Write About John Daly’s Indiscretions, Get Blasted By the Twitter Bullhorn

Chris Littmann wrote in this space yesterday about John Daly’s new reality show, and the convenient timing of a 456-page file becoming public record just before it premiered. The contents of the report really aren’t all that embarrassing, but the Florida Times-Union article on the report certainly got Daly fired up at its author, Garry Smits.

That white space is where Smits’ cell phone number was available for more than 11 hours to anyone who visited Daly’s Twitter page. Daly deleted the tweet in the past hour, as well as other tweets that referred to Smits’ article as “paparazzi-like gossip BS” and urged his followers to “Call and flood his line and tell him how we really feel.”

Those followers mostly didn’t heed Daly’s call. Smits tweeted around midnight on Tuesday than only “10-12” have called, but that number grew to around 30 by this morning, though he told ESPN the calls were “not unlike anything I would get after covering the Florida-Georgia game.” (PGA spokesman Ty Votaw told CBS Sports’ Steve Elling that the organization would “discuss internally” what to do with Daly.)

I wonder if Daly wasn’t more upset with the over a quarter-million dollars in legal fees he was ordered to pay to the Times-Union after a failed defamation lawsuit than he was with Smits personally. Any number of media outlets could have taken Daly’s disciplinary file, now public record and reported details from it; only the Times-Union had beaten Daly in a court of law.

After all, wouldn’t a rap sheet of indiscretions be great promotion for “Being John Daly” -- the first episode is on YouTube -- if Daly didn’t come off as miserable and vindictive in reacting to its release? I suppose it’s fitting that a guy who can’t get out of his own way in general is getting in the way of a reality show called “Being John Daly” by, well, being John Daly.

↵