John Daly lunches at Hooters with a NY Times columnist and you couldn’t ask for a better book plug. Sorry, it’s one of those Times articles available only to subscribers, but here’s a taste:

Daly has never lost his Arkansas-honed accent, though he has been a lost soul all over the map. He has never surrendered his Southern identity, though he has succumbed to Tennessee whiskey. He has never played the victim to an abusive father, though he has been haunted by suicidal thoughts.

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“I know myself better than most people could know themselves, maybe, because I’ve been through rehab,” he said over lunch.

The drinking tales and the Betty Ford visits, the slot-machine obsessions and the squandered millions, his past wives and his incarcerated wife, and his sex droughts, romps and corresponding golf slumps and streaks are detailed in an unvarnished voice for his book, “My Life In and Out of the Rough,” published this month by HarperCollins.

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But this is not a melodramatic James Frey-esque, self-pity memoir with a saccharine message of healing through darkness complete with a tidy epiphany. This is not a superstar’s self-deification vehicle designed to buff his everyman goodness, either.

Daly is an unpolished man of loose ends, of addictions unconquered, of flaws unhemmed, of a life’s journey mired in stop-and-go traffic. This is John Daly. And as Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris sing it, “This is us.”

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Daly tells the writer, Selena Roberts, he just wants to be loved and hopes his current wife will provide some when she’s released from prison on a money laundering conviction.

As he’ll tell you, Daly is at his best when surrounded by good lovin’. “I just want to go home, get a great big hug and a French kiss and feel like I’m loved,” Daly said.

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