Thank you, John Daly. The anti-machine, non-drug-enhanced, form fitless, wonderfully careless oaf, the Everyslob. That John Daly.

Search for something in sports to appreciate these days, to marvel at, to be sure of, to defy our suspicions and ease our regrets, and for a moment at least there is Daly.

Oh, not always and not often enough, but thank goodness when the world of sports is full of so many truly bad human beings, so many cheaters and posers and grim jerks, when relief seems impossible to find, we can count on Daly.

We know his flaws; we have the same ones. We overeat. We drink too much.

We can't stop smoking. We flail in relationships. We triple bogey.

If we are not as much a country song as is Daly, we certainly know the tune.

Daly drops onto the sports pages from time to time and is always welcome, whether from some wacky domestic adventure, some personal excess, from playing golf well enough to win.

Daly lives on the edges of life, always fascinating to those of us who do not, plus he plays a maddening game with the same negligence as those of us who do it much worse.

It is so easy to love Daly, as easy as it is to stand in awe of Tiger Woods, or to see in Phil Mickelson encouraging flaws that are never quite destructive enough to overcome his corporate halo.

To see Woods now in his muscle shirts, his displaying at least a vanity that comes with self-absorption, there is also the suspicion that to get a physique like that, shortcuts can be used.

Not to imply anything other than even Woods is not beyond a reasonable skepticism.

But, Daly. Oh, no. Never.

When Gary Player nattered on a few weeks back about steroids on the golf tour, whatever mental leaps were made sailed right over Daly.

In any sport where an enhanced body causes wonder, or where behavior is dangerous and criminal, where even after the cheering stops, the medical judgment looms, we get discouraged.

But we know that there is a place where we can be sure that what we've seen is as honest as we want it to be.

Great. Good. Bad. Or horrible.

In that lumpy, uncared-for body rests the salvation of us all. Reassurance is in a belly that hangs so far over the belt that we can be sure that it got that way naturally. Comfort is in the impatience for everything, a need to get on and accept what's next, understandable in a way that all those endless hours on the practice tee are not.

We could never be Woods. We could never be Mickelson or Sergio Garcia, except to gag under pressure, but we could be Daly. We are Daly.

So, when Daly shows up anywhere around the lead of a golf tournament, especially a major such as this week's PGA, the event that invented the Daly legend, the smiles that come are always worth the sighs that follow.

As he knew and we knew, Daly would not sustain his challenge in the second round of the PGA, yet hanging uncharacteristically around, still there as we would wish to be, with just enough hope for all of us to share.

In all of sports, there is no other proxy for us like Daly, and never before has there been a need to have one that is both real and unreal.

Daly plays golf as if it is a dare, without the careful attention that certainly would have made him a bigger winner, earned him more than two major titles but would have made him at the same time just another grape in the bunch.

His attempts to clean up, to get sober, to at least drink less, to lose weight, to gamble responsibly, to find a wife as sane as himself, all of that has failed.

Maybe if we were to root him on, not as the un-country club stand-in for the rest of us but just more for his own health and promise, maybe it would take. But probably not.

And certainly our hearts would not be in it. For here's what we want more than Daly's own well-being. It is to see now, 16 years after he came out of nowhere to win a PGA, that he could do it again.

Having changed nothing. Having used nothing we can't get ourselves at happy hour. Having done it his way.

Which would be ours, if we had a way.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com

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