Teed Off
My Life as a Player’s
Wife on the PGA Tour
by Sherrie Daly
Gallery Books
Tiger Woods is far from the most degenerate golfer on the green. That distinguished title, according to his fourth ex-wife, goes to John Daly, the true bad boy of the stately gentleman’s game.
Urinating on the course, passing out at charity events, squiring strippers to fancy country clubs, these are just some in a long list of atrocities the infamous golfer committed over the years, according to a new tell-all “Teed Off,” written by an angry Sherrie Daly. They were married for nine years, during the height of his comeback years, and divorced in 2010.
“Its not just Tiger. It’s John and others, believe me,” she tells The Post. “Professional golfers behave as dirty as any other professional athlete or rock star.”
Sherrie also reveals that the game is riddled with prostitution, drug use and overall misbehavior more generally associated with football and basketball.
“Golf sluts may dress in golf outfits, with those nerdy visors and argyle socks and sweater vests and pretend they’re interested in the game. But they’re just whores in preppy clothes,” she writes.
Man traps
The two met in 2001 — Sherrie, a blond, acid-tongued Memphis southern belle in her mid-20s, and Daly, nicknamed “Long John” for his driving distance, 10 years her senior. At first, Sherrie, who worked at her father’s car dealership, was unimpressed and considered him a has-been. She had been aware of his wild reputation and his three previous marriages. But something clicked. And he promised that he had changed and warned her that if he started drinking whiskey again to leave. She ignored the glaring warning signs.
Seven weeks after meeting, they married and she joined him on the PGA circuit. Sherrie recalled being nervous the first time she walked on the course, purchasing a preppy collared shirt and a conservative outfit to fit in with the other fancy golf wives. But she found things were less than dignified during her time on tour.
“Little did I know that being a golf wife would mean fighting off strippers,” she writes. “Strippers swarm the course alongside the real golf fans, acting like they’re watching the game. Only they’re wearing slutty high heels made out of rubber, and they’re handing out to all of the players fliers for the strip clubs where they work. The grass is just littered with pieces of paper printed with pictures of those nasty strippers on them.” Golfers easily picked these women up on the sly, writing their numbers down on golf balls instead of autographing them.
“I’d been told by many men in Memphis, including my banker, that there was a girl who’d give golfers [oral sex] when they got to the 16th hole at Southwind. Apparently, all they had to do was pay $300 when they got there, and shed take them into the bushes and she’d do it for them right there,” she writes.
To her utter shock, the prestigious Hilton Head golf course in South Carolina was chock-full of prostitutes. “Not the ‘Pretty Woman’ type, the real prostitutes that you see on the ‘The First 48.’ Security guards had to come and get them off the parking lot. They didn’t care that I was standing there. They were giving their cards out for their escort services,” she says.
Green fees
As she discovered the seedy underbelly of the golf world, she began to notice terrible signs in her own relationship. Though Daly was riding high on a comeback, supplying her with unending amounts of cash (she often spent as much as $30,000 at Gucci among other designer stores) and close to 60 karats of diamonds during their first few months of marriage, problems emerged.
He began to drink whiskey again, sometimes as early as 7 a.m.
She quickly learned that there were three sides to Daly: John the man she married, Johnny the drunk baby who would “literally get into a fetal position on the floor” and JD, the alcoholic who was “possessed by a demon.”
He developed the habit of getting blind drunk, going into a rage and destroying everything in sight, from family photos to the window of their Porsche.
The next morning he would either not remember or apologize. “I felt sorry for him. I chalked it up to him being drunk and forgave him,” she says.
He also loved to urinate on things. Once, in front of his mother and his wife, he peed on the walls of his Arkansas home when decorators mistakenly painted the walls a light green instead of brown. “This is what I think of the color,” he said mid-flow.
Daly partied harder than most rock stars, Sherrie realized one night in Florida at the VH1 “Fairway to Heaven” Celebrity Golf Tournament. There, Daly made fast friends with Tommy Lee and Bret Michaels and invited the two on board his bus. Daly was so proud of the size of his penis that he challenged Tommy Lee to compare.
“They both whipped it out right there on the bus. I didn’t see, but I did hear that John was bigger around. I’m sure he just loved that,” she writes.
After a night of heavy drinking, Daly went to drive his bus when Michaels, of all people, insisted that he stop. “When Bret Michaels is the voice of reason, you know you’re in trouble,” she says.
There were times when Daly would pass out cold during charity events — and once Sherrie, all 125 pounds of her, had to carry the chunky Daly to save him from humiliation, she tells The Post.
One day, an eight-months-pregnant Sherrie joined her husband, who was already drunk, at a Make-A-Wish charity event where strippers graced the greens at a country club in Little Rock, Ark. Daly’s handlers warned the strippers not to go near him. Sherrie left for a moment to go to the bathroom and returned to find her husband flanked by two of them.
“The girl was all but naked,” Sherrie says, and told the strippers, “ ‘Get your autograph and get on down the road, girl. Scram.’ ”
One stripper started to leave, but threw Sherrie a haughty smirk. This drove Sherrie nuts.
“I grabbed that one girl, the one who had sassed me, and I choked her,” she writes. “And then I grabbed the other girl’s hair, and I swung her around every which way.”
Daly retaliated by taking a beer bottle and throwing it at her pregnant stomach, leaving her on the green. Later, he shoved a fruitcake in his pregnant wife’s face and smacked her on the back of her head. His friends and handlers watched idly as he then dragged her off of the bus and left her by the side of the road.
Last straws
His behavior— chronic cheating, obsessive gambling (during one Vegas stay, he lost $1.6 million in only a few hours), non-stop drinking — only worsened when he secured a lucrative deal with Hooters.
He began cheating out in the open, taking his ex-wife to Vegas and flaunting affairs in front of Sherrie’s close friends. Pictures of him with a porn star surfaced on the Internet. For every infraction, he paid up. Following the porn pictures, he sent Sherrie and her friends on a trip to New York where they spent $10,000 on Cristal alone.
Sherrie, however, had her own fair share of demons. Sherrie and her parents were indicted for money laundering. She ended up spending 150 days in jail on the charge of failure to report a transaction over $10,000. She says those days were a holiday from the hell she experienced at home.
She filed for divorce shortly after her sentence in 2006 but reconciled with him after he promised to quit drinking whiskey.
When they met at a restaurant, he ordered a vodka cocktail. “It’s not whiskey,” he said.
The final straw was one night when she claims Daly returned home drunk and tried to rape her. When she battled him and called the cops, he pushed the blame on her, telling cops and later the press that she had attacked him with a steak knife.
The next morning, sporting fresh scratches on his face, he attended a golf outing. The media went nuts with news that his wife had attacked him. But she insists that it was all made up and that he scratched himself and even applied red makeup on his shirt to make what appeared to be blood splotches.
“I might have done a lot of things I’m not proud of in my life. But I did not stab John Daly,” she writes.
Sherrie says that it was Daly’s decision to stick by this lie that made her write the book. When they finalized their divorce in 2010, she said she would only agree to the stipulation that she not talk to the media or write a book if he went public with the truth about that night, she says.
“I’m not a bitter ex-wife. I was very sad that it ended this way. We have a child,” says Sherrie, who now volunteers for Women Standing Tall, a charity devoted to battered and abused women. “I gave him the opportunity they put in the divorce decree, that I could not talk about my time with him if he would only tell the truth. He refused. Now people can hear my side of the story.”