Oddly fetching in a Van Dyke beard and gonad-crushing cheerleader bloomers, David Feherty, the 1991 Ryder Cup man from Northern Ireland and now America's best TV golf analyst, has been bouncing on to our screens here lately.

In the best of his ads for Cobra Golf, the half-daft Feherty leaps on a giant trampoline and between bounces tells us why some driver has the springiest clubface on earth. "While the trampoline was Cobra's idea," Feherty coos with a schoolgirl's bow, "the outfit was mine."

This we never doubted.

The droll jester from Bangor, County Down, may have won 10 times professionally and made more than £1.5m before retiring a decade ago, but he has surpassed those earnings and found his true calling by becoming a trenchant, hilarious voice in the stuffy confines of TV golf.

"I'm convinced my Irishness is a huge part of my success," he says. "Well, that and I make fun of people. I'm really more of a stand-up comedian who happened to be good at golf."

For a decade he has patrolled the country clubs of the PGA Tour with headset, microphone and intellect - often in shorts and barefoot on his off-camera days - pricking the pompous and creating a whole new golf vocabulary.

After one of Tiger Woods' other-worldly shots, Feherty proclaimed: "Never has my flabber been so completely gasted." In a Pythonesque skit on a golf highlights show he played a stalker who screamed at Tiger on the driving range (Tiger was in on the joke). Feherty gets along so well with the impenetrable golf messiah that the two occasionally engage in gaseous duels on the links.

"I've never beaten him," Feherty insists. "He doesn't allow himself to lose anything, including his sense of fun. Going into the final day of last year's Buick Open, which would be his 50th win, I had assumed he was too preoccupied to remember we were tied in our juvenile contest at eight each. But when he came out of the scorer's tent, I offered him my hand, which he grasped, and I heard an almost imperceptible squeak. He looked me in the eye, and deadpanned, I win'. "

Feherty empathises with the players without becoming a sycophant. "These guys chasing Tiger - Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk, Retief Goosen - they're the best group the world has ever seen," he says. "But they all know that if Tiger plays well they're screwed. Look at Mickelson: 42 majors without winning and he endures the most withering criticism of any player at any time in the game's history. Just vilified. Then he wins three majors, but badly loses one again the US Open, and he gets crucified. When anyone other than Tiger wins a major, it should count as three."

Feherty signed a four-year contract with CBS that will have him doing 20 tournaments this year. He's written five books, is struggling with a sequel to his first novel, A Nasty Bit of Rough, and writes a monthly column for Golf magazine. He's done sitcom work, voiceovers for Tiger Woods' video games, and in addition to free appearances for children's charities, this year will do about 30 corporate outings for about $25,000 a pop.

An adopted Texan who loves his macho Ford truck and hand-crafted shotguns - he hunts birds with guys like Tom Watson - Feherty now lives in a plush Dallas mini-manse with his second wife, Anita, and their daughter, eight-year-old Erin. (Both have two older boys from previous marriages. He has dual Irish and UK citizenship, but not American).

Anita, an interior designer, met Feherty on a blind date, and married him in 1996. Lately she spends much of her time furnishing an even bigger mansion they're building nearby, complete with pool, elevator and acoustically-engineered office for Feherty, an audiophile whose vinyl collection ranges from Puccini to Johnny Cash. Not bad for a blue-collar kid from Ulster.

Bored with school, except English and music, Feherty says his best education came from his father, Billy, a surveyor at the Belfast docklands, and mother, Vi, a "typical Ulster housewife" with a dry wit, who raised their three children through the Troubles without instilling hate for anyone.

"We had murders and explosions in our town," he says, "but the violence seemed an irrelevance. That's how localised it was . . . My father always found something good to say about someone, no matter their reputation. I remember when he came home after being laid off at 42. I had never seen his face like that. The next day, thinking Dad would need to start his own business, I stole some office supplies from primary school. I was nine. He marched me back to confess what I had done."

Feherty became the pro-shop kid at Bangor Golf Club, learning the game from "a wonderful man", the then head pro Ernie Jones, now at the K Club. Feherty went on to work at Holywood, Balmoral and Royal Belfast golf clubs before turning pro at 17 (His favourite courses: Portmarnock, Waterville and Rosses Point). "But I knew by the time I was 20," he says, "that I wanted to be in broadcasting. Early on I was always on stage, either at school or in church. At Christmas I would be the little a**hole in front of the choir singing Once in Royal David's City."

Feherty captained Ireland's winning 1990 Dunhill Cup team at St Andrew's, hitting what Sam Torrance tells me was "maybe the greatest four-iron ever" to win in sudden death matchplay on the 17th hole against England's Howard Clark. "Once the Scots were knocked out," says Feherty, "the whole crowd turned Irish."

He played well on the 1991 Ryder Cup team that lost at Kiawah Island, and barely missed qualifying for the team in 1989 and 1993. Yet Feherty admits: "I knew early on I would never be a world-beater."

"For David, golf was just a way of earning money," says Torrance, Feherty's best friend on the Euro Tour. "He loved the game as much as any of us, but he didn't like the hard work of travelling and being away from home. It's a lonely life."

