Going bananas to hear Daly’s latest head-throw
“After the break, John Daly’s latest head-throw . . .”
We immediately picked up on that reference to the American golfer, even if we had to cover the poor child’s ears to protect her from “head-throw” as a word. A shrewd offer in negotiations ended the impasse (“You can peel the banana yourself, how’s that?”) so that we could listen to the item.
You’re aware of the furore, of course – Daly walked off the course during the Australian Open last week and, as is the way with any golfing controversy, perspective is in short supply, what an outrage, etc etc.
Well, we don’t agree, because here in this corner of the paper we’re fond of John Daly. Not because he’s some kind of rebel, or because he shakes up golf’s conservative image, or because of his haircut. No: we just happened to meet him once and he was a very nice chap. Ever since we’ve kept an eye out. And an ear, obviously. The meeting took place in a Cork hotel, as Daly was in the southern capital in connection with a new golf course. Detailed to meet the great man, I rocked up ahead of time and was ushered into a genteel living-room-type area where John was lounging with a gigantic glass of Coke. At least I like to think it was a gigantic glass of Coke, but I was very naive at that stage of my development. I was very conscious of two different things as we chatted, and I don’t mean my panicky conversation gambits whenever Daly actually tried to talk about golf as distinct from music, or American football, panic that revealed itself when I played back the tape as a kind of hurried squeak in my voice, a nice counterpoint to Daly’sunhurried Southern burr.
No, I mean the presence of a handler throughout the discussion, albeit one perched a good distance away. It wasn’t intimidating, not the way an English journalist once described an interview with Alan Shearer, when the “Geordie legend” had several henchmen present throughout the proceedings, including one man who spent the interview standing directly, and silently, behind the journalist. It wasn’t like that with Daly. And to be fair, the handler on that occasion was discreetly reading a newspaper a couple of tables way, unlike their equivalent on another occasion in Dublin, who spent the entire interview at the end of the same table I and the interviewee occupied, frowning intently at a menu. The other notable aspect of the interview was my growing realisation that there was a TV cameraman roaming around the room shooting the interview from all sorts of angles: between the legs of a table, through the crook of my elbow, from directly above.
This wasn’t much of a consideration until some months later, when a pal e-mailed from America to say he had clocked a trailer on the Golf Channel about a course in Cork, Ireland, with John Daly on board, so he tuned in to see some of his home town, and lo and behold . . “I was surprised to see Daly in Cork,” went his e-mail, “But when I saw you of all people on the Golf Channel . . . I nearly passed out.”
The reason for that level of surprise? Time was when I had a position on golf, or an opposition, which I unleashed at the drop of a hat, but as John D. Sheridan said, time makes wise men and cowards of us all eventually. The mellowing-out process took a bit longer on my part but even I eventually took the position that golfers were human beings just like us, a position I arrived at that bit quicker after my encounter with Daly. The conversion was later sealed by a series of golf lessons with one of life’s gentlemen, John McHenry, who often writes in these parts on the game. His calm patience revealed the inherent attraction of the game to me, though superhuman self-control has so far kept me away from the links and fairways on my days off.
Moreover, those lessons also gave me the chance to produce one sentence I never thought I’d have to use in a million years. A few months ago I flicked the television onto the Solheim Cup for my father-in-law, who was visiting us.
As a few experts discussed the day’s play, I pointed out one of them.
“See that chap in the orange jumper?” I said.
“He’s my golf coach.”
*michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
