Tiger Woods is back in action today for the first time since he tried to give it a go at the 2023 Masters back in April.
Lingering injuries have kept the G.O.A.T. from competing as of late, only because he’s been struggling to walk around golf courses comfortably since his most recent leg injury stemming from a serious car crash back in 2021. But now, he’s back in action at the Hero World Challenge, and he looks pretty damn good so far.
Anytime Tiger tees it up, a lot of people think of his many great moments on the golf course, including a staggering 82 PGA Tour tournament victories in his career. One of his most memorable moments has to be his against-all-odds victory at the 2019 Masters, proving that even as he ages, you can still never count him out.
The only time you could probably count him out was when he took on a hungover drunk John Daly in the 2004 Target World Challenge. If you know the eccentric (and possibly alcoholic) John Daly, the story he tells about the unlikely head-to-head win versus Tiger is just another classic Daly anecdote.
Daly sat down with country music star Ernest to talk about the Tiger story on the Just Being ERNEST podcast back in 2021, and his telling of how it all went down did not disappoint:
“I’ve only beat him probably twice in 5,000 times. It’s his tournament and I’m sitting at the table at Sherwood in Thousand Oaks, California. And there’s only 16 players, it’s a big tournament to get in and I had a really good year.
I get done early, I didn’t play very good, I shot a 73. Tiger shot 73, so we’re paired the next morning. They had this big table in there, all 15 of my guys. We’re sitting there…we’re not sitting there getting drinks, I’ve got my Crown bottle of whiskey… everybody’s got bottles.
Tiger comes in and I say ‘Hey, how’d you do?’ (Woods says) ‘Looks like I’m playing with you tomorrow.’ I go ‘Come have a drink with us.’ (Tigers responds with) ‘Nah, I’m gonna go hit some balls.'”
Daly and his crew were still sitting there drinking two hours later when Tiger came back in from practicing. The always entertaining Daly then asked again if he wanted to have a couple of drinks with them, and Tiger declined because he was going to the gym to work out.
As the story goes, Daly is still sitting there, on his third bottle of Crown when Tiger Woods comes back in once again, and at this point John says that he’s “wasted” when he asks if Tiger wants to join them for a third time. That’s when the situation gets hilariously complicated as Woods says no, then tricks Daly into playing a song in front of all of the sponsors at the tournament.
Tiger apparently said he was going to “kick Daly’s ass” the next day because he was drunk at the gathering, and things didn’t exactly work out like that for Woods, as Daly explained:
“I go out the next day, I shoot 65 and beat him by like 6 shots. It was about the last time I ever beat him. And he is looking at me the whole day… I’ve got drinks coming down, people bringing me drinks on the golf course.
I was making him think they were drinks, but they were just Diet Cokes… I got him thinking that I was really drinking. I shoot 65, he shoots 71, and he was so pissed.”
Check out the hilarious story of one of golf’s greats getting beat by one of drinking’s greats in the video below:
