The PGA Tour says it has a superior product. So why is John Daly still playing?

AVONDALE, La. — Two weeks ago in an Augusta, Ga., Hooters, John Daly sat hobbled on a barstool behind tables of his merchandise. Lines went out the door, people desperate to take shots of whiskey with the bad boy of golf, to which he always obliged. Just a mile away, the pinnacle event in golf took place. But John Daly is not a golfer anymore. He’s a spectacle.

An off-duty sheriff provided security to control the chaos that rarely slowed down across seven days of the Masters tournament. Daly, 56, struggled to move around, eventually needing the help of two men to gingerly make his way down two steps to his waiting RV.

And two weeks later, Daly played in a PGA Tour event. No, really.

He remains the exact picture you have in your mind. A ridiculously long white beard that goes down to his chest and a shaggy head of hair. A bulbous stomach that cascades over his belt line and hangs over his garish pants. A cigarette in his hand that shifts to his mouth while he putts on each hole.

He drove up to the first tee in a golf cart — that he uses in all tournaments due to osteoarthritis in his knee — with the wind carrying his beard in the air, ready to play the Zurich Classic in New Orleans, the tour’s lone two-man team event. He and 51-year-old former Open Championship winner David Duval received sponsor exemptions to play, the event clearly wanting to add some name recognition to an event trying to survive in an era of LIV Golf and elevated PGA Tour events.

Then they shot a 75 on Thursday — in the best ball format. Then they shot an 83 in Friday’s alternate shot format, including a 45 on the front nine. By the time they finished, they were the only group over par — 14 shots over par, 30 shots behind the leaders.

Is this what the PGA Tour wants to be? The tour’s primary argument in its war against the rival LIV Golf is quality. It boasts having star-studded fields compared to — in their view — weak LIV fields primarily filled with old timers and has-beens. It’s raising purse amounts to unprecedented amounts and stacking fields in those elevated events to put the best in the world against each other, much of that because it’s trying to improve the television product and ask for more money.

And the Zurich Classic is not some joke of an event. Despite unfortunate scheduling — few golfers will play three weeks in a row, and it comes after the Masters and the elevated RBC Heritage event — it still has some of the biggest stars in the game with teams of Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa and Max Homa, Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim, Sam Burns and Billy Horschel, Sahith Theegala and Justin Suh and so on.

Yet guess who was one of the exclusive featured groups shown on the tour’s PGA Tour Live product Friday morning? John Daly and David Duval.

They’re selling this. It’s understandable, on the surface. Don’t forget the aforementioned crowds at Hooters during the biggest golf week of the year. The…