When John Daly ended up in a fist fight during a PGA Tour tournament with the father of one of his competitors

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John Daly is one of the most entertaining characters to have ever graced the world of professional golf.

Daly achieved huge success during his time at the top, with two major championships to his name, and he was the longest hitter on the PGA Tour for two decades, by quite some distance as well.

However, the incredibly gifted 59-year-old was also involved in plenty of controversy.

Daly was banned from the Australian Open after his poor behavior on the golf course in 2011 and that was nothing new for the man affectionately known as the ‘Wild Thing’.

He withdrew from big events on numerous occasions throughout his career.

And that theme has continued on into his PGA Tour Champions career, with Daly recently withdrawing from the Sanford International after making a 14-over par 19 on the par-five 12th hole en route to a round of 88.

However, all of those transgressions were nothing in comparison to what happened just after the World Series of Golf at Firestone in Akron, Ohio, back in 1994.

When John Daly ended up in a fist fight during a PGA Tour tournament

Daly was struggling with his life off the golf course in 1994.

His year actually got off to a great start on the course, with a win at the BellSouth Classic in May.

However, things quickly went downhill for Daly after he missed the cut at the US Open at Oakmont in 1994.

He was disqualified from the Canon Greater Hartford Open at the end of June, before withdrawing from the New England Classic the following month.

Daly then missed three cuts in a row before he finished sixth from last in his final event of the year at the NEC World Series of Golf.

Following a final round 83, Daly was involved in a physical altercation with the father of one of his competitors, Jeff Roth.

The two-time major champion was allegedly hitting into the group in front of him on numerous occasions and after being heckled by Roth’s father, things escalated quickly.

Daly was grabbed from behind by Roth’s father in the parking lot, and a skirmish ensued between the two on the ground. Fans intervened to break up the fight and both parties went their separate ways.

Daly received a $20,000 fine for his troubles and was banned for the remainder of the 1994 season.

Back in 2020, Daly explained what actually happened at Firestone.

He said: “At Firestone one year in ’94 I got heckled by Jeff Roth, a guy who as a club pro, he played in the PGA Championship a few times.

“I was playing with Davis Love and Neal Lancaster and I can’t remember what hole it was, it was kind of a blind drive. I hit last and Davis hit it down the middle and I see this guy holding his arms up, but the marshal had told us to go.

“So the next hole is a driveable par four and they’re walking off the green and I guess Jeff stepped off the back, I hit it on the left side pin high and the next thing you know I’m getting heckled by his parents, the whole way in,.

“I’m going like, ‘what did I do’? I’d put up with it for three or four holes and I went up to a rules official and I said, ‘you need to control those people who are heckling me, I haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t know why they’re doing it’.

“This was at the Firestone North Course, so after your round you’ve got to walk through a huge fan parking lot and this old man, his father, jumps on my back. What are you going to do? I got a good couple of punches in…but (laughter).

“Jeff was 30 yards away going, ‘I’ll kick your butt’, and I said, ‘well come on man, you gonna let this guy do it for you’?“

What Jeff Roth said about John Daly and his father fighting

Roth opened up on the incident many years after it happened.

He said: “Back in ’94 in the World Series of Golf, he was going through a lot of issues and I happened to be in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

“He almost killed me with one of his tee shots, hitting in to me and then he did it on the next hole too.

“I remember coming off going to the parking lot where the communications trailer was. I got in touch with commissioner Finchem and we went up into one of the rooms there are Firestone and we chatted for a couple of hours.

“Neal Lancaster who had played with Daly was really the only person who came up there and offered any kind of words of apology. I give Neal a lot of credit for that because Daly had basically just played right through Neal on the last hole and left Neal out in the fairway. So Neal had to kind of finish by himself because Daly was trying to track me down.

“There was some words spoken between my little gallery and he and his caddie. We had a few words in the parking lot there.

“I was walking down the hallway actually past the pro shop when we heard the scuffle between my parents and Daly. I walked outside and my dad was kind of picking himself up off the asphalt and then John and I had a few more words and I kind of left it at that.“

There are always two sides to every story, and nobody came out of this looking good.

However, the main thing is that both Daly and Roth’s father moved on quickly from the incident, with nobody getting seriously hurt.