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…