 76s. It was a pig-ugly 76, and I was pissed.

So I grab Donnie and I go out drinking. Remember those “40 or 50 drinks of whiskey since my first rehab” I mentioned? Well, I drank a big bunch of 7&7s that Thursday night, so maybe the 40 or 50 number is a little light.

After a while, Donnie couldn’t stand watching it anymore, so he left me with a bunch of caddies and told them to bring me home. We ended up at a joint called Sloppy Joe’s. All told, I had been drinking for a good 12 hours. I was absolutely trashed, as drunk as I’d ever been in my life and still be standing. That night was the first time I got up on a stage and sang “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Finally, at about three o’clock in the morning, the guys got me back to the hotel, and as I was coming in the front door of our suite, I stumbled and crashed against this door leading into the kitchen. Smashed the hell out of it, fell down, and blacked out.

Next thing I know, I’m sprawled out on the floor, and Olin Browne, one of my good friends on the Tour, is trying to help me get up. There are five or six security guards standing around, but there wasn’t anything for me to do besides watching Ollie try to haul my drunk ass off the floor. And Paulette’s yelling, “Oh, my God! He destroyed the room!” And Ollie’s looking at her, saying, “Hey, it’s just a door.”

Right, it was just a door. I’ve destroyed rooms before. I know what they look like after I’m done with them. This was no big f------ deal.

With Ollie’s help, I managed to get up, get myself into the bedroom, and fall into bed, where I blacked out again, this time with my eyes open. (I’d done that before. I guess it must look pretty scary.)

By then somebody called an ambulance, which I didn’t think I needed: I had a blackout, that’s all. But the EMTs came and strapped me to a gurney and started wheeling me out. Ollie was still there, and a couple of cops now, and the security guards, and Donnie.

Then Fuzzy Zoeller came up as they were wheeling me down the hall towards the elevator. He leaned down and said, “Are you alright, kid? Are you gonna be okay?”

And I said, “No, Fuzz, I’m not. I’m fixing to lose my wife, and I ain’t playing worth a s---, and I’m drunk all the time, and I wish somebody would just kill me. Why don’t you grab that cop’s gun and just f------ kill me. I can’t live like this anymore.”

• • •

‘Where I am now’

Thirteen years ago, Hollywood Henderson warned me.

I met him at Sierra Tucson in January 1993, my first time in rehab, and after I got to know him a little bit, he told me, “John, you’re going to find something that you’re going to love to do as much as you loved to drink, and it’s going to fulfill that part of your body that says, okay, I’m doing something. And you’ve got to be very, very careful what that is.”

The people around me – my agents, my closest friends – were hoping, of course, that the “something” would be practicing golf.

No such luck.

What I found was gambling.

Gambling is the only thing that gets my juices flowing like golf does – or whiskey used to. As I told a writer for Esquire magazine about five years ago, playing slot machines for me is like being completely alone, on my own, like on a cross-country drive. All the noise in a casino? I don’t hear it. I’m in a zone, and I’m all by myself. I’ll check my watch, and maybe 10, 15 hours have gone by. It’s scary how far away I get.

It’s sort of like the way I felt when I was a teenager, and I’d be out on the golf course on a summer afternoon, when it wouldn’t get dark until late. Everybody else had gone home, but I’d be there, all by myself, in this peaceful zone. I’d be totally locked in, working on my game, not thinking about anything or anybody else.

Out there on the golf course, with everything still and the day fading away, I was the only person in the world, and I felt good.

That’s the feeling I get when I gamble.

And here’s where that feeling got me in the 18 months after I left rehab in 1993: when I got to St. Andrews to play the 1995 British Open, I owed almost $4 million to casinos.

The only way I’d been able to keep my head above water was to turn all my quarterly endorsement income over to the casinos, and then run myself ragged by playing all over the world for appearance fees and by doing too many corporate outings, all because I needed the money to feed the beast.

The British Open saved me. Not because of the size of the winner’s purse itself – it was only 125,000 pounds, which was like $200,000 back then. But after St. Andrews, when you throw in all my bonuses from my sponsors, I took a $1M+ haul away from the Old Course. All that went to the casinos. The rest of the summer and fall I spent collecting appearance fees at tournaments all over the world. By the end of 1995, when my quarterly sponsorship payments came in, I was able to pay off the casinos.

Then, in 1996, the whole cycle began again: up and down, back and forth, waiting for my quarterly checks to pay off the casinos, hustling appearance fees, running myself ragged doing corporate outings instead of spending time with my family and working on my game.

That’s the way it’s been for the last 10 years.

This worries me. A lot.

Sherrie has been very supportive on the gambling front. She tells me that the kids don’t do without – and she’s right about that. They all go to great private schools. They have everything they need. They’re covered. They’re set up just fine.

