ORLANDO, Fla. — John Daly woke up Wednesday morning to read that swing coach Butch Harmon fired him. Then he got a phone call when he was at the entrance to Bay Hill letting him know he had been kicked out of the Arnold Palmer Invitational for missing the pro-am.
“Hasn’t been a good day,” Daly told The Associated Press. “This is the last thing I needed in my life. I feel like I let Arnold down.”
The wild ride of golf’s most unpredictable figure took another hairpin turn when Daly said he was given wrong information that caused him to miss his tee time, starting a bizarre chain reaction that knocked out two other players from the tournament.
The tour has a policy that anyone missing the pro-am is ineligible to play in the tournament.
Daly, who received a sponsor’s exemption, played a Monday pro-am at Bay Hill and said he was asked to play the Wednesday pro-am, too. He requested a morning start, then called Tuesday to find out his tee time. A woman in the tournament office told him 9:47 a.m., which instead was his starting time for the first round.
“I didn’t even know that was my Thursday tee time,” Daly said. “I should have looked into it. It stinks for me. I want to do anything I can for the tournament as a sponsor exemption. I wanted to meet the people I was playing with in the pro-am. I love Arnold Palmer to death. I called and talked to him and apologized.
“And the thing that upsets me is I cost Nick O’Hern and Ryuji Imada, so now I got these guys mad at me, too.”
Imada and O’Hern were alternates for the pro-am, and both thought they were assigned to the afternoon group. Instead, they were the first two names called when Daly didn’t show, and when neither was around, they also were disqualified from the $5.8 million event.
O’Hern lives only five minutes away at Isleworth and was furious to learn he would not be eligible.
“When I should have been on the tee, I was giving my girls breakfast,” O’Hern said. “I thought common sense would have prevailed. This is a tough one to take. Unfortunately, we got caught up in John’s snowball effect.”
The snowball is starting to look like an avalanche.
Daly lost his full PGA Tour card two years ago and relies mainly on sponsor exemptions. In seven events this year, he has missed the cut three times. 

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