Golf and alcohol have been best friends since the very first time a man in knickers made a bad shot and needed something to take the edge off. Today, in an era of trackman data, protein shakes, and yoga mats in the locker room, the sport still carries a deep, cultural relationship with the bottle. Whether it’s cracking a cold one in a cart after 18 holes or raising a glass of Rioja on the 19th hole, booze and the fairways are practically inseparable.
But what about the professionals? What happens when the cameras are rolling, the FedEx Cup points are on the line, and the legends of the PGA Tour decide to indulge? Some of the most entertaining, controversial, and downright human stories in professional golf revolve around who is drinking, what they’re drinking, and just how much. From a man who once consumed a fifth of Jack Daniel’s a day to a Spanish maestro who pairs a glass of fine Rioja with a Cuban cigar before teeing off, the PGA Tour has had its fair share of legendary drinkers.
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This isn’t a cautionary tale. It’s a honest, entertaining, and factual look at the men who brought their love of a cold beer (or a stiff whiskey) into the world of professional golf, and what that relationship did to their careers, their legacies, and in some cases, their lives.
The Culture of Drinking in Professional Golf
Before naming names, it’s worth understanding why golf and alcohol are so deeply intertwined. Unlike basketball or football, golf is a sport played over four to five hours in wide open spaces, often in the sweltering sun. The pace is leisurely. The social element is enormous. Even at the amateur level, drinking is baked into the experience.
A study conducted by data scientists at Pickswise surveyed golfers across all 50 states and found that Florida golfers average 4.8 drinks per round, the highest in the nation. That breaks down to roughly one drink every 3.75 holes. Texas came in second at 4.6 drinks per round. Interestingly, even the most sober states in the U.S. outpaced their UK counterparts by more than half a drink per round, despite what the raucous galleries at the Ryder Cup might suggest.
That culture doesn’t disappear when golfers turn professional. It evolves. In many cases, it intensifies. The loneliness of life on the road, the pressure of performance, the camaraderie of the locker room: all of it creates an environment where alcohol can quietly become a problem for players who once thought they had it under control.
The PGA Tour’s official rulebook prohibits players from drinking during competitive rounds. According to nine-year Tour veteran Michael Kim, however, a small number of players have been known to bend that rule in extreme circumstances, though he stressed it is far from common.
John Daly: Golf’s Most Legendary Drinker
No article about drinking on the PGA Tour would be complete without dedicating considerable space to John Daly. In fact, it is impossible to overstate how central alcohol has been to his story. Daly is not just golf’s most famous drinker. He is, by most measures, one of the heaviest drinkers in the history of professional sports.
Born on April 28, 1966, Daly grew up in a working-class household where Jack Daniel’s was the drink of choice. He began drinking as a child, reportedly around age nine or ten, and by the time he reached the University of Arkansas, his relationship with alcohol was already serious business. His coach, Steve Loy, put him on a strict diet to lose 60 pounds. Daly’s solution? Replace food with liquor. He openly admitted to losing 65 to 67 pounds over a few months by subsisting on Jack Daniel’s and popcorn. “A fifth a day,” he told Golf Digest. “I didn’t eat for three days, probably went through four fifths of Jack and finally collapsed.” His first whiskey overdose landed him in a hospital.
What followed was a career of breathtaking contradictions. Daly arrived at the 1991 PGA Championship at Crooked Stick as the ninth alternate, barely having a place in the field. He drove through the night to make it. Then, with minimal preparation and what he later admitted was frequent intoxication, he won his first major championship. It remains one of the most improbable victories in golf history. He followed it up with a playoff win at the 1995 Open Championship at St Andrews, making him a two-time major champion. Between those victories, he also drank his way through some of the darkest chapters imaginable.
In an interview with broadcaster Graham Bensinger, Daly revealed that during his peak party years, he would consume 35 to 40 beers in a day, then follow it up with whiskey at night. He described going out until 7 or 7:30 in the morning on nights before Tour events with tee times at 8. His swing coach Butch Harmon famously quit in 2008, telling the press that the most important thing in Daly’s life was getting drunk.
