Golfweek

Note: This story appeared in the June 10, 2006 issue of Golfweek.

By JEFF RUDE

We don’t see the tears of a clown. The mask gets in the way. It follows that we can’t get our arms around the counterintuitive concept of David Feherty, golf’s funniest man, being depressed. We’re supposed to process those amusing one-liners and facial contortions and then, in the midst of a belly laugh, imagine the humorist from Northern Ireland pondering suicide and getting another bottle of Irish whiskey from his young daughter to feed his daily habit of 11/2 bottles of Bushmills?

Common sense screams no. David Feherty, depressed? Sure, and Jack Nicklaus was a chopper.

Feherty still isn’t sure if he drank because he was depressed or was depressed because he drank. For a long time he didn’t realize what was wrong, that he had a mental illness. But he now knows those two sick bedfellows conspired to lure him down an alley so dark that his family’s foundation cracked.

Alcohol and depression tend to hold hands. And so it was that Feherty, a self-described “spectacular drunk,” medicated himself with the wrong tonic, the hard kind. He spiraled downward to the point he needed a second bottle of whiskey “just to get a buzz,” to the point that watching grim developments on the nightly news made him sad for days.

“I felt I needed to drink to get rid of the pain,” said Feherty, the former European Ryder Cup player turned CBS golf announcer. “Depression is when you lose hope. I just couldn’t see a way out.”

The long trail of empty liquor bottles over those three to four years, though, has led to a happy, reformed present. Down about 40 pounds, he has reclaimed a joyful home life, far different from those dreadful times when his wife, Anita, says she was on “pins and needles” and kept the kids away from him.

The depression is under control after the trialand- error experimentation with a dozen or so anti-depressants since the diagnosis three years ago. He has consumed alcohol for only two short periods in the last 18 months, none since a January relapse in Barbados that again led to his curling up in the fetal position and Anita, for the umpteenth time, putting the sobering perspective of daughter Erin’s photograph in front of his scared eyes.

“Now I wake up and most of the pain is gone,” he says. “I feel like a different person.”

The upshot is that the comic, as a public figure, can now save lives. Male depression is known as a vastly underreported medical problem and Feherty realizes his acknowledgement can perhaps prompt other sufferers to seek treatment. He knows there’s a stigma. It hardly surprises him that psychotherapist Terrence Real, author of the best-selling “I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression,” contends that depression affects the lives of as many men as women – though females are twice as likely to be treated.

Feherty says depression affects two of three Americans. An estimated 20 million people in the U.S. have been diagnosed, and millions more don’t realize they have it. So if Feherty’s courageous revealing gets just one to be treated, he could help 100 others in that person’s life. After all, depressives stick around and make other people miserable, Feherty says, whereas “at least dead people have the decency to not be around any more.”

His admissions, he admits, are part selfish, too. Helping others makes him feel better. Plus, with others knowing he’s not supposed to drink, it will be harder for him to sneak off and imbibe. Like in a hotel room stocked with tiny bottles. “I’ve been in staring matches with mini-bars,” Feherty says. “And mini-bars seldom blink.”

Yet another sign that the apocalypse might be upon us is that Feherty recently spoke at an alcohol awareness and education program. “That’s like asking Michael Jackson to talk at a baby-sitting convention,” he says.

Feherty is the same guy who got so blotto after winning the Scottish Open in Glasgow, he woke up two days later in Gleneagles not knowing how he had gotten there. They still haven’t found that trophy, one of the oldest in sports, and Feherty still can’t account for much of the hazy 1980s.

Yet he doesn’t regret those bender decades, for he had such wonderful times. Nor does he condemn social drinking. “As Keith Richards said, ‘There’s a difference between scratching your arse and tearing yourself a new one,’ ” he said.

But he knows, too, where booze can lead. In his case, to suicidal thoughts.

“I contemplated it a long, long time,” he said. “But I was worried about the mess I would leave, the fact someone would have to clean up. If I could’ve just flipped a switch and evaporated, I probably would’ve done it.”

Instead, he went on draining bottle after bottle. Until Jan. 25, 2005. Alcoholics know key dates. And Feherty knows Jan. 25. That was the day Erin, then 6, told her father as they lay down affectionately face to face, scratching each other’s backs, “Daddy, you need another bottle.” So she got up and brought him some more whiskey and, as she would sometimes do, poured a glass for him.

That’s the day David Feherty sobered up.

“She could’ve carved those words in my heart,” he says. “I’m never going to hear anything more true than that.” Now he’s still the life of the party; the party just doesn’t go until 5 a.m. He has discovered sober people go to bed at midnight. He has rediscovered his family.

No one was more relieved than Anita, his wife of 10 years. After all, she lived with a drunk, depressed Irishman in a house full of hunting shotguns. She saw him lying there in bed all day, staring at the ceiling or with the covers pulled overhead. He might not leave the house for days, except to run up “enormous bills” at the liquor store. All the laughter died in sorrow when he got home from work.

“It takes quite of bit of acting and talent to always be ‘on,’ ” she said. “He’d always be on, but when he’d come home he’d be off. I’d wonder, ‘What’s the deal here?’ He’d sit there lethargic with a drink in his hand, just staring. I’d find things to do with the kids so they weren’t exposed to that. I thought he was going to die. I thought at one point his body wasn’t going to hold up.

“As a family we were robbed of his humor. We stopped having a social life. We saw the silence, the blank stare and the drink to the mouth. We didn’t see the funny man.

“But now the funny man is actually back in our house. He’s happy. It’s great having him home.”

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