Golf:  He has learned to manage his wilder impulses, but John Daly retains the warmth and honesty that have won so many fans, writes Johnny Watterson

A stranger walks up to the table where John Daly is sitting on the balcony of the Blarney Golf Resort. He puts his arm around the golfer's shoulders.

"Howya, Jahn?" he says in an unmodified West Cork accent, pointing toward a woman with a camera.

"Doin' good," says Daly, looking up from his cheeseburger.

"Pity like ya didn't finish de 18th last week," says the stranger by way of grim consolation. "Arra, sure never mind. It happens us all," he adds.

"You bet," says Daly, a little perplexed, as the man hunkers down for a photograph, the knife and fork of the two-times Major winner discreetly lowered below the table. Daly smiles, shakes his hand and continues to eat his lunch, a hundred heads watching.

The 18th hole at Hoylake in the British Open was the reason Daly has been able to party a little in Cork, let down his sun-bleached mullet for a few days. The hole when those who are constantly startled by Daly's car-crash life sighed and quietly wished he hadn't but were not surprised when he did dump his ball out of bounds twice to miss the cut for the weekend.

"He went for everything," was Colin Montgomerie's slightly jolted view of his playing partner.

"You know it was working," says Daly in defence.

"At 18 you wouldn't have thought OB (out of bounds) would come into play. I was trying to hit it way left, even into fairway one. I'm aiming at a TV camera, which is 60 yards left of OB. And I heeled it. I'd been hitting my drivers solid. It's just the golf gods saying, 'Hey, it's not your time right now.'

"Then I'm sitting on the fairway knowing that the cut's going to be one under. I've gotta knock this three wood, my fourth shot, onto the green, try to one- or two-putt, make bogey and make the cut. I'm glad I went for it. Hit a bad three-wood and hit it out again. But if I'd laid up with an iron, knocked it on and maybe two-putted for seven, I'd miss the cut by one. The only thing I was upset about was the drive. Made a good swing, heeled the damn thing and it just kept goin' right, right, right. Next thing you know it's the red flag. Oh God!"

John Patrick Daly is surrounded these days by a band of "good people" because these are good times. Behind him is the finishing hole of his Irish design project, the one that bears his name.

In front of him are 10 bottles of his favourite tipple, Diet Coke, several of them stabbed into a basin of crushed ice. There are also six bottles of orange juice, a bottle of Bacardi, a bottle of vodka, numerous pints and four packs of Marlborough stacked one on top of the other.

On the window sill a speaker sits with Daly's iPod attached. There are 23,000 songs on it, he says, but Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues has caught the mood and Daly is playing air guitar to the chords, singing along with the man in black.

He's leaning back in the chair, his moon face and sun-dried lips thrown back, eyes closed. Blake, one of his "good people" - Daly calls him Bubba - is slamming his hands on the table top and nodding approvingly at the lead vocal and air-guitarist.

Daly, plucking at the imaginary strings with meaty hands and forearms that are forested in a scorched coating of yellow hair, is in his own blissful world.

"I hear the train a comin'/It's rollin' round the bend/And I ain't seen the sunshine/Since I don't know when/I'm stuck in Folsom Prison/And time keeps draggin' on/But that train keeps a-rollin'/On down to San Antone."

A woman taps on the window and asks him to turn the speaker inward so everyone can hear the music.

"You wanna hear my songs? You wanna hear mine?" he asks eagerly. Then he looks around the table. "You wanna hear some of mine? They're here."

Yeah, John. Yeah, we want to hear some. Everyone wants a bit. Daly obliges, refills with Bacardi and starts slapping the table, as does Blake, to the beat of his first country CD, My Life, which came out in June.

"I'm drunk. I'm dead broke. I ain't got a penny to my name," goes the downbeat country-and-western lament, one he penned himself. That was Daly up until two years ago. That was the train wreck that was his life until he began to pull things together.

"I know I'm not the only guy that's had problems in life," he says.

"And it seems to me that a lot of athletes shy away from talking about things that may have happened to them or their families. I think I'm just a life guy. I don't think I hide anything and I don't really think about it.

"I'm going to drink and do whatever I'm doing. I don't really care who's around. I don't do anything illegal. I may drink a little too much every now and then. I mean it's great. Bringing the iPod here, playing the music. It's fun. You gotta have some fun in life. I'm a kind of go-getter. Just everything I do is full-go, it seems to me. But certain things in my life have moderated a little bit. I've had to do that."

Long John has had plenty of practice to moderate. He once claimed that at 23 years of age he was slugging down a bottle of Jack Daniels a day. Still, he joined the professional tour in 1991 and won the PGA Championship during his first year, driving through the night and scraping in as the ninth and final alternate for the championship.

He entered the competition only when one of the other players dropped out and none of the other alternates could make it. A first-round score of 69, without the benefit of a practice round, was followed with 67, 69 and 71, enough to give him a three-stroke victory. In 1995 and by the age of 30, the Arkansas redneck was accepting the claret jug from the R&A blazers at the British Open. Daly was out of the traps.

