Daly shows delicate touch

Course etiquette be damned. The young man walking up the first fairway couldn't resist the temptation of extracting a mobile phone from the back pocket of his Chinos and making a call to his deskbound friend. On the sort of day when life is worth living, the golf junkie wanted to rub it in, and some more, to his absent colleague.

"Jaysus, this guy Daly hits the ball out of sight. You'd want to see him," he said, knowing full well the listener on the other end could do no such thing. "I'm telling you, he's incredible."

You'd better believe it. John Patrick Daly's presence in the field may have been courtesy of greenbacks (and plenty of them) but he had the crowd mesmerised in yesterday's first round.

And, strangely, it wasn't his grip-it-and-rip-it driving that held them spellbound, rather his incredible short game: the touch of an angel from the man who has God-Serenity-Courage-Wisdom stamped onto his black leather bag. The Diet Coke-guzzling two-time major winner, in fact, performed an array of shot-making from rough and flower beds to upstage the noted king of the short game, Seve Ballesteros, who played alongside him.

Daly's first stroke in the 1999 Irish Open took place shortly after eight o'clock off the 10th tee. A good-sized gallery of the devoted and the curious had already gathered to follow his every move and, as the three-ball meandered around the course towards the notorious 13th, the crowd had swollen significantly. Oddly enough, the trio of Daly, Ballesteros and Paul McGinley hit the watching public with a par blitz over the opening three holes. The 13th was to change that pedestrian statistic, but the source of the trouble proved to be the least likely of the three.

The only one to use a driver off the tee (Daly took two-iron, Ballesteros 3-wood), the Dubliner's drive clipped a tree and dived into the creek for a watery grave. His third shot with a fairway wood off a nasty downhill lie veered right into thick rough. McGinley hacked the attempted recovery a mere two yards into further trouble. After six shots, he still hadn't found the putting surface and he eventually signed for an eight.

McGinley's troubles didn't affect Messrs Daly and Ballesteros, both of whom had also missed the green. Anything but, in fact, as both contrived to conjure up pars.

The American's four was spectacular, almost defying belief.

His four-iron approach curled right into a flower bed set amidst trees some 50 yards from the green. The ball rubbed against the root of a tree, but Daly punched at it with a sand wedge and propelled it forward. Peat and flower buds were sprayed everywhere but, miraculously, the ball finished 15 feet from the pin (but still off the green) and he demonstrated his touch with the new Odyssey Triforce putter by holing out.

It was the sort of recovery that Ballesteros has become famous for over the years. At the 18th, Daly was again in Houdini mode. A wild drive left his ball nestling in a fir tree. He shoved his huge frame into its branches, chipped back onto the fairway and hit a sand wedge third shot to three feet. He sank the putt, and the crowd went crazy.

Time and time again, Ballesteros has driven crowds around the world crazy with such antics himself. Yesterday, his short game wasn't as sharp as the big man's. Yet, Daly remarked: "Seve's short game is still just phenomenal."

But what of the swing that gets the Spaniard into so many weird and wonderful places? Daly believes he has the solution. Would he not tell him? "What can you say to a legend? I'm too scared to tell him," responded Daly, adding: "But I do hope he reads about it in the papers."

The solution, according to Daly, is for Seve to "hit at impact a little lower . . . as great as his swing is, I think it would help him an awful lot. Everybody in Europe and in the States would love to see him playing better."

Such sentiments have been expressed about Daly too. Yesterday, he ignored the jack hammering in the adjacent industrial site beside the 16th and the noise of the chainsaw in the forestry across from the fourth green, and was unaware that the clock was put on his three-ball on the 15th. Instead, Daly played golf. And that pleased everyone.

"What did you make of the tee-markers that resembled pints of creamy-headed stout?" he was asked. "I just imagined they were chocolate milk shakes," Daly quipped back. Not your average golfer, is he?