It's been a rough, rough two years. When one hears John Daly say these words above the din of a wind-blown practice area, it tends to grab one's attention. It is akin to Mozart saying: "Hey, I have just written something. Fancy a listen?" Or Picasso murmuring: "This doodle is interesting. Do you want a peek?"

Daly has a genius for trouble. He is the nabob of sob. He endures an existence that is painful, messy but that is the saviour of a golf reporter on a slow day.

His present difficulty is two-fold. It does not concern his struggles with alcohol or his repeated skirmishes with matrimony. Daly, a two-time major champion, has endured two years of almost constant pain and injury.

He is, too, in the midst of a controversy.

Admittedly, this is like saying a fish is in the midst of water. Daly's 2008 row concerns Butch Harmon "who needs to stay as far away from me as he possibly can". Daly weighs 300lb and change. Mr Harmon, be warned.

The coach's transgression appears to be comments he made about Daly disappearing into a Hooters tent during a tournament, quaffing beers and assigning his bag to an American football coach. Daly admits the Hooters part. He disputes the rest with a belligerence mixed with a naive, affecting honesty. "I'm eating too much, but I'm not drinking hardly at all," he said. Harmon, once briefly Daly's coach, made his claims on the Golf Channel and "real men just don't do that". He will be calling him out at high noon next.

Daly, of course, has pressing problems with his health. This is a man who was once taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack and the doctors found him lying behind the screen with a Marlboro in his mouth and the remnants of a Burger King takeaway lying on the gurney.

Mercifully, his ailments now seem golf related. They still cause the great man some angst, though. "My doctor told me I shouldn't be here," he said on arrival at Royal Birkdale. Yesterday, he expanded: "I've got tendinitis in my left elbow and I had a cyst in my right hand that was a calcium build-up that we thought was arthritis," he said. Daly has also been forced to deal with a shoulder injury and rib surgery just three months ago.

He comes to the Open, therefore, in the sort of fragile shape that belies his impressive frame. "I can't really judge my game," said the behemoth who lifted the 1991 USPGA championship and the Open at St Andrews in 1995.

"The last few days have been the first time in a year and a half that I could work on my golf game. It felt pretty good to work for six or seven hours, hit a lot of balls. I don't expect a lot here."

He is probably correct not to be talking up his chances. In 12 events on the US Tour this year, Daly has failed to make the weekend. In three European Tour events, he has made the cut once. Since the 1998 Open at Birkdale, he has made the cut twice in the greatest golf tournament in the world.

Daly, however, endures as a favourite with spectators. He has never knowingly stood on a tee with the intention of playing safe. But he can also engineer the most extraordinary, delicate shots.

His performance at St Andrews in 2005 was memorable if purely for a flicked wedge that shot towards the sun over Fife before landing with a dull thud just inches from the hole. It was part of a display that led him to finishing tied for 15th.

"Everybody wakes up to a different day not knowing what to expect," he said. "I think the fans do not know what to expect of me. We'll just have to see what happens.

"Europe has been really, really good for me. It has just been bad for me the last couple of years, being hurt and not being able to play good golf." He added: "Physically, mentally it ruins your confidence and I've had none for a couple of years. It's just always something that is ailing or hurting."

At the practice ground after hitting some three-quarter shots, Daly was gently reflective: "I feel that I am missing out on my life a little bit. It's been a rough, rough two years."

This is a claim that merits some attention. Daly, after all, wrote in his biography: "My father pulled a gun on me, my mother died, my best friend walked out on me and my wife was convicted of a felony and sent to prison. All that in five years."

But he was still looking to the future with both the melancholy and the wit of a true comic. "I'm a survivor," he said. He is designing a course outside of Joplin, Missouri, that is more than 8000 yards in length.

He is thinking big, hanging tough. "It's pretty hot in Arkansas right now," he said of his healthy tan. "I can take my shirt off there."

I don't know about Butch Harmon but there was an image that left me feeling pretty spooked.