Far from the early wins concentrating the mind on success, between the doomed relationships booze became his best friend, the subsequent free fall landing him into various addiction clinics, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Betty Ford's salubrious infirmary.

During those early professional years the young pro had more wives than tournament wins. He was married and divorced three times and didn't stop to ask what effect it was having on him. And his cavalry charge through a stretch between 1995 and 2001, when his main sponsor, Callaway, also dumped him, left him without one professional tour win.

His misdemeanours, though, are indulged by most of those who look in from a distance, while an easily carried humility and accessibility have allowed those closer take a compassionate view of a crummy and idiosyncratic past.

Daly is more hillbilly than hellraiser, comfortably more KFC than caviar. He is part trailer park, part global product and almost triumphantly flawed. He is all of us.

The sense that in his chaotic life the biggest victim has been himself is overwhelming and people gravitate toward the wounded boy. The body language is welcoming even to the strangers buzzing around the Blarney Golf Resort with alien accents.

For those fallow years Daly became known for on-course pyrotechnics; spectacular blow-up holes near the end of rounds became a disturbing feature of his game.

In 1999 at the US Open, he was actually leading going into the final day but took 11 on the eighth hole and finished last of those who had made the final cut.

His propensity for knocking ball after ball into water and out-of-bounds, for triple and quadruple bogeys, or hitting a ball while it was still moving and then walking off the course showed Daly to be falling apart right in front of the tour.

During the 1998 Greater Vancouver Open, overweight and into the third year of his spectacular losing streak, he was seen on television visibly shaking as he tried to play, causing the announcers to audibly wince.

In his book My life in and out of the rough: the truth behind all the bull**** you think you know about me, the troubadour declared he'd lost over $50 million gambling, one particular day losing over $1 million on $5,000-a-go Las Vegas slot machines.

"Certain things in my life I've moderated," he says. "Drinking I've moderated. Here we've been drinking a little bit. That was way more than normal. It was just in the moment, in the mood. It's not like I had to get into a car or had anything to do.

"The gambling - it taught me an unbelievable lesson. I had no idea I'd lost that much money until I went through every tax return. I'm going 'Holy cow, I did that.'

"I don't want to dwell on it and I'm still going to gamble but I'm not going to blow millions again. You just learn as you go."

Over the past several years, Daly has managed to stop travelling the unapproved back roads. After winning a few minor tournaments, he finally bagged the Buick Invitational in February 2004, breaking his arid PGA Tour run. He clinched victory on the first hole of a three-way play-off by hitting a long, difficult, greenside bunker shot to within inches of the cup.

Perhaps, fittingly it was the wonderfully soft touch of his wrists, not his trademark length, that changed his career course.

What was Daly like to play with? Blarney golf director David O'Sullivan was asked.

"I've never played with anyone like him," said the former St Margaret's GC professional. "He was pin high in two on the seventh. That's 601 yards."

Over the past two seasons, last week's escapade in Hoylake aside, Daly has played the most consistent golf of his career, been in contention 20 times, had a lot of seconds and thirds and won a title. In that carefree streak there were no speed bumps on the horizon - until late last November.

It could easily have unravelled again, when his wife Sherrie was handed a five-month prison sentence on a federal charge involving a drug ring and an illegal gambling operation. Her mother and father, Alvis and Billie Miller, were also indicted.

Daly had met his fourth wife at a tournament in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2001 and married her seven weeks later. Prosecutors said during the hearing the golfer had known nothing at all about his wife's nefarious activities.

"I've always said that it's none of my business what other people think of me," says Daly. "Maybe it leaves me open. But I'll get it all out. I don't have any skeletons in my closet. Everything is about life. I know that there's something bigger and greater than me. Golf doesn't get me as upset as it used to. I used to get very upset. At the Open I was disappointed, not upset. When I left the golf course, it was over. I see a different picture.

"I look now and see things going great in my life, the golf course behind me, watching my kids grow up. I've a wine out this week. I've the book, the CD. I've great sponsorships. I'm the luckiest human being that ever walked.

"I wish my life would have been in this place five years ago. You look at Tiger. Everything is perfect for Tiger because he made it that way.

"Sherrie going to prison like that just stood me for a loop, really set me back in golf this year. Now that she's back I can go play and not have to worry. For me it was tough being a mother and a father at the same time."

Daly stands up and walks across the balcony. More bear than lion, the logo of his merchandise, his ursine roll and broad, rounded shoulders shows there is a lot of him and under the flab there is evidence of lurking power.

"Little John just turned three yesterday. All he wants to do is hit golf balls. He hit a drive 62 yards with my driver. Puts the club right up here under his arm. Won't swing anything but my clubs, my hats, my golf shoes. Won't drink anything but Diet Coke. I'm trying to get him off the cigarettes," he says, shoulders jerking up and down.

Laughing, he kisses everyone on the head, takes his iPod, leaves the drink and goes to bed, Bubba by his side, Johnny Cash in his head.