One of the most legendary stories in all of golf lore involves the 1994 Sherwood Country Club event, where Daly invited a young Tiger Woods to have a drink the night before a head-to-head match. Woods declined, went to hit balls, worked out, and went to bed like a professional. Daly’s crew kept drinking for five or six more hours. The next morning, Daly’s caddie was still drunk as they walked to the tee. Daly ordered a Jack and Coke from the beverage cart on the first hole and proceeded to shoot a 65 while Tiger shot a 71. As Daly himself put it, “He was shaking his head all day.”
Perhaps the most remarkable tale of on-course drinking came during an L.A. Open, when the round became so slow that Daly retreated to the locker room at the turn and downed five beers. He then went out and shot four under on the front nine. He later said it was one of the only times he drank during an official competitive round.
The price of this lifestyle, however, was enormous.
| Category | Daly’s Toll |
|---|---|
| PGA Tour Suspensions | 2 |
| Trips to Alcohol Rehab | Multiple (including Betty Ford Center) |
| Marriages Ended | 4 |
| Estimated Gambling Losses | ~$50 million |
| Career PGA Tour Wins | 5 (including 2 majors) |
His swing coach’s departure, his sponsors dropping him one by one, and his descent into the Betty Ford Center at 31 years old are all chapters in a story that reads like a country song. And in fact, Daly literally wrote one: his 2010 track “Whiskey and Water” tells the story of a man whose old friend Jack Daniel’s keeps pulling him back. It’s not entirely fiction.
Despite everything, Daly’s fan support never collapsed. People saw in him something real, something messy and human. As journalist Lance Cagle wrote, “When fans look at Daly, we see both the talent we wish we had and the insecurities that we cannot shake.” He remains one of the most beloved figures the sport has ever produced, now competing on the PGA Tour Champions circuit where he is exempt for life from the PGA Championship.
David Feherty: Two Bottles of Whiskey and 40 Vicodin a Day
If John Daly is the cautionary tale everyone knows by name, David Feherty is the one the golf world nearly lost without the same level of headlines. The Northern Irishman turned professional in 1976 and built a solid European Tour career, winning five times and representing Europe in the 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island. He was witty, charismatic, and devastatingly funny. He was also quietly falling apart.
Feherty has described his peak consumption in staggering terms. “A typical day was 30 to 40 Vicodin and two and a half bottles of whiskey,” he told Rolling Stone. “There was cocaine, there was dope. When I think about it now I’m like, ‘Why am I alive?'” It is not a rhetorical question. He genuinely does not know how his body survived.
Some of his drinking stories are more darkly comedic than tragic. After winning the Scottish Open in Glasgow in 1986, Feherty went on such a bender that he woke up two days later on a putting green 150 miles away, alongside Led Zeppelin’s road manager, with no memory of getting there or what had happened to his silver trophy. While playing the Swedish Open, he went out for a drink and woke up the next day in Denmark, having crossed an international border during his blackout. He kept $600 in his wallet at all times because that was exactly the cost of getting back from Denmark to his starting time.
After retiring from playing, Feherty joined CBS Sports in 1997 and became one of the most beloved commentators in golf history. But the drinking continued. By the early 2000s, he had also been diagnosed with clinical depression and eventually bipolar disorder, a condition that does not mix well with substance abuse. He experienced hallucinations. He contemplated suicide. His wife Anita threatened to leave him after she watched their young daughter fetch him a bottle of whiskey.
That was the moment. Feherty got sober in 2005, with help from both Anita and two-time Masters champion Tom Watson, who recognized the signs without being told, privately helped arrange treatment, and traveled with Feherty to get it done. Jack Nicklaus, who happened to be nearby, lent Feherty his private jet to get to Kansas City. He stayed sober for ten years. Then his eldest son, Shey, died of an overdose in 2017, on Shey’s own 29th birthday. Feherty relapsed. He has spoken openly about it, and has since returned to sobriety.
