Want to inject some instant energy into your operation? Check out John Daly Pizza, a business-within-a-business proposition that pairs the celebrity power of its namesake owner with a turnkey pizza program that comes complete with all the necessary ingredients, equipment and marketing collateral. Daly used to be the baddest of the bad boys on the PGA Tour, but since the Tiger Woods revelations, consider his reputation restored.
The pizza part of the John Daly Pizza Program seems well thought out. Sign up and you’ll get a pizza baking oven, a refrigerated pizza preparation unit, pizza making utensils and smallwares and all the necessary training materials. Don’t need all that? Then just stock up on the program’s dough, sauce, cheese and meat ingredients and you’re ready to prepare a John Daly personal or large pizza. Just display the on-site marketing materials and you’re in business.
There seem to be a few plusses and minuses involved here.
One big plus is the opportunity for a restaurant to acquire a major celebrity tie-in for a relative pittance. Daly has an avid national fan base and the chances that some of them will turn up to see what kind of pizza the golfer has put his name on are good. A second positive is the chance for operations that don’t currently menu pizza to add this money-making category overnight. If you’ve got an operation where fans gather to party and watch televised sports and you want to include pizza in your offerings, John Daly Pizza is a natural addition.
A big minus is that not every person who knows of John Daly is a fan of John Daly. His supporters are many, and they see him as a long-hitting lovable lunk whose, shall we say, appetite for life is just larger than that of the average guy. They point to his two major championships, the 1991 PGA Championship and the 1995 British Open and other golfing feats. They admire Daly’s take-no-prisoners approach to his sport and to life in general. It’s developed into almost a cult following.
Daly’s detractors, who include the more genteel followers of golf, see him as a monumental waste of talent who has been given multiple chances to turn his life around, but hasn’t. They point to his several trips into alcohol rehab, his four marriages, legendary gambling losses and other off-the-course adventures. The low point was his six-month suspension from the PGA Tour last year, which dipped even lower when Daly parked his RV several blocks from the entrance to the Masters tournament in Augusta, GA, and hawked his personal merchandise to the passing crowds.
Many of his activities, good and bad, were first documented in the 2006 TV reality series “The Daly Planet.” His current reality show on the Golf Channel, “Being John Daly,” is tamer, part of a much-needed image makeover that will be necessary for commercial ventures like John Daly Pizza to work.
But would it work for you? There are two glowing testimonials for this program so far on www.johndalypizza.com. One is supplied by the general manager of John Daly Restaurant and Bar in Olive Branch, MS. The other comes from the general manager of the Lions Den Golf Club in Dardanelle, AR, which Daly owns. So we don’t know yet how well it works in non-Daly owned ventures. Yet such is the nature of Daly’s celebrity that he’s maintained product endorsements through all of his troubles, so he just might be able to pull pizza eaters into your operation.