John Daly's Recipe For Success

Morley Safer Profiles Colorful Pro Golfer

(CBS)  Daly was on top of the world, but again his world was crumbling: Alcohol proved hard to shake. After running up huge gambling debts and trashing a hotel room, his third wife divorced him, two multimillion-dollar sponsors dropped him and Daly headed back to rehab.

As his life fell apart, so did his game. He seemed to hit rock bottom when he experienced uncontrollable shaking at the Vancouver Open in 1998. A lot of people thought Daly was finished.

"He was meant to be a great athlete. He just was never meant to parade this wreck of a life in front of the world," says Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly.

Reilly says Daly’s human frailties are precisely what endear him to the fans. "The reason people love John Daly is because he's so human. He's so flawed. You know, he's not Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods has a 30-inch waistband, huge shoulders, can work out for four straight hours," Reilly says. "John Daly, he's way overweight, he's addicted to too many things. He smokes too much. He's us, you know?"

He's a mixed blessing for the PGA. There are continuing dramas but he is a huge draw — television ratings soar when he is in contention.

"On one hand, he’s an embarrassment clearly, and on the other he pulls in the television ratings," Safer noted.

"Yeah, the PGA knows, they kind of need him. Because he’s a great draw," Reilly agreed. "But they’re always like, 'Oh, please don’t let me look in the newspaper today to see what happened.'"

The one place where Daly can escape all that is his hometown, Dardanelle, Ark. The son of a carpenter at the local nuclear power plant, he recently bought the golf course where he taught himself to play. It's a club, that, like Daly, has virtually no rules.

"I don't care what you wear, just, you know, cover up the private parts," Daly jokes.

He says his life began to turn around after he decided to ignore all of the advice to go back to rehab, to quit gambling and taking anti-depressants.

"I took myself off all this medication I was on, that doctors were putting me on. Prescribing, 'You gotta do this, you gotta do that.' And I looked in the mirror one day, I said, 'One thing you gotta do, John, let's take care of John for now,'" he recalls. "I used to look in the mirror and flip myself off, and now I can look in the mirror and say, 'Hey, you're alright, you're alright today, man.'"

What he found he could not, or would not, give up were gambling and alcohol. He lost yet another multimillion-dollar endorsement deal as a result. But he claims he is trying to learn from his mistakes.

"I've lost a ton of money in the middle of the 90s," Daly says.

Asked how much, Daly says "in the millions."

No matter how much it has cost him, Daly claims he’s not an alcoholic and he can still drink — but only beer. "It's the only thing I like to drink. I don't drink whiskey anymore, so thank God for that," he says.

But it's a roller-coaster life. In 2004, when the golf world had just about written him off, Daly once again came out of nowhere. He won his first PGA tournament in almost a decade, the Buick Invitational. It was "back to the future" for the kid from Arkansas.