Feherty’s story is different from Daly’s in one critical way: he never made his drinking part of his brand. He drank behind closed doors while projecting humor to the world. It was only when he got sober, and spoke truthfully about what had happened, that the golf world understood just how close it had come to losing him entirely.
Payne Stewart: The Charismatic Champion Who Fought the Bottle
Payne Stewart is remembered today primarily for two things: his iconic plus-fours and flat caps, and his tragic death in a plane crash in October 1999. But those who followed the Tour closely during the 1980s and early 1990s also remember that Stewart had a highly publicized battle with alcohol.
In 1987, Stewart was arrested for driving under the influence, a significant story at the time. In 1993, at the PGA Championship, he famously passed out in front of an airplane after a night of drinking with fellow players Paul Azinger and Mark Lye. These were not isolated incidents. His drinking during that era was well-known among Tour insiders and witnessed firsthand by fans and officials alike.
What makes Stewart’s story meaningful, rather than simply cautionary, is what came next. He reportedly got sober in 1995, and the years that followed produced the greatest golf of his career. He won the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, completing one of the most celebrated major victories in the sport’s history, holing a 15-foot putt on the 72nd hole to beat Phil Mickelson by a single stroke. The image of him raising his fist in triumph, dressed in red, white, and blue, became one of golf’s defining photographs.
Stewart died in a plane crash just months later. His recovery from alcohol, and the career renaissance that followed it, remains one of the more poignant redemption arcs in sports history.
Miguel Angel Jimenez: Fine Wine, Fat Cigars, and Zero Apologies
Not every story here is a warning. Miguel Angel Jimenez, the flamboyant Spaniard with the iconic ponytail and the permanently relaxed demeanor, represents something entirely different: a man who has turned his love of drinking into art.
Known on Tour as “The Mechanic” because of a brief stint working in an auto shop before becoming a professional golfer, Jimenez is unabashedly committed to the finer things. According to a legendary interview with Cigar Aficionado, he keeps 400 cigars in his home humidor, smokes four or five a day, and has assembled a wine collection that would make a Michelin-starred sommelier weep with admiration. His cellar includes bottles of Rioja from names like Cirsion, Ardanza, Marques de Riscal, and Torre Muga, as well as Spanish wines from Ribera del Duero and fino sherry. He also enjoys Bushmills 1608 Irish whiskey and Lagavulin 16-Year-Old single malt Scotch, which he notes pairs beautifully with a Cuban cigar.
His pre-round ritual has become the stuff of golf legend. While other Tour players are doing ice baths and running biometric tests, Jimenez is on the range with an espresso in one hand. He has openly admitted that he thinks nothing of having a glass of wine before he goes out to play. The difference, he insists, is that he never smokes or drinks during official competitive rounds. He just has one right before he tees off and one right after he finishes, often lighting his cigar before he’s signed his scorecard.
When a reporter at a PGA Tour Champions event asked him what he planned to fix in his game before a final-round showdown, Jimenez gave what may be the single greatest answer in the history of professional sports press conferences: “No, I’m going to pick up now, I’m going to go to a nice restaurant to have a nice bottle of wine and a beautiful big fat cigar, right, and enjoy myself. And then whatever happens tomorrow, whatever happens.”
He went out the next day and competed for the win.
Jimenez has won more than 21 European Tour titles and, at 61 years of age, continues to rack up victories on the PGA Tour Champions, where he is one of the most dominant players on the circuit. His attitude toward drinking, smoking, and living well is not recklessness. For him, it is a philosophy. “I’m like the good wines,” he once said. “Getting better with age.”
It is very hard to argue with him.
Jason Dufner: The Coolest Man on Tour (With a Beer in Hand)
Jason Dufner is not an alcoholic, and nobody has ever suggested he is. But the 2013 PGA Championship winner has built a reputation on being the most casually, authentically chill man on the PGA Tour, and alcohol is part of that identity in the most relaxed way possible.
When asked whether he ever shows emotion, Dufner once told reporters: “Here and there a couple of times a year. Usually there is some alcohol involved or Auburn football, but for the most part I’m laid back.”
