Ask any normie on the street to the name the first two golfers that pop into their heads. The first will be Tiger Woods. The second will be John Daly. The big-boned, bleach-blond bad boy became a legend from the jump, winning the 1991 PGA Championship as the ninth and final alternate, but his reputation has only grown since.
A veritable real-life Happy Gilmore, the two-time major winner has ridden high highs and low lows. He’s cranked butts, crushed Diet Cokes and belted “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” more times than anyone can count. Heck, he’s even moonlighted as an amateur mixologist, inventing the ‘John Daly,’ a combination of lemonade, iced tea and vodka that has spawned a canned cocktail empire.
That’s where we pick up our story. This week on the Vanity Index podcast, Chad Mumm – the head honcho behind Netflix’s Full Swing and the PGA Tour’s Pro Shop venture – spoke about a recent run-in with Daly. Mumm was scheduled to interview Daly for an audience in Las Vegas. Backstage, the pair were prepping for their talk when Mumm asked Daly how his namesake cocktail came to be. Was it truly his invention or one of those things that just sort of happened? Unsurprisingly, Daly had a heck of story about that. Gather around the campfire and listen up.
You heard the man. According to Daly, he invented the John Daly cocktail at the ripe old age of nine. Not 19. Not 29. NINE YEARS OLD. As the story goes, Daly’s Little League team won the town championship, so he invited them back to his house to celebrate. Ma and Pa Daly weren’t around, so he took his mum’s pitcher of sunbrewed iced tea and dumped an entire bottle of his dad’s favourite vodka into it. Then he topped that with splash of lemonade and the team started ripping shots. Thus John Daly, both the man and the cocktail, was born.
As always with Daly, it’s tough to separate the fact from the fiction, but that’s half the fun. He’s the kind of guy who tells the same fishing story for a decade. The first year he tells it, it’s a smallmouth bass. By year 10, he’s Captain Ahab chasing a white whale to the ends of the earth. So take all of this with a grain of salt – or should we say a drop of vodka. It may not be entirely true, but it’s 100 percent John Daly.
