The Game That Waits — John Daly, Anthony Kim, and What Golf Teaches Us About the Only Life We Have

The Game That Waits — John Daly, Anthony Kim, and What Golf Teaches Us About the Only Life We Have Golf is a patient game. It does not chase you. It does not call after you when you leave or negotiate for your return or promise things will be different if you come back. It simply exists — and here is the thing about it that no other game has ever managed — it is never the same twice. The wind is different. The light is different. The person standing on the first tee is different, carrying a different version of themselves to the same ground that looked completely different the last time they stood on it. The course that broke you on a Tuesday in October will be a different course entirely on a Saturday in April, and you will be a different person walking it, and the conversation between the two of you will produce something that has never happened before and will never happen again. That is the eternal beauty of it. And it is precisely what makes golf the most patient of all games — because it does not need to be the same to be waiting. It just needs to be there. And it is always there. Come back when you're ready. Whatever you find when you return will be exactly what you need.

Two men. Two completely different relationships with that patience. One who came back changed. One who came back the same. Both of them beloved. Both of them teaching something true — not about golf, but about the only life any of us actually gets, which is the one happening right now, with all its wreckage and all its grace, on whatever fairway you happen to find yourself standing on today.

This is not a morality tale. It is something more honest than that. It is two real men, held up against the light of a game that has always been the most accurate mirror sport has ever built, and the reflection is complicated and warm and worth looking at directly.

John Daly — The Man the Game Never Let Go On the night of August 7, 1991, John Daly was sitting in Memphis, Tennessee, the ninth alternate for the PGA Championship. Nine names deep on the list. He had not traveled to Carmel, Indiana because being the ninth alternate is not a position from which a reasonable person expects to play. The phone rang. Nick Price was withdrawing. Eight alternates above Daly were unreachable or had declined. John Daly threw his clubs in his car and drove ten hours through the night.

He arrived at Crooked Stick Golf Club without a practice round, without a yardage book, without ever having seen a single hole of Pete Dye's most demanding design. He borrowed Nick Price's caddie — Jeff Medlin, known as Squeaky — and walked to the first tee on Thursday morning with nothing but his swing and the philosophy that had always governed it. Grip it. Rip it. Trust what you have and go.

He won the PGA Championship by three shots. First major. First Tour win. Same week.

The gallery that followed him that week understood immediately what they were watching — not just a golfer, but a force of nature in polyester pants, a man who hit the ball further than anyone had seen and cared less about the consequences than anyone had dared, who played the game with a joy so complete and so infectious that by Sunday afternoon the entirety of Crooked Stick was essentially one large moving crowd trailing a 25-year-old rookie from Arkansas who had driven through the night to get there. They loved him from the first swing. They have never stopped.

Four years later, at the 1995 Open Championship at St. Andrews, John Daly won his second major on the oldest and most sacred ground in golf — the birthplace of the game itself, the course that five hundred years of history had made into something larger than any single player who had ever walked it. The gallery at St. Andrews, who have seen everything the game has produced since before living memory, gave John Daly one of the great receptions the Old Course has ever witnessed. Not because he was the most polished professional golfer in the field. Because he was the most human one. They recognized in him something they recognized in themselves — the wild swing, the full commitment, the refusal to play small, and the specific kind of courage that looks to everyone else like recklessness but feels, from the inside, like the only honest option available.

Two majors. Six Ryder Cup wins. One of the most gifted ball-strikers his era produced. A swing so distinctive that thirty years later golf instructors still use it to teach what freedom of movement looks like when it is completely, finally, unconditionally trusted.

And then there is the rest of it. The part that John Daly has never hidden and has never apologized for, partly because he understands that hiding it would be dishonest and partly because he has never been capable of dishonesty even when honesty cost him everything. Four marriages. Multiple stints in alcohol rehabilitation. A gambling addiction that by his own admission consumed between fifty and sixty million dollars — he once lost $1.65 million in five hours at a casino in Las Vegas, not as a rumor but as a documented entry in his own autobiography. He has checked into rehabilitation facilities and checked out. He has made promises and broken them. He has been suspended by the PGA Tour, reinstated, suspended again, and welcomed back each time by galleries that treated his return as something between a relief and a celebration.

