Golf bedlam – Ouch! John Daly

PLAYER: JOHN DALY

EVENT: TNT DUTCH OPEN AT SILVERSUM

DATE: JULY 2002

Troubled by a nagging pain in his right hand, John Daly had been struggling to play his normal – some would say erratic – game during one of his regular excursions to Europe.

Seeking help from a local doctor, Daly had his hand x-rayed, revealing a shard of glass buried under the skin near his first knuckle. All those years of punching TV’s and wing mirrors, it seemed, had caught up with the Wild Thing.

Following a trip to a local hospital where the shard was removed and the wound stitched, Daly took his place in the first round of the tournament, confident that his latest medical mishap was now behind him.

Eleven holes in, however, Daly realised there was blood running down his hand. The wound had opened up. Faced with withdrawing from the event and disappointing the nice folk of the Netherlands or patching himself up, Daly reached into his bag for something – anything – to stem the flow.

All he could find, though, was some Super Glue. Grabbing the tube, he overlooked the bit in the instructions about avoiding contact with skin and proceeded to apply a blob over the open wound.

Remarkably, it did the trick, and he duly carded a respectable 70. “I don’t care that it’s unwise medically,” he said later. “I’m not going to watch it bleed.” The following day, Daly opted for a more traditional Band-Aid and recovered sufficiently to shoot a 67 on his way to an eventual tie for 53rd place.

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