He is waiting on the top tier of the sixth tee of the Bay Ridge Boat & Golf Club, looking a little bored but relaxed. It’s autumn, so the Arkansas atmosphere is fresh and easier to handle than the disabling humidity of a Deep south summer. The trees in the forests that surround the course all the way up to the endless flat-topped hills arc turning browner each day and dropping more and more of their increasingly crispy leaves. Pools of muddy water formed during three days of non-stop rain the week previous arc dotted all over the course. The sleeves and collars of his burgundy polo shirt and back of his brown windcheater arc heavily decorated with the logos of companies he represents. The yellow baseball cap, manufactured just in time for filming by a company in nearby Russellville, has only a lion (the logo for his own enterprises) and the letters H, i, P, P, and O stitched into it. He must like animals.

Today there is a script. A 36-year-old presenter from a Japanese film company who looks 18 is standing on the lower tier of the tee and talking into the camera. She says her piece and then swings her blue driver, connects well and sends the ball more than a decent distance clown the long, straight fairway. But it’s not far enough for her to be happy – not for the purpose of this infomercial anyway. She hams an unsatisfied shrug, looks back into the camera and speaks again. Apart from the Japanese film crew, the only words that the small crowd of locals surrounding the tee understand arc the last two: “John” and “Daly”. They arc chronically overemphasised. It’s like the woman is introducing The Stones to a packed Madison Square Gardens.

He quickly flicks his Marlboro Medium out of shot and grips his oversized driver in his hands. The camera pans back and up. He positions himself and starts his swing. The spectators have been told to keep quiet while the camera is rolling but they can’t. Some break the peace before the ball has even been struck – the epic body arch, although they’ve seen it all before, draws multiple gasps of awe. When he connects, he docs so with the force of a giant gun hammer explosively cracking a .44 cartridge. The ball is blasted over the presenter’s head (thank god) and up into the expanse of the sky. An eon seems to pass before it lands a ridiculous 350-odd yards down the fairway. The crowd goes nuts. He looks into the camera and says: “Hi, I’m John Daly. Welcome to my home.”

Welcome, that is, to the fervid megalopolis of Dardanelle (population 3,909 at the last count). John’s dad, Jim, came here to work at the Arkansas Nuclear One power plant when John was five. Men who weren’t employed there probably earned their wedge at Tyson’s – a chicken processing factory. Power and chickens are the two big things in Dardanelle, other than the church. This is the South, after all, where the men in dog collars still have considerable influence on Regular Joe’s way of life, even if he chooses to not fear God. You can take a stroll down the short main street and buy yourself a nice shiny 9mm in one of Dardanelle’s two gun shops but you sure as hell can’t buy a beer. Perhaps it’s a bit ironic that the pro golfer most associated with the bottle lives in Yell County, a dry county. Perhaps it’s sensible that people living in the county can’t buy booze and guns in the same shopping spree. Not legally, anyway.

The director is unhappy with the noise the crowd made during the take and wants to shoot it again. Whenever he makes such a request, he docs so with caution. John’s reputation, even if he gave up golf and became a monk, will always precede him. But the director has nothing to sweat about. John is acting entirely professionally, doing what he has to do to keep the sponsor happy (and his money rolling in), but doing it with style and humour. There was a shot earlier when his talking head had to spiel off the usual chat about how long and straight and easy to control the driver in his hand was. He did it well, sounded convincing but then turned away and said: “Was that OK/ I have no idea what the fuck I just said.”

And if any other evidence was needed that the 36-year-old so-called ‘Wild Thing’ of golf is altogether more in control than the public image of him suggests, then you only have to consider this: If Daly had thrown his toys out the pram and walked off the set, or even if he had cancelled the whole damn shoot, few people would have blamed him – during the two days, the health of his beloved morn, Lou, declined substantially. At one point she was whisked away to hospital and diagnosed with having fluid in her lungs. Not long after the film was made, in November, she passed away while John, on her wishes, was away playing in Australia and the Far East. The next week, during the Australian PGA, the papers naturally led with John chucking his putter and ball into the water near the 18th green rather than with who was actually winning the tournament. That was unfair. As his best buddy Donnie Crabtree said before Lou died: “If John loses his mom, she will be the first person close to him that he has ever lost. It might hit him hard.” Besides, he was miles out of contention in the event and not worthy of a mention, let alone a headline .

