John Daly: Two Majors, Enormous Chaos, and a Diagnosis He Disputed

John Daly won the 1991 PGA Championship as the ninth alternate, having driven all night to get there without a practice round. Four years later he won the Open at St Andrews. He hit the ball further than anyone had seen and he did it with a swing no coach would teach.

He also drank catastrophically, gambled away sums that are difficult to comprehend, and conducted the whole thing in front of a sport that had never seen anything like him. Whether bipolar disorder was part of it is genuinely unclear — including, it seems, to Daly.

The Ninth Alternate

Daly's arrival is one of the great sports stories. He was ninth alternate for the 1991 PGA Championship at Crooked Stick, meaning nine players had to withdraw for him to get in. He drove through the night from Memphis, arrived without having seen the course, and won it.

He was twenty-five, unknown, and hitting drives thirty yards past everyone else in the field. The gallery adopted him instantly, and never really let go — Daly's relationship with ordinary golf fans has outlasted every controversy, because he looked and behaved like them rather than like a professional athlete.

In 1995 he won the Open Championship at St Andrews in a playoff, which made him a two-time major winner before he was thirty.

The Chaos

Almost everything else went badly.

Daly has been open about alcoholism, and about gambling losses he has estimated in the tens of millions of dollars — he has described losing well over a million dollars in a single night at slot machines. He has been married four times, has been suspended by the PGA Tour on several occasions, and has walked off courses mid-round.

He also grew up around alcohol; he has said he began drinking as a boy.

Through all of it he kept playing, kept being cheered, and kept the sponsorship of a public that found him more recognisable than the immaculate professionals around him.

The Diagnosis Question

Daly has said at various points that he was told he had bipolar disorder, and at other points that the diagnosis was wrong — that a doctor had misread him and that what he actually had was a drinking problem.

He has also spoken about being prescribed medication and disliking it, and about ultimately approaching his difficulties as questions of alcohol and gambling rather than mood.

Our honest reading is that this is unresolved and probably unresolvable from outside. Severe long-term alcoholism combined with a gambling addiction produces impulsivity, mood swings, grandiosity and depressive collapse without any additional diagnosis needed. Equally, undiagnosed mood disorder is a well-recognised driver of exactly those addictions. Disentangling them requires sustained sobriety and careful assessment, and Daly's account of his own sobriety has varied over the years.

We would not describe him as an established case, and we would not describe him as definitively not one.

Later Years

Daly has continued to compete, moving to the senior tour, and won the 2017 Insperity Invitational. He has had significant health problems, including a bladder cancer diagnosis he disclosed in 2020 and subsequent treatment.

He remains one of the most popular figures in golf with ordinary spectators, and has built a substantial second career around merchandise, appearances and a persona he has cheerfully commercialised.

Why He Is Listed

Daly appears on bipolar lists constantly, and readers searching for him deserve an accurate answer rather than a confident one.

His case also illustrates something important about how addiction and mood disorder interact in professional sport, where enormous discipline is required in one domain and often absent in every other, and where the money arrives young and in quantities that make destructive behaviour survivable for far longer than it would be for anyone else.

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