Driver Abuse: Daly Launches Balky ‘Bertha’

The words are stitched into the back pocket of his pants: “Grip it and rip it.” On Saturday, John Daly put a new spin on that: Grip it and throw it - his driver, that is.

Daly, looking to salvage a bad day on the 12th tee at Winged Foot Golf Club in the PGA Championship, bombed his drive over the trees and into the 17th fairway.

Turning away in disgust, Daly hurled his Callaway “Biggest Big Bertha” over an out-of-bounds fence and into the woods.

A couple of marshals scrambled over a chain-link fence after the club, found it in a patch of low growth that bore a close resemblance to poison ivy and ran the club up the fairway. By the 13th tee it was back in Daly’s bag - though it would come out again once more.

Perhaps not since Tommy Bolt pitched his driver into the lake on the 18th hole at Cherry Hills Country Club in the 1960 U.S. Open has so prominent a player put on such a display of temper in a major championship. One bright side of Daly’s poor play was that there were no more TV cameras following him to record the event.

Daly finished with a round of 77 and he plummeted off the leaderboard.

“On No. 12, if I hit my driver straight, I’ve got a 9-iron or wedge into the green,” Daly said afterward, explaining his frustration.”I blocked it way right and I made a bogey.”

Tiger tamed

Instead of moving into contention in the third round, Tiger Woods moved all over the leaderboard.

When he rolled in a 5-footer to save bogey on the 18th green, Woods limped off with a 1-over-par 71 that left him eight strokes behind.

From the way he was walking, it looked like Woods may have injured his groin on another vicious swing from the rough.

Asked whether he was hurt, Woods replied, “Yeah. I hurt my ego.”

Back behind their counters

Darrell Kestner was in the pro shop, chatting with a member. Bruce Zabriski had some golf lessons on his schedule. Just another routine day in the life of two golf club pros.

Except that Friday, a day earlier, they were striding the fairways of the Winged Foot Golf Club in the PGA Championship. Kestner and Zabriski were among the 26 club pros who earned their way into the final major championship of the year.

None made the cut - the first time that’s happened since 1989 - and now they are back to their full-time jobs, giving lessons, selling golf clubs and getting foursomes out on the course.

“It’s mentally exhausting to hit a good drive, hit a good 3-iron on the green and then face those difficult putts,” Kestner said in a telephone interview from Deep Dale Golf Club in Manhasset, N.Y. “The whole time I’m struggling, saying, ‘Let me go back to doing something I enjoy.”’

Lest anyone get the idea these club pros can’t play, consider that Kestner and Zabriski, both former assistant pros at Winged Foot, are winners of the National Club Pro Championship. Both played for two years on the PGA Tour. Kestner has shot 66 several times from the back tees at Winged Foot’s West Course and Zabriski once had a 67.

But under the pressure of major tournament play, and with Winged Foot’s rough a shaggy 6 inches long, neither could break 75 this week.