But then John Daly, ever since that superhuman 1991 win in the US PGA Championship, has always been the subject of total fascination to golf fans and non-golf fans alike, and not just in America. The infomercial he’s cutting today is for Hippo, an English company, and it’s only being· shown on Japanese TV “These days,” John says, “I work hard at my golf, I’m more of a family man than I’ve ever been and I hang out with my buddies at home. “don’t go out anymore; never go to bars and do stuff like that.” The attention, however, hasn’t withered. Nobody interested in John will ever forget the legendary bad-boy antics – the heavy boozing, the smashed hotel rooms, the on-course strops, the failed marriages, the suicide attempts, the incessant gambling, the trips to rehab – but they’ll also always remember his two brilliant Major wins, his huge heart, his extraordinary generosity, his central part in raising massive sums of money for the Make A Wish Foundation and the local Boys and Girl’s Club, his genuine affection for his fans and all that he’s done for the absolute good of the game. Trying to justify the extremes of his behaviour is what makes him such a compelling character. He might snap his putter in two and walk out of a tournament without an explanation but then he’ll hit up a diner to eat and pay the bill for everybody else chowing down on hot biscuits and gravy. There’s never been anybody quite like him – not in the golf world, which, let’s face it, isn’t home to too many genuine rock stars (Fuzzy, you’re excluded).

It’s the punters’ turn to join in with the filming. The point of the scene is to prove that the new Hippo driver is as long and as good a golf club as any other driver on the market. The only difference is that it’s a whole lot cheaper. A couple of scratch students from the local college and some other regulars from Bay Ridge have been asked to smack a couple of drives down the fairway with their usual club and then have a crack with the Hippo. Down the other end of the fairway arc two cute college girls measuring the distance and radioing back the results. Quite beautifully, they’ve never been on a golf course before and they certainly have no idea what the fuss over the blond guy with the Hummer golf cart is all about. The smell of a little extra money to take over the Yell County line is what brings them onto John Daly’s turf.

In the same way that John’s personality and style of play fitted with his old sponsor Callaway and their Big Bertha drivers, there’s something right about Hippo picking him up as their man. John, who calls himself ‘Just an ugly country boy from Arkansas who plays golf’, is a staunch believer in the game being accessible to everyone – country boys and poor city boys included. “I believe public golf courses arc the only way to get someone playing that may not be able to afford the nicer courses,” he says, “especially since nowadays you can build a public one just as nice as a country club and charge a lot less.” And so naturally he also believes in the Hippo philosophy of manufacturing pro-quality equipment· at hacker prices. “l love being involved with a company that doesn’t rip off the consumer,” he says.

But there’s more to his relationship with Hippo than agreeing with their business plan. “I’ve learned now that if somebody wants to tell me to do something and that’s gonna be in the contract, then I don’t sign the contract” he says. ‘I’ve learned to not take the money and be miserable.” The marketing and sales man at Hippo, Brent Dornford, says that they do have a clause in the Daly paperwork that relates to ‘good behaviour’ but it’s not as stringent as the terms allegedly laid down by Callaway.

Rewind to March 1997 John, after a long period of sobriety, is back on the bottle again and falling out of love with Paulette, a beautiful Californian model, his third wife and mother of his second child. He’s just hit a bad round at the Player’s Championship in Florida and decides, as he often did when he was younger, to drown his disappointment. He gets suitably wrecked, stumbles back to the hotel, falls into the kitchen door and passes out. Paulette, worried and annoyed that he’s so messed up, walks out with their young daughter, Sierra, and calls the sheriffs department. They find John unconscious, pull him onto a stretcher and drive him to hospital where he’s diagnosed with alcohol poisoning (not for the first time).