"Most of us didn't understand why he didn't play better," says Nick Price, another friend. "I think he was better than me, but David is extremely intelligent and sometimes very smart people have trouble playing the game because golf is not an equation."

Feherty says he had chances to win majors in 1989 at Royal Troon, in '91 at Crooked Stick (PGA) and in '94 at Turnberry, where he finished tied for sixth, seventh and fourth, respectively. "But I didn't want the responsibility that came with winning a major. There was always this one pivotal shot . . . and I would always miss that shot."

And this was a conscious thing?

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. There was a comfort in mediocrity," he says.

"I had the good sense not to Van de Velde myself. I played just well enough to be perceived as an almost guy. And since I was honest about that, people really identified with it . . .

"The truth is that I felt like it was a nine-to-five job at times. Even now he says he doesn't own a set of clubs and doesn't play. Officially, it's because of an arthritic back. Unofficially, he'd rather shoot clays. I'd run out of money, then go win a tournament. The aspect I enjoyed most was the social life. I was around the same hundred guys every week, really close friends like Torrance, John O'Leary, Ian Woosnam. It was like a boys club for the best part of 20 years, and for me it revolved around the nightlife . . .

"I was the Tiger Woods of drinking. I was a world-class drunk."

For nearly two years Feherty has gone through a public confession about his alcoholism and depression, incorporating the struggle into his stand-up comedy and going so far as to pose nude in Golf magazine to illustrate one of his near-suicidal moments in what was a two-bottles-of-Bushmills-a-day hell.

In a dark wood-panelled office that could pass for a divorce lawyer's, Feherty scoops up his hunting beagle, Ziggy, for moral support as we get introspective.

"I honestly don't know how Anita managed to deal with me. I had these horrible hallucinations. People doing horrible things to my children, but I couldn't see their faces. I couldn't do anything. I withdrew socially. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. Physically I was wracked with pain. Head to foot.

I thought I had some kind of degenerative muscle disorder. Turns out, that's a symptom of depression.

"I drank heavily from about the time I was 16, but I've never been drunk on the air. Though he admits to losing or giving away all but two of his tournament trophies while on the bottle. I became a spectacular drunk toward the end. I would drink one bottle of whiskey to prepare myself for drinking the second. That was what it took to put me to sleep at night. I went days without sleep. That's the real killer, when you wake up screaming and realise you haven't been to sleep yet . . .

"After I told my doctor how much I was drinking," he says, needing a punchline, "he asked, Have you thought about getting help?' "No', I said, I can drink it all myself'."

If he knows of any deep root cause for his pain, he's not saying. He was misdiagnosed in 2000 with adult attention-deficit disorder and there was a pretty miserable first marriage that lasted 10 years, but he doesn't dwell on it. "There was no priest fondling," he quips. "With my protestant background, the priests weren't even fondling themselves."

His angel of intervention, finally came in the voice of little Erin, who two years ago, at six, saw him nearly passed out in the living room, an empty bottle of Bushmills beside him. "She crawled into my lap," Feherty tells me, his voice drained and slow, "and she said, Dad, you need another bottle'. She looked really sad, so I sent her to get one."

With that, Anita could take no more. Sober up, or she and Erin would leave. So he agreed to stop killing himself. Says Feherty: "I looked into the eyes of a young child who had the accidental wisdom to flip the switch."

In the made-for-TV world he inhabits we'd go straight to the happy violins now, but this is Planet Feherty. "There's nothing worse than a reformed whore," he bellows. So, yes, there have been a few lapses on the road back. A trip to Donegal in June 2005 for his dad's 80th birthday turned into a three-week binge. "How else was I to know if I was truly cured?"

Sober for six months now, he's off his depression medication and looks like a clear-eyed athlete again, biceps thick, channelling Lance Armstrong as he rides his bike through Dallas, itching to hunt for quail with Ziggy. "Everyone around me is happier. When you help one depressive you help a hundred other people."

The only thing missing - this is America, remember - is a testimonial thanking God for his rescue. That is the way it's done over here, but Feherty's not buying it. "I am a diehard atheist," he says, crossing into uncharted waters for an American TV personality.

"Funny how on TV in America you can talk about paedophile priests but you can't talk about why you would ever need priests . . . I have no trouble with Jesus. I used to wear Payne Stewart's WWJD What Would Jesus Do? bracelet. But all the rest is superstition. All the things we loathe in human beings are the attributes we give to this God. He wants to be worshipped and told how great he is, meanwhile somebody's five-year-old is being raped by her stepfather. Where is her God?"

Feherty pauses. This is no random rant. But surely he's thinking that in America, where last year a survey found 53% of the population believes the Bible is literally true, network TV executives don't fancy public atheists for golf broadcasts. After all, a sizeable number of tour players align themselves with America's religious right, whom Feherty calls "maybe the scariest people in the world".

Ziggy nervously paws the carpet. Who wants to see unemployed beagles? We change the subject . . .

  • Bruce Selcraig is an ex-Sports Illustrated reporter and writes for the New York Times and The Smithsonian magazine, among others.