John Daly’s latest major withdrawal extends his staggering record of early exits

There’s the romanticized version of John Daly: the lovable, from-out-of-nowhere pro with the flowing mullet and cartoonish power who, when he bashed his way to a stunning victory at the 1991 PGA Championship at Crooked Stick, looked like he might win another two-dozen major titles.

And then there’s the bleaker version.

Browse the “Major Championship” section of Daly’s Wikipedia page and a very different picture takes shape: In Daly’s 63 major starts since the last of his two major wins (1995 Open Championship at the Old Course), he has missed 38 cuts and recorded not a single top 10 finish. In six of those weeks, Daly didn’t even complete two rounds.

His most recent withdrawal came this week at the 152nd Open Championship at Royal Troon, sometime between his first-round 11-over 82 and the beginning of the second round; Daly cited his chronically bum knee. This came just two months after Daly pulled the plug on the Friday morning of the PGA Championship at Valhalla with a thumb injury. If you’re scoring at home, 6 out of 63 is a double-digit WD rate on golf’s biggest stages. (Jack Nicklaus, for comparison, played in 163 majors. He WD’ed just once, at the 1983 Masters, with back spasms.)   

Shameful? Sure, one could argue that case. Sad? Yes, that, too. Or maybe you see it another way: Daly is still good for the game, still a fan favorite, and even if walking 36 holes has proven to be too much for his banged-up, 58-year-old body, it’s still inspiring to see him getting out there and grinding. Daly didn’t speak to the press in Troon this week, but a couple of years ago he did say this about his physical state: “For me, I’ve had probably more surgeries probably than Tiger. They just keep adding up over the last five years. But I get this metal put in this knee, hell, I got more metal than the Bionic Man does.”

However you feel about Daly’s history of white-flag raising at the majors, it’s hard not to be in awe of the variety of ways in which he has declared no mas. Let us look back.

Daly’s first major WD came at the 1997 U.S. Open at Congressional. He was 27 then. He struggled to a 77 in the first round and on Friday carded a front-nine 38. Enough was enough. With no explanation to his playing partners, Daly quit at the turn and beelined for the parking lot. Callaway Golf, his then-new sponsor, released a statement that said Daly had withdrawn because of physical and mental exhaustion. (The U.S. Open was Daly’s third straight start, after an eight-week stay he’d spent at an addiction treatment center.)

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Three years later, Daly ducked out early from another U.S. Open, this time at Pebble Beach, where he’d capped his first round with a three-water-ball, septuple-bogey 14 on Pebble’s iconic 18th hole. Daly’s final tally: a 12-over 83. “It’s amazing how quickly it went,” said Daly’s caddie that week, former NHL player Dan Quinn. “One little swing and it was like, ‘Oh, my God.'”

At the 2009 PGA Championship at Hazeltine, Daly, now 43, finished his first round with a pair of doubles to shoot 76. Several hours later, he alerted tournament officials he was out, citing a sore back. A year later, at the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits, Daly’s shoulder was the culprit. After play was suspended in the second round, Daly, whose card to that point read 4-7-4-7-4-4-3, announced he would not be returning on Saturday, tweeting, “right shoulder, so painful & swollen the size of a grapefruit–ice on my shoulder & tryin to type w/my left hand.” That week marked Daly’s 18th withdrawal from a PGA Tour event in the last five years.

In the lead-up to the 2019 Open Championship, Daly was fighting osteoarthritis in his knee, and also something else: a spider bite that, he said, had led to an infection and sepsis diagnosis. Earlier that year, at the PGA Championship, the PGA of America had permitted Daly to use a cart by way of a request Daly had filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The R&A, though, denied Daly the same courtesy. On Tuesday of tournament week, Daly pulled out. “While I trust the R&A’s decision was made with good intentions,” he tweeted, “I could not disagree more with their conclusions.” (Note: Because the WD came before the tournament began, we didn’t include it in our accounting above.)

From 2020-23, Daly played in two more PGA Championships and two more Opens, finishing two rounds but missing the cut in each of them. Which brings us to his two 2024 early exits, from the PGA and this week in Troon. On Friday, as is his custom, Daly tweeted a photo of the injury that caused his Open WD. “Watching from afar isn’t the same, but know I tried my heart out to get thru it,” he wrote. “Was at physio this morning and made the decision to ice & rest it!”    

You might be asking yourself how many more majors Daly has in him. When it comes the Open, the answer is no more than two. Earlier this year, the R&A lowered the age limit for past champions from 60 to 55. But players currently exempt as past champions — i.e., Daly — were grandfathered in and will be permitted to play though the age of 60, meaning, assuming he gives it a go, Daly’s last Open will come at Birkdale in 2026.

His last major, though? That’s anyone’s guess. PGA Championship winners have a lifetime exemption.