John’s night of excess results in a ban from playing on the PGA Tour; an insistence, if he wants to play again, that he needs to check into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California; and the end of his marriage to Paulette (although that was probably doomed regardless). Two weeks into rehab, his then-sponsor, Wilson, drops him. Daly, less than two years after winning the British Open at St. Andrews, is out in the wilderness and in financial turmoil – without Wilson, he’s left with $1.7 million in gambling debts and hundreds of thousands of dollars owing to the tax man. It becomes too much for him to deal with. He motors up to a mountaintop and seriously considers driving off. Calls to his buddy Donnie and former football star turned cleaning-up mentor Thomas ‘Hollywood’ Henderson help him come to his senses.

In May, Ely Callaway, who Daly genuinely liked, came to his rescue by offering him $3 million a year and the chance to have his gambling debt cancelled. It sounded like an unreal deal, which it was, except that there were conditions – John must give up gambling and keep attending AA meetings. Although Callaway deny it, reports after he walked out of the deal, most particularly in an August 200 I issue of Golf Digest, alleged there was also pressure on Daly to cooperate with Callaway’s own two psychologists. Whatever may have happened ultimately resulted in a disaster for Daly. John told Golf Digest he was on lithium, prozac, xanax and panxil while he was being sponsored by Callaway; that, even though he knows that they had his best interests at heart, he was ‘a damned lab rat’. Rather than feeling better about himself, he said, he ballooned to 260 pounds, suffered headaches and the shits, and was constantly tired. After 18 months of the relationship and playing poorly, he had had enough. So he fled to Vegas for a session of slot machine therapy. Callaway offered him one more chance but only if he went back to rehab. He did – for a night – and then he walked out again.

The shoot has moved down the hill to outside John’s house, an 8,200 square foot palace within the grounds of the course he played as a kid. Coming back to Dardanelle (via Tennessee, Colorado and Florida), John says, has been one of the best decisions he’s made in his turbulent life. Here, more than anywhere in the world, he feels a sense of genuine peace. “Since I moved back here I’ve been a lot happier,” he says. “Things in my life are a lot more at ease because everybody here just wants to be my friend; they don’t want anything from me.” The people here adore him but they also respect him. John may be an uber-celebrity, but he doesn’t need to live like one in Dardanelle. On any given day when he’s not touring, the world and his wife can stroll past his yard and watch him hitting perfect chips down his short range or practising putts on his artificial green. He doesn’t need to hide away. People here let him be. He is, after all, one of their own.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that Daly started playing some of the best golf of his career after he moved back to his hometown’· “In July, (2002), my mom got real sick, he says, so I’ve been staying home and not playing much.” Before that, though, Long John was on fire. He raked in $1.5m on the course in 2001 (his best year ever, financially) and had a brilliant start to 2002, finishing in the top five at both the Phoenix Open and Buick Invitational. Although he won in Europe in 2001, at the BMW Open in Germany, he hasn’t being crowned champion of a regular US Tour event in nine years. “But”, he says, “I feel like I’m swinging well and putting good right now. It’s just a matter of time, I hope.” At 36, he’s certainly not too old to still be a serious force in world golf – statistically he’s currently at the peak age to perform – and he certainly hasn’t lost that bullish Daly confidence. “I wouldn’t be playing golf if I didn’t think I had a chance to win,” he says.

He steps inside to grab a sandwich and change his shirt. The director sets up a couple of chairs for the short interview he’s about to film. The backdrop of the shot will be John’s million-dollar tour bus parked up in front of his house. He hates flying, so he cruises to tournaments Daly-style in his own signature vehicle. To believe it, you have to see it. Inside it’s pimper than Superfly’s beach house. In the bedroom: a huge flat-screened TV, a mirrored ceiling and a massive bed covered with animal print bedclothes. In the living room: black marble floors, black leather sofas, a full gold-trimmed bar and kitchen and strip lights that snake around the ceilings and light up the ubiquitous Lion logo etched onto the interior fittings. Up front: brown leather seats and the control box from which the booming stereo and the plethora of other hi-tech gadgets are operated. So that John can chill outside in the warmer months without missing a beat, the manufacturer has even ensured that there’s an awning you can pull out from the top of the bus and an outdoor stereo and TV system slotted into a panel behind the front wheel. It’s one of the most audacious vehicles ever built. John Daly is one of the few people alive who can get away with being its captain.