The problem is that if I don’t get a grip on this thing now, what’s going to happen as I get older and my earning power decreases?

I’ll give you a perfect example of how destructive my gambling gets at times.

Last fall, after getting beat by Tiger in a playoff at the WGC AmEx Championship in San Francisco, I made $750,000 for finishing second, and generally felt pretty good about everything except my putting. I was real disappointed that I hadn’t won, but at least I’d had a really nice payday. But instead of going home and closing the 2005 PGA Tour season on a high note, I went straight to Vegas. My first stop was the new Wynn Las Vegas casino, where they have this $5,000 slot machine. Within an hour and a half, I was down $600,000. There went all that hard work against Tiger.

Next I went over to Bally’s. Got a $600,000 line. Won about $175,000 and took it back over to that damned $5,000 machine. It owed me bigtime. But I didn’t hit s--- on it. Got another $600,000 line from Wynn. Lost it in two hours on that $5,000 slot.

Back to Bally’s, where I won another $80,000, then tried dialing down to the $100 slots, looking for a little streak so I could pay down some of what I owed.

No dice: in less than five hours, I lost $1.65 million.

So much for finishing the 2005 PGA Tour season on a high note.

And here’s how my sick mind analyzed the situation: my sponsorship payments would be coming through in January, so I’d be able to pay everything off and get back to even by the beginning of the new year.

Everything’s fine. Everything’s okay. No problema.

Hell, yes, there’s a problema. If I don’t get control of my gambling, it’s going to flat-out ruin me.

What burns me most, looking back, is that in the 12 years I’ve been gambling heavily, if I had left after the first hour and a half every time I was in a casino, I’d be up, way up. Instead, I’m down $50 to $60 million.

The fact is, 95 percent of the time that I go to a casino, the first 90 minutes I’m there I hit the biggest jackpots more often than anybody. I’m the luckiest guy on a slot machine you’ve ever seen – in the first hour and a half.

I like slots better than blackjack because of the solitude. It’s just me, by myself, and I’m in total control. I just push the button and watch the machine. With the slots, it’s like I’m driving my bus – I’m in control, just me.

Bud and Johnny, my agents, God bless ’em, they’ve busted their butts trying to throw a rope around me when it comes to gambling, but I haven’t listened. And until I listen, the way I listened to my body with the medications and the whiskey, well . . . all I can say is that I’m just going to have to start listening soon, real soon.

Look, in balance, I’ve taken a lot more control of my life in the last five or six years. I’m off those damned medications. I don’t drink JD anymore. I don’t beat up on hotel rooms and cars as much. Only gambling remains a problem.

So here’s my plan. Every time I go to the casino, I start with the $25 slots. Plus, I set a walkout loss number. And the minute I hit that loss number, I quit, leave, just walk-the-hell out. If I make a little bit, then maybe I move up to the $100 slots or the $500s, or maybe I take it to the blackjack table. It’s their money. Why not give it a shot, try to double it? And if I make a lot, I can . . .

Well, that’s my plan. It’s a start. It’s a start for me. I know, I know – I’m still a long way from quitting gambling.

What would I do if I did?

Drink? That’s not an option, at least in terms of whiskey. If I start drinking whiskey again, it’ll kill me, plain and simple. I know that.

The only real option is to get control of my gambling.

• • •

A lot of stuff has come down on my head in the last five years. My father pulled a gun on me, my mother died, my best friend since first grade walked out on me, and my wife was convicted of a felony and sent to prison.

All that in five years.

Sometimes I feel like a character in a bad soap opera that’s stuck in replay mode.

Sometimes I feel like getting in my bus and just driving away from it all.

And sometimes I feel like kicking my own fat butt for feeling sorry for myself. Everybody goes through tough times. Everybody has troubles. Everybody has personal problems, family problems, relationship problems.

A long time ago, back in what I now think of as the “dark days,” I was driving somewhere with Fuzzy Zoeller – probably looking for a bar – and I was bitching about something, how I was being screwed over by some wife or something.

Suddenly he makes a left turn into this big graveyard and drives slowly into the middle of it, not saying a word. Finally, he pulls over, stops, turns off the engine, and turns to me.

“You think you have troubles, son?” Fuzz says. “Well, those folks in there are in a helluva lot worse shape than you are.”

I know it.

I’m lucky: I was born with a special talent for hitting a little white ball and making people happy.

I’m blessed: I have four wonderful children who light up my life. I know just loving them is not enough, that I have to guide them and advise them and help them as they discover who they want to be. And I look forward to that challenge, although I suspect it will be the hardest one I’ll ever have to face.

But I’m really and truly optimistic: I think I’m going to do even better on the back nine.