After winning the 2013 PGA Championship at Oak Hill, photos circulated of Dufner drinking directly from the Wanamaker Trophy. He later told the Howard Stern Show that the Wanamaker can hold exactly 43 beers. He did not say how he confirmed this scientifically. The world chose not to question it.
Dufner’s drinking is not dramatic. It is not a crisis or a scandal. It is simply part of who he is: the guy who seems to exist at a constant 72 degrees of relaxation, who built a social media following during the “Dufnering” meme era, and who once won a major championship while looking like he was mildly inconvenienced by the whole affair. That he occasionally has a few beers in celebration fits his persona perfectly. It has never appeared to interfere with his game or his professional conduct.
Interestingly, Dufner is also one of the most well-liked players on Tour among peers and fans alike. His casual honesty, including his willingness to acknowledge that booze is part of how he occasionally expresses joy, endears him to fans who are tired of perfectly managed athlete personas.
Chris Kirk: The Courage to Put the Glass Down
Chris Kirk’s story is not about excess or fame. It is about the quiet, devastating way that alcohol can take hold of a person who, by every external measure, appears to be succeeding.
Kirk won four times on the PGA Tour between 2011 and 2015 and reached as high as world No. 16. He was selected for the 2015 U.S. Presidents Cup team. From the outside, everything looked fine. From the inside, things were coming apart.
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Kirk grew up with a family history of alcoholism. As a professional athlete on the road for months at a time, away from his wife and three young sons, he began using alcohol to manage anxiety and loneliness. The drinking escalated gradually. He gave up beer in late 2017, telling himself it was for weight reasons. He switched to wine, vodka, and bourbon. “Switching from beer to hard liquor probably accelerated things,” he later admitted to Golf Digest.
What followed was a cycle he described in unsparing detail. “I’ve got to drink the right amount at night so that I feel normal the next day. Not too much so that I’m really hung over, but I can’t not have anything or I’m going to feel weird the next day.” That sentence, delivered quietly in a PGA Tour interview, captures the functional alcoholism that is hardest to see from the outside.
In May 2019, on the eve of his 34th birthday, Kirk announced an indefinite leave from the Tour to deal with alcohol abuse and depression. He enrolled in a 12-step program and sought psychiatric help. He relapsed twice before finally achieving sobriety on April 29, 2019, a date he knows precisely because it matters deeply to him.
He returned to the Tour in late 2019 and, over the following years, rebuilt his career with remarkable patience and grace. On February 26, 2023, he won the Honda Classic, his first PGA Tour victory in nearly eight years, ending an 2,836-day drought. He celebrated with a Diet Coke. His first words after the victory: “I owe everything that I have in my entire life to my sobriety.”
The PGA Tour awarded Kirk its Courage Award for 2023. Commissioner Jay Monahan said his impact on the game goes far beyond anything measurable by a scorecard. Kirk won again at The Sentry in January 2024, his sixth PGA Tour title. He has become one of the most powerful voices in professional sports on the subject of addiction and recovery, openly sharing his story because he knows others are fighting the same battle in silence.
The Modern PGA Tour and the Changing Relationship With Alcohol
The fitness revolution in professional golf, pioneered in large part by Tiger Woods’ emphasis on physical training in the late 1990s, fundamentally changed the culture of the locker room. A new generation of players arrived who treated their bodies as athletic instruments, not just vehicles for getting around 18 holes. Strength training, nutrition science, sleep optimization: all of it became standard. And with it, the “work hard, play hard” drinking culture of the previous era became less prevalent.
That said, it has not disappeared. Several PGA Tour stops maintain reputations for active nightlife where players indulge more freely. The Waste Management Phoenix Open at TPC Scottsdale, known as the “Greatest Show on Golf,” attracts massive alcohol-soaked galleries and creates an atmosphere that is as much festival as tournament. The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am has long combined professional golf with celebrity culture and social drinking. These events are part of the Tour’s personality.