John emerges from his house with a cigarette dangling from his bottom lip and a can of diet coke in his hand. “All right. Let’s do it,” he says, and sits down in front of the camera. The presenter asks him about his golfing life, so he goes through it – how he taught himself to play with a full-length set of MacGregor’s that his dad bought him when six; how he was beating the locals at Bay Ridge before he was 1 O; how he worshipped Jack Nicklaus and endlessly studied his swing on TV; how, at 13, he won the adult championship at the Lake of the Woods in Virginia (his dad took jobs at power plants all over the US when John was growing up but always maintained roots in Dardanelle); how he won the Missouri State Championship when he was 17 and the Arkansas by the time he left college; how he was offered a golf scholarship to the University of Arkansas but left in his junior year to turn pro; how hard it was to make enough money to survive playing the mini tours; how it took him four attempts to qualify for the PGA lour; and then how, in 1991, as a Tour rookie, his life dramatically changed forever.

John’s performance at the 1991 US PGA is one the greatest achievements in all of sport, not just golf. As ninth on the waiting list the evening before the tournament started, he was planning dinner with his then-girlfriend, Bettye, and some friends at their home in Memphis. The phone rang. It was a “four official telling him that eight people had already pulled out and somebody else was likely to produce a sick note by the start of phi)’ the following morning. John said he would risk it. With Bettye, he drove the 450-mile route to Crooked Stick Golf Course in Carmel, Indiana. It took him eight hours. When he got there, he was told he was playing.

At the time, Jack Nicklaus called Crooked Stick the most difficult golf course in America, and he’d played it on countless occasions. Daly had never visited the course before, and he’d missed the opportunity to have a practice round. He picked up the caddy of Nick Price, one of the pros that had dropped out. They’d never worked together before. And then, soon after he gripped and ripped his first drive, a brutal storm blew across the course. Play was temporarily suspended. A local man was even struck down and killed by lightning. Daly marched on regardless and recorded a first round 67, an unbelievable two shots off the lead.

By Sunday he was the champion, of both the PGA and the people. Whether it was his hockey hair; or the way he pumped his fist to rouse the crowd; or his massive over-swing; or the length of his drives (he was taking an astonishing four or five clubs less than the other pros on his second shot); or the suspicion that he’d sank a quick beer to calm his nerves between the 12th green and the 13th tee on the last day; or the fact that, after day three, as leader, he hadn’t gone to bed early like a good boy but accepted an invitation to watch the Indiana Colts football team (Daly adores football almost as much as golf) and got totally wrecked in the process; or his generosity in giving away $30,000 of his prize money to a local charity to show his appreciation of the fans; or a combination of all these characteristics, by the time he drove out of Crooked Stick, John Daly was an instant hero. Nobody had heard of him before the tournament had started. He was the must famous man in golf by the time it finished. And he was only 25.

“It’s still one of the greatest years of my life,” says John about 1991. It meant, of course, instant wealth (a guesstimate at the time reckoned winning a Major brought in $14 million over time) but also that which he cared about more than anything – the love of the people. Ever since he was a shy kid, totally lacking in confidence in every aspect of his life outside of golf, John had dreamed of having a huge bank of supporters following him round the course – just like Jack had. “I always wanted the fans on my side,” he says, “and l love people watching me play.” But was he ready for everything that comes with suddenly being crowned a champion golfer? “No, I wasn’t prepared,” he says. “I just thought you go out and try to win a tournament and if you do, it’s great. I didn’t realise what would happen after I won the PGA and all the stuff that went with it. I wasn’t prepared like Tiger Woods was. He was prepared for it ever since he was born, I think.”

