Wild Thing back on the path to 'heaven'

"Every time I come here I feel like I'm playing in my home town," he said. "The fans know I love them and I feel like they love me.

"They're my sort of crowd, country style with hearts of gold. They can relate to the problems I've had and I can relate to theirs."

Daly carries form as a passenger in the huge mobile home he travels in from tournament to tournament and uses in preference to the unsettling anonymity of a hotel room.

This season he has made the cut in all seven events in which he has teed up. Statistically he ranks second on the US PGA Tour in driving distance, third in putting average, fifth in sand saves and 33rd in scoring average. Yet this is the man whose 2003 PGA Tour programme ended with seven consecutive missed cuts or withdrawals.

There were those who feared Daly's career was bunkered forever. But in October he insisted on keeping a commercial commitment to play the Korean Open and was rewarded with his first tournament win in two years.

Daly returned home to play in the Callaway Invitational. And he won again.

"Not big tournaments, but it didn't matter," he said. "Any time you win a professional tournament these days you get confidence. And it carried over to this year a little bit."

A little bit? The Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines is one of the US PGA Tour's elite events and in February he hit a brilliant bunker shot to win it in a play-off against Britain's Luke Donald.

The 37-year-old Californian entered his 10th Masters insisting: "I feel like I'm playing well enough right now that maybe I can contend this year."

Yet, inevitably, there is emotional baggage in the back of that mobile home.

In 1993, Daly's first wife, Bettye, served him with divorce papers just before the Masters. Nonplussed, he finished third. This time he parked up at Augusta National to learn that his fourth wife, Sherrie, and her parents had pleaded guilty to money-laundering. Sherrie and her mother were put under house arrest for six months and given five years' probation. Daly's father-in-law was jailed for two years.

Daly knew nothing of the crimes, which took place before he met Sherrie. But he's standing by his gal, saying: "I told Sherrie, 'I know you're not guilty of anything. But you've got to make a plea. You can't beat a federal court, a federal judge and the FBI. There's no way.'"

There's no way, either, that Daly will let the experience affect him this week.

He said: "What I love about this place is I can forget about anything when I'm on the golf course because it's so serene. Not another place like it."

But then there's not another golfer like Daly. He said: "There's mistakes, divorces, drinking. Fans relate because they know what I've been through and I can feel what they've been through.

"It's about going forward in a positive way, instead of going backwards and making the same mistakes over and over again.

"I'm not the most religious person in the world, but I think the good Lord up there has blessed me. I think I've had 12 lives. There's a reason why I'm still here and a reason why I'm here this week."

If that reason is to win the Masters, we'll all offer a prayer of thanks.