At 41 years old and 530 pounds, Harold Daly wasn't going to shoot his age. Or his weight. But after topping his tee shot on a long par 4, he looked on pace to shoot his cholesterol.
It was nearing noon in the unforgiving Nevada desert: sunbathing weather for scorpions and rattlers but a heatstroke hazard for oversized men with overtaxed hearts.
Daly mopped his brow, sheathed his driver and snagged a super-long Slim Jim from his golf bag, inhaling the two-foot-long strip like a giant frog sucking back a snake.
"Hmm," he said, chewing his salty snack and ruminating on what went wrong. "Must have come up on that one. You'd think it would be easy to keep all this weight down."
Luckily, Daly had others to lean on—beefsteak buddies whose bellies wiggled when they waggled and who wheezed on the walk from their carts to the ball. For the past four hours, they'd been working their way around the Paiute Golf Resort in Las Vegas, playing a scramble that was more of a waddle, belting back beers and pepper-cured beef, their shots piling up with their calorie counts.
If it wasn't pretty, well, that wasn't the point. Daly and his comparably porky pals—Dennis Kane, Mike Cronin and Mike Woodriff—made a fearsome foursome at the Fat Boy Open, the heaviest hitters in an offbeat event in which no one ever really hits it thin.
"Golf?" Daly said. "I don't know if you'd call it that. But we've got pretty good appetites."
s Daly spoke, a burly guy breezed by on a cart, touring the course like a rancher checking on his herd. Some six years ago, as PGA Tour players focused on fitness, Marty Linde found himself contemplating fatness. Almost everyone he knew was on a diet. Low-carb this. Low-carb that. Linde, a manager for a Nevada beverage distribution company, liked to go low only on the links. Around that time, he was invited to play in a small golf outing, a memorial event for the recently deceased friend of a friend, a gregarious fellow with a zeppelin physique who everyone lovingly called "The Fat Man." Out on the links, the booze flowed freely and the drives sailed weakly. Linde had a blast, and an idea. He knew a lot guys with generous hearts and expansive guts. Why not turn the outing into an annual event, and spoon the proceeds to charity? The cause would be good and the gimmick great: a golf tournament for the plus-sized, a bit of self-deprecating recreation that flew in the face of the Atkins craze.
Big swig: Daly takes a well-earned break between shots. In 2004, with help from three friends in the beverage business, Linde launched the Fat Boy Open with 80 players. It's been growing like a waistline ever since. "You guys having a good day?" Linde called out to Harold Daly's foursome. Dennis Kane, weighing 320 pounds and wearing a floral-patterned shirt that brought to mind a humpback on a Hawaiian vacation, fixed Linde with a mock glare.
"If this was a good day," he growled, "I'd still be in bed."
In fact, he was up before the break of dawn, hurtling through the darkness toward the Paiute clubhouse, where hundreds of big men had gathered like Low-carb this. Low-carb that. Marty Linde, the tournament's founder, liked to go lowonly on the links. respondents to a casting call by Jenny Craig. They milled around the check-in table, collecting goodie bags of tournament freebies, including strips of jerky, peppered beef nuggets and extralarge T-shirts with the Fat Boy logo: a golf club criss-crossed with a fork.
It was nearing noon in the unforgiving Nevada desert: sunbathing weather for scorpions and rattlers but a heatstroke hazard for oversized men with overtaxed hearts.
Daly mopped his brow, sheathed his driver and snagged a super-long Slim Jim from his golf bag, inhaling the two-foot-long strip like a giant frog sucking back a snake.
"Hmm," he said, chewing his salty snack and ruminating on what went wrong. "Must have come up on that one. You'd think it would be easy to keep all this weight down."
Luckily, Daly had others to lean on—beefsteak buddies whose bellies wiggled when they waggled and who wheezed on the walk from their carts to the ball. For the past four hours, they'd been working their way around the Paiute Golf Resort in Las Vegas, playing a scramble that was more of a waddle, belting back beers and pepper-cured beef, their shots piling up with their calorie counts.
If it wasn't pretty, well, that wasn't the point. Daly and his comparably porky pals—Dennis Kane, Mike Cronin and Mike Woodriff—made a fearsome foursome at the Fat Boy Open, the heaviest hitters in an offbeat event in which no one ever really hits it thin.
"Golf?" Daly said. "I don't know if you'd call it that. But we've got pretty good appetites."
s Daly spoke, a burly guy breezed by on a cart, touring the course like a rancher checking on his herd. Some six years ago, as PGA Tour players focused on fitness, Marty Linde found himself contemplating fatness. Almost everyone he knew was on a diet. Low-carb this. Low-carb that. Linde, a manager for a Nevada beverage distribution company, liked to go low only on the links. Around that time, he was invited to play in a small golf outing, a memorial event for the recently deceased friend of a friend, a gregarious fellow with a zeppelin physique who everyone lovingly called "The Fat Man." Out on the links, the booze flowed freely and the drives sailed weakly. Linde had a blast, and an idea. He knew a lot guys with generous hearts and expansive guts. Why not turn the outing into an annual event, and spoon the proceeds to charity? The cause would be good and the gimmick great: a golf tournament for the plus-sized, a bit of self-deprecating recreation that flew in the face of the Atkins craze.
Big swig: Daly takes a well-earned break between shots. In 2004, with help from three friends in the beverage business, Linde launched the Fat Boy Open with 80 players. It's been growing like a waistline ever since. "You guys having a good day?" Linde called out to Harold Daly's foursome. Dennis Kane, weighing 320 pounds and wearing a floral-patterned shirt that brought to mind a humpback on a Hawaiian vacation, fixed Linde with a mock glare.
"If this was a good day," he growled, "I'd still be in bed."
In fact, he was up before the break of dawn, hurtling through the darkness toward the Paiute clubhouse, where hundreds of big men had gathered like Low-carb this. Low-carb that. Marty Linde, the tournament's founder, liked to go lowonly on the links. respondents to a casting call by Jenny Craig. They milled around the check-in table, collecting goodie bags of tournament freebies, including strips of jerky, peppered beef nuggets and extralarge T-shirts with the Fat Boy logo: a golf club criss-crossed with a fork.
