The Hooters near Augusta National was the anti-Masters, yet had lore of its own

We can all imagine John Daly’s pain, if and when he returns to Augusta, Ga., and does a drive-by on ole 2834 Washington Road, where he has spent, collectively, months of his unlikely life. He’s 59.

For years during the Masters, Daly, who grew up in little towns across the South, parked his RV in the macadam lot at 2834, sleeping in at night, selling millions of dollars of Long John/Wild Thing hardgoods in a nearby merch tent. R.I.P., Hooters, Washington Road, Augusta. You were the anti-Masters. The servers in the Augusta National clubhouse wear button-front yellow vests and white shirts. The servers at Hooters serve their rounds in short shorts in a color you could call NBA Orange. The business model behind Hooters is female servers, male clientele. 

The marriage between professional sports and the Hooters chain is a long one, and even though the company has filed for bankruptcy protection, there’s no reason to think the whole business, with its 400-plus locations, will be shuttered anytime soon. The first so-called Hooters Girl was Lynne Austin, from Plant City, Fla., later married to Darren Daulton, a Philadelphia Phillies catcher. Handsome couple! At least for a while. With their marriage dissolving in the early 1990s, Daulton would continue to see Austin, larger than life, on a billboard at the team’s spring-training ballpark in Clearwater, Fla. As for golf, it wasn’t really a Hooters sport, until the John Daly-Augusta Hooters marriage was consummated.

That John Daly never finished better than third in the dozen times he played the Masters seems unlikely. He’s the greatest natural golf talent I have ever seen, up close. (My top 7: Daly, Fred Couples, Tiger, Big Jack, Seve, Trevino, Laura Davies.) His game — long and high with 13 clubs, with a gift for greenside pitching and lag putting — was tailor-made for the Augusta National course.

But over the past nearly 30 years, he’s made way more money moving product from the Hooters lot than he did in the tournament, where his six paydays netted him a grand total of $187,000, almost half of it ($81,600) on his T3 finish in ’93.

Daly’s people — yes, John Daly has an unlikely team around him — told an ESPN writer that that their man cleared $780,000 in sales in the Hooters lot at the ’24 Masters. Some of these Long John shoppers surely downed pitchers at the Wash Road Hooters. Talk about your win-wins.

Hard to know where Daly will set up shop next. TBonz, the steakhouse at 2856 Washington Road, would seem like a natural fit. The Whole Life Ministries, at 2621 Washington, has a four-acre lot in a place called the Master’s Plaza. (Note the apostrophe.) The location can’t be beat — right across the street from the club’s main entrance. At first blush, you might think that an evangelical church and golf’s Wild Thing would be unlikely bedfellows, but if you think more about it, maybe they’re not. Another candidate could be Rhinehart’s Oyster Bar at 3051 Washington Road. Back in the day (Clinton I), Rhinehart’s was a biker hangout. The Rhinehart motto, “Beyond Casual,” is culturally in tune with Daly’s world view. He drinks shots with some of his customers and will tell life-on-Tour stories deep into the night.

During several Masters, John Daly and Davis Love III parked their RVs side by side, not at the Hooters lot but in that general neighborhood. They were both playing, in these April weeks. Davis would always have his young son, Dru, staying with him. Dru was young and impressionable. One morning Dru noted a half-dozen pizza boxes outside John’s bus (Davis’s term) and said, “That a lot of pizza for one guy!” But there was often a late-night party in the Daly rig.

On another occasion, JD gifted Dru a large box of M&Ms, like the ones you see being wheeled into any 7-Eleven, 48 bags to the box. Dru was impressed by Daly’s generosity, but Daly was not: “I got millions of ‘em,” he said.

One other April, on a Friday night after a missed cut, Daly made a quick getaway, not bothering to dismantle his TV cable from its external power source. Davis watched as the Daly RV, Long John at wheel, skipped town, the cable dragging behind it like a long and sheepish tail.

The John Daly-Davis Love relationship tells you more about Davis’s interior life than it reveals about John’s true north. In other words, despite Davis’s Polo contract, posture and long association with PGA Tour officialdom, there’s more JD in him than you might guess. The culture of the Tour, right through the end of the last century, was more Southern than anything else. That’s why the Daly-Washington Road Hooters was such a natural fit.

There’s another public figure I associate with the Hooters on Washington Road in Augusta, and in this case the fit is not a natural one. That figure is George Plimpton, one of my writing heroes, who made one memorable visit to the Augusta Hooters. You may know Plimpton as a founder of The Paris Review, the literary quarterly. As Daly appears in Happy Gilmore 2, Plimpton appears in Good Will Hunting, playing Matt Damon’s psychologist.

Plimpton’s best-known book is Paper Lion, in which he, a gangly Harvard-educated writer, takes a brief turn as a Detroit Lions quarterback. (Alan Alda played Plimpton in the movie version.) After that stunt, Plimpton played in several Tour pro-ams and wrote a book about it, The Bogey Man. It’s a classic.

George went to the Masters only once, to write a piece for Golf Digest. He asked an Augusta National member for a “membership blank,” gathered around a communal ham in a rental house and shared a basement bedroom with the writer Guy Yocom. Guy has told me about taking Plimpton to the Washington Road Hooters, where fresh servers were brought in every year, women known as Hooters Recruiters. One took a liking to George, then in his early 70s. “You’re so cute,” she said. Plimpton’s cheeks went red.

At that same Masters, Dan Jenkins took Plimpton to see Hootie Johnson, then the club’s chairman. Describing this unlikely scene in Golf Digest, Plimpton wrote, “As we were about to enter the chairman’s office Dan urged me to start off by asking Mr. Johnson, ‘Now let’s get it straight — is it Hootie or Hooters?’ I resisted.”

Plimpton had a theory on sportswriting: the smaller the ball, the better the writing. John Daly wrote a book called My Life In & Out of the Rough.

In it, he writes:

I love women, I really do. I guess it shows, what with me being married now four times. But I got to tell you, it ain’t been easy. I pay a few hundred grand a year in alimony and child support. I’ve had three divorces: one peaceful but long, one long and nasty, one short and brutal. Still, while I’m not exactly an oil painting, women do seem to like me okay. And one of my main sponsors is Hooters, so how bad could I be?

The guess here is that Hooters and the Daly bus have not reached the end of the road.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com