Not surprisingly, the moneymen were the first to home in on the golf new phenomenon. Reebok had called Daly’s parents in Dardanelle with a clothing deal before John was even champion. Wilson opened their chequebook soon after. And, naturally, the media wanted a piece of him too. Within 24 hours of sinking his final putt, the champion was invited by CBS to appear in front to the Crooked Stick clubhouse (with a killer hangover) on Good Morning America; Johnny Carson had called asking if John wanted to appear on the Tonight Show; a Larry King Livc interview was arranged; and People magazine, Time, Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and all the Arkansas papers were preparing editorials and wanted to speak to him. Governor Bill Clinton even declared Monday to be John Daly Day in Arkansas. The White House was already busy drawing up an invitation.

That was the fun side of suddenly becoming a star. But there was a darker edge to the exposure that would cause. dramatic changes in Daly’s personal life. Not only did rumours quickly spread about his drinking and gambling habits, questions were raised about the woman in the floral dress and gigantic sunglasses who had run onto the 18th green to congratulate John, on his orders, when he became champion. When asked, John said she was Bettye from Georgia, the girl he going was marry that (October in Las Vegas. It was going to be his second marriage. The first had broken down. That many of his friends suspected there was more to his girlfriend than she let on didn’t bother John. He loved her and he trusted her.

Bettye had told John that her family name was Fulford, that she was 31, single without kids, and worked in convention miles at a Radisson hotel in Georgia. After 1.5 million people in America alone saw her on TV, calls started coming into anybody in Arkansas who had been mentioned in any of the many subsequent articles on Daly – his old coaches, friends and family – from people claiming to know more about Bettye than John did. Her family name was indeed Fulford, they reported, but that was a maiden name. Many people in Georgia knew her as Bettie Blackshear, wife of Michael Blackshear, her second husband to whom she was still married. Oh, and John probably ought to know that she had a 13 year-old kid living 50 miles north of Atlanta from her first marriage, and, no, she wasn’t 31, she was 39. But, yes, she did work in convention sales.

John didn’t believe a word of it. Not until his friends delivered a massive dossier of evidence gathered together by a private dick. It included a photograph from Bettye’s high school yearbook showing her graduating in 1972 – the year John turned six. Convinced, he kicked her out of their home in Memphis in December. The drama, however, had only just begun. Unbeknown to John, she was already pregnant with John’s first child and determined to ensure that the kid and her would be rewarded with a decent slice of John’s new fortune, even though they weren’t married. She employed a well known palimony attorney, Marvin Mitchelson, who specialised in making as much money as possible for women living with, but not legally bound to, rich and famous men. After a series of delays, including one in which Bettye moved back to Georgia from Tennessee because there a precedent existed for the kind of case she was involved with, Mitchelson’s men delivered a suit to John whilst, unbelievably, he was in the middle of his practice round for the 1992 Masters.

And that wasn’t the end of it either. John, who said at the time that Bettye was still the love of his life regardless, offered to take her back on condition that she dropped the suit. It would be for the good of the baby too, he said, who was due to be born the next month. She agreed and they married in Dardanelle soon after. It was a stormy union, though, that didn’t last long. Widely publicised was the Christmas party that went wrong and resulted in Daly smashing up his new home in Colorado. State law dictated that Bettye had to file a third degree assault charge against John, although she had no reason to and didn’t want to. When she did, Daly was subjected to trial by media. He hit his wife, they said. But they had no proof. Daly was so troubled by the accusations, and they were only accusations, that he contemplated suicide. When the case eventually came to court, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge – a non-assault charge. “It’s things that John beats up, not human beings,” a person who knows John best has always maintained. At last that appears to now be accepted as fact.