Certain players of the modern era, including Brooks Koepka, have leaned into celebrations involving alcohol with genuine enthusiasm. After winning the 2023 PGA Championship, Koepka was photographed drinking beer from the Wanamaker Trophy. According to social media reports, it was filled with 18 beers. Koepka is a disciplined athlete by any standard. For him, celebration drinking is exactly that: celebration.
Rickie Fowler has partnered with tequila brands and represents what might be called the modern professional’s approach to alcohol: social drinking combined with business savvy, treated as part of a balanced and carefully managed life rather than a coping mechanism.
The contrast between the John Daly era and today’s Tour tells a larger story about how professional athletes in all sports have evolved in their relationship with their own bodies and the demands of elite competition.
What the Data Actually Says About Golfers and Drinking
To put the PGA Tour’s culture in context, consider how deeply drinking is embedded in golf at every level.
| State | Average Drinks Per Round |
|---|---|
| Florida | 4.8 |
| Texas | 4.6 |
| North Carolina | approx. 4.3 |
| New Mexico | approx. 4.2 |
| Pennsylvania | approx. 4.1 |
| United Kingdom (average) | 0.33 to 0.40 |
Source: Pickswise survey of 1,500+ U.S. and 1,500 UK golfers
The gulf between American and British drinking culture on the golf course is staggering. American recreational golfers are drinking at a rate roughly ten to fourteen times higher than their counterparts across the Atlantic. For professionals who came up through this culture, who were socialized at country clubs, college golf programs, and mini-tour events where drinking was part of the atmosphere, the transition to the PGA Tour does not automatically switch off those habits.
The Players Who Chose a Different Path
It would be incomplete to write this article without acknowledging those who made the opposite choice. Bubba Watson, a two-time Masters champion, has never consumed alcohol in his life, citing his Christian faith and his belief that it would compromise his performance and focus. Watson’s career is one of the more decorated in recent memory, with two green jackets and multiple PGA Tour victories.
Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, and Scottie Scheffler all project the image of athletes who treat their bodies with extreme care. That does not mean they never have a beer. It means that for the current generation of elite Tour players, drinking is no longer a defining characteristic, and certainly not a crutch.
The evolution is real. The Tour of 2025 is a dramatically different place from the Tour of 1991, when Daly was drinking Jack Daniel’s by the fifth and Feherty was waking up in foreign countries. That progression is, on balance, a good thing for the longevity and health of the players.
A Toast to Golf’s Most Human Stories
What makes the drinking stories of the PGA Tour so fascinating is not the alcohol itself. It is what the alcohol reveals. John Daly’s drinking reveals a man of extraordinary natural talent who could never quite get out of his own way, and yet remained beloved because he was so transparently, painfully, beautifully human. David Feherty’s drinking reveals a brilliantly funny man who was using laughter to hide a darkness he thought would swallow him. Payne Stewart’s drinking, and subsequent sobriety, reveals that people can change, and that change can produce the greatest moments of a person’s life. Chris Kirk’s story reveals that addiction respects no ranking or earnings, and that asking for help is the hardest and most important thing a person can do.
Miguel Angel Jimenez? He is simply a man who has decided that a glass of Rioja and a Montecristo cigar are among the finer things this world has to offer, and he refuses to be ashamed of that. At 61, still competing and winning, he may be making a point.
Golf teaches you that the course always wins eventually. You cannot fight it. You can only manage it, respect it, and find joy in the moments when you play it well. The players who learned that lesson, about the course and about themselves, found something more lasting than a great scorecard. They found a way to keep playing.
And for the rest of us watching from the gallery, cold drink in hand? We raise one to all of them.
Whether you’re a beer-on-the-back-nine type, a cocktail-at-the-clubhouse person, or a glass-of-wine-after-the-round drinker, the stories behind the PGA Tour’s most notable drinkers are a reminder that the people swinging those clubs are just as complicated, flawed, and remarkable as anyone you’d meet at your local 19th hole.
Sources: https://chesbrewco.com
Category: Drink