He has had two knees replaced. He has battled Type 2 diabetes. He was diagnosed with bladder cancer and went through treatment and came out the other side. He has had sixteen surgeries in four years. He calls himself Lazarus — I keep coming back from the dead, he says, without irony and without complaint. Waking up is a win for me.

He still drinks. He has been clear about this. He has not found the path to sobriety that would give the story the clean redemptive arc that everyone who loves him has been hoping for. He plays on a cart now because his knees will not carry him eighteen holes. He shows up at pro-ams and LIV events and celebrity tournaments and the galleries still cheer, still roar when the ball leaves the face and disappears into the distance, still love him with the specific, uncomplicated loyalty that is reserved for the people who never pretended to be something they were not.

Golf has never asked John Daly to be different than he is. It has simply offered him the tee box, every time, and waited to see if he would take it. He always takes it. He always will. That is the John Daly covenant with the game, and the game, patient as it has always been, has honored it every single time.

Anthony Kim — The Man Who Came Back From Somewhere Nobody Could Find Anthony Kim did not have a slow fade. He did not taper off gradually, did not have a few bad years, did not decline in the visible, traceable way that allows observers to construct a narrative in real time. He was there — fully, brilliantly, electrifyingly there — and then he was gone. Completely gone. For over a decade, almost entirely without explanation, into a silence so total that the golf world eventually stopped speculating and simply filed him away in the category of things that might have been.

What the golf world did not know, during those years of silence, was how close it came to never getting him back at all.

Anthony Kim turned professional in 2006 out of the University of Oklahoma. By 2010 he had won three PGA Tour events, had been ranked as high as sixth in the world, had won the Ryder Cup as part of the United States team, and had established himself as one of the most exciting young players in the game — fearless, charismatic, walking the course with the specific swagger of someone who believed completely in every shot before he hit it. The galleries loved him the way galleries love the players who make the game look like an act of pure will. He was 25 years old. He was going to be great. Everyone knew it. He knew it.

And then his body broke. A series of injuries — a torn Achilles, a torn thumb ligament, a wrist injury — compounded and complicated and refused to heal the way they were supposed to heal. The surgeries came. The rehabilitation came. The setbacks came. And somewhere in the gap between the player he had been and the player he was trying to become again, something else arrived — the darkness that injury and isolation and the specific despair of watching your gifts go unused can produce in a person who defined himself entirely by those gifts.

He has spoken about it now with the honesty that sobriety makes possible. Doctors told him at one point that he potentially had two weeks to live. Two weeks. Not as a metaphor. As a medical assessment of where his body was and where it was heading if nothing changed. He checked himself into rehabilitation. He got sober. He has been sober for three years.

During those years of silence he was not playing golf. He was staying alive. He was finding out who he was when the scorecard was taken away and the gallery was gone and the only competition was the one happening inside his own body and his own mind. He was, in the most fundamental sense, playing the hardest round of his life on a course that had no fairways and no flags and no finish line. And he made it through.

The comeback began, of all things, with a fake tweet. An anonymous person posted on social media that Anthony Kim had signed with LIV Golf. Kim saw it. He said something moved in him when he read it — something that had been quiet for a long time and was not quiet anymore. He reached out to LIV. He said: if you are interested, I am interested. He told the people around him that he owed that anonymous person dinner, whoever they were, because the fake tweet started a real conversation that changed his life.

He returned to competitive golf at LIV Golf in 2024, over a decade after his last Tour event, with no ranking and no recent competitive record and every reason in the world for the expectations to be modest. He shot a final round 63 to beat Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau — two of the best players in the world — and win. His first professional win in sixteen years. He held the trophy. And then his daughter ran onto the green.

He said it was the best moment of his life. Not the win. Not the 63. His daughter running onto the green.