Catch John as he is today, however, and all these dramas (and the many, many others) seem like the wild years of a man who has now come of age. “I’m a late maturer,” John says. He’s in the leopardskin carpeted music room of his house waiting to shoot a quick take of him playing his personalised ‘Grip it and Rip it’ guitar. Surrounding him arc the other 40-odd axes he owns, many of which arc highly collectable. You only have to be a passing music fan to totally trip out in this room. “Oh my god, you’ve got Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Strat. And BB King’s Gibson. And a signed Wille Nelson acoustic, and a Paul and Gene from Kiss autographed special. What? Bon Jovi’s and Eddie Van Halen’s and Jo Walsh’s and Graham Nash’s and Johnny Lee’s arc all in here too? Holy shit, dude, you’ve got the lot. Mind if I plug that cherry red SG in for a quick strum? That belongs, to who? No sweat, man, I wont touch it.

John started music late in life. He’s always been a fan but he didn’t start physically playing until reasonably recently. Maybe that was sensible. He still reckons he sucks at the guitar ( of course he’s not nearly as bad as he makes out) but at least now he’s got good buddies, all with long careers in music, to help him out. It’s those cats – Hootie & The Blowfish, Johnny Lee, Willie Nelson, Daron Norwood – who contributed to John’s recent debut album, My Life. It’s a record well worth checking out. Not only will you be surprised to find out that Long John has a belter of a voice (think of the swing, then think of the vocal equivalent), you’ll be doing his charities a favour. In his own words, “it’s basically an album of country songs, blues songs, and rock songs about my life”. More than anything, then, it gives you a chance to hear a side of Daly that you can’t glean from reading magazine articles or watching him play. Some of the tracks, like ‘Mr Fan’ are thoughtful and sad. Others, like ‘All My Exes Wear Rolexes’, arc plain hilarious.

Austin comes up from the living room – another museum of collectable memorabilia, but sports this time (signed golf bags and shirts – yes, he’s got Jordan and every other king of basketball, and football, and baseball). He wants to bang the drums whilst his step dad plays guitar. Austin is the toddler son of Sherrie, John’s gorgeous wife (his fourth for the record). John doesn’t mind but Sherrie knows what he’s really up to. “Austin,” she calls from downstairs, “you can have your picture taken later. Come down here for the moment.” Austin’s not convinced but he jumps down from his drum stool anyway. The film crew are ready. Cue the ‘golf version of Knockin’ on Heaven s Door , – the last shot of the two days.

John, of course, is far from knockin’ on heaven’s door. Because he arrived on the scene so early, and has had so much attention since, it seems like he ought to be one of the Tour’s elder statesman. He is in many ways. “A couple of the younger guys come and talk to mc,11 he says, “because I’ve messed up a few times. They say, ‘\>Veil, I’ve clone this and what do I need to do?’ and I try and help them out.” And he’s become “a sort of big brother” to Pat Perez and Frank Lickliter, like Fuzzy was to him. But he’s not nearing the end of his career. The John Daly of today is more focussed than ever – more than he was, he says, when he took time out to practise solidly for the 1995 British Open (still the win he considers the greatest of his life). And more than he was when he was playing the mini-tours in southern Africa. (Daly had the first of his great wins out there – but for different reasons. With his hand in bandages because he beat up a hotel room in disgust at spun king most of what little money he had into a Swaziland casino drop-box, he walked onto the course the next day, won the Swazi Sun Classic and saved his ass financially.) Somehow, though, it seems that even if John wins a third Major (far stranger things have happened in his life), he will forever be associated with the nineties.

Throughout the decade, he was reprimanded by the Tour and slagged off by some of his fellow pros for supposedly destroying the image of the game, but he was always the biggest draw; he was always the man the people wanted to follow round the course. In a sense then, Daly has been (and still is) the greatest symbol of how the game is changing.

Like Arnold Palmer did is his day, Daly has made hundreds of thousands of people across the world feel like golf is a sport that they can participate in – by watching; or· by crunching drives at the range; or by paying a green fee and playing at a municipal course. The idea that golf is wholly the pastime of a wealthy elite dissolved the moment John pulled out his I wood at Crooked Stick in 1991. The world of the game is all the better for it. Whilst John is still an active pro, the bad behaviour will always make the headlines first. But news doesn’t last. The legacy of a pioneer docs. Even when the pioneer is “just an ugly boy from Arkansas who plays golf’.