That is what sixteen years of silence and survival and the long, quiet road back from the edge of everything produces. Not a trophy. A daughter running across the grass toward her father who is still here, still swinging, still finding a way. The gallery that watched it understood that they were not watching a golf tournament finish. They were watching a life resume.

Two Men, One Mirror Here is what the game shows us when we hold these two stories up to it honestly.

John Daly and Anthony Kim are not the same person. They do not share a philosophy or a playing style or a path through the darkness that their gifts and their demons created for them. What they share is the willingness to be fully visible — to play the game and live the life without the armor of pretense, without the managed public image and the carefully worded statements and the protective distance that most public figures maintain between who they are and who they allow the world to see.

Anthony Kim chose sobriety. He made the decision that doctors told him was the only decision that would allow him to continue being alive, and he made it, and he has honored it, and the life on the other side of it contains a daughter running across a fairway and a 63 in the final round and the specific, hard-won peace of a man who looked at himself honestly and decided to change what he saw. That path is not easy. It is the hardest thing a person can do. And it is worth celebrating with the full weight of what it actually cost.

John Daly has not chosen sobriety. He has chosen to keep going, on his own terms, with his vodka seltzers and his replaced knees and his cancer in remission and his Lazarus philosophy and the galleries still cheering every time the ball leaves his face and flies somewhere impossible. His path is not the clean arc. It is the messy, complicated, fully human arc of a man who knows exactly who he is and has decided that being exactly that person, without apology, for whatever time remains, is the only life he knows how to live. That is not a celebration of the drinking. It is an acknowledgment of the man — the whole man, not just the parts that are easy to love — and a refusal to stop loving him because the story did not resolve the way we hoped it would.

Golf shows you who you are. It does not tell you what to do about it. It simply holds up the mirror — on the first tee, in the fairway, over the putt that matters — and shows you the truth of yourself in that moment, on that day, with whatever you brought to the course. What you do with what you see is the part that belongs entirely to you.

Anthony Kim saw himself and changed.

John Daly sees himself every single day and keeps showing up anyway.

Both of them are teaching something. Both of them deserve the galleries they have. And both of them, standing on the first tee of whatever round comes next, represent the thing that golf has always represented at its most honest and most human — the person alone with the game, with everything they are and everything they have been through, deciding one more time to swing.

What Golf Is Actually Trying to Tell You The microcosm of a golf round is the microcosm of a life. You already know this if you have read anything this publication has written. You know it from the first tee and the back nine and the 18th hole that comes for everyone eventually. You know it from the bad shot that follows the perfect one and the round that falls apart on the 14th hole and the putt that breaks the wrong way when you needed it most.

What John Daly and Anthony Kim add to that conversation is the part that goes beyond a single round — the part about what you do when the round is over and the real difficulty begins. The difficulty that has nothing to do with a scorecard. The difficulty of being a person in the world with gifts that feel too large to carry and demons that are trying to take everything those gifts were supposed to build. The difficulty of looking at yourself clearly, in the mirror that golf and life both hold up, and deciding what you are going to do about what you see.

Anthony Kim decided to do something different. The decision cost him everything in the short term and gave him everything back in the long term, including a daughter running across a fairway toward her father who is still here.

John Daly decided to keep going as he is. That decision has cost him things too — things that matter more than a scorecard and that cannot be recovered by winning another tournament. But he is still here. He is still swinging. Waking up is a win for me.

Both of those lives are worth something. Both of those stories are worth telling. And the lesson that sits in the space between them — the lesson that golf has been trying to deliver from the first moment you stepped onto a course and felt what the game felt like from the inside — is not complicated.

You have one life. It is the one you are living right now, on this course, in this round, with everything you brought to the first tee today. The game does not ask you to be perfect. It asks you to be present. It asks you to show up honestly, swing with everything you have, and deal with the result — not the result you wanted, but the one you actually got — with the same grace and honesty and stubborn willingness to keep going that the game itself has always modeled.

The course will always be here.

The question is whether you will be.

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