I'm Obsessed With Adam Sandler’s ‘Forever’ Friend John Daly In Happy Gilmore 2, But Why Wasn't He In The First Movie?

By most accounts, one of the best movies of 2025 (and possibly one of the best sports movies of all time) was Josh Safdie’s table-tennis stresser Marty Supreme, but the director’s Uncut Gems star Adam Sandler delivered one of the year’s other most sporting efforts with the long-awaited sequel Happy Gilmore 2. To be expected, Sandler shined as bright as ever, but it was his pro-golfing co-star and on-screen BFF John Daly who stole the show for me.

For all the seemingly countless callbacks to the original film, Daly himself wasn’t one of them, as he did not pop up in the 1995 release. What fans like me definitely didn’t know at the time was that Sandler and Daly were already pals, what with Daly popularizing the grip-it-and-rip-it driving approach. And in speaking with Hard Rock Bet, Daly revealed that he’d hoped to appear in Tamra Davis’ movie, but he was unfortunately nowhere near the production location at the time. As he put it:

Given everything we know about Happy Gilmore's plot, it's hard to know how and where John Daly might have factored into it. It probably wouldn't have made much sense for the tourney winner to already be living in Happy's backyard, as having a successful athlete bestie might have deflated the entire plot of the movie, since Happy could have just borrowed money from Daly to pay for his grandmother's house.

Alas, as fun as that might have been, it couldn't have happened, with Daly pointing out that he was out of the U.S. at the time when filming took place. Given the film's release in February 1996, one can assume that the production happened in mid-1995, at which point Daly was around the world pulling off a somewhat surprising victory at the Open Championship in St. Andrews, Scotland, with the event happening in July of that year. (Fun fact: that year marked the first Open appearance from a young Tiger Woods.)

While John Daly certainly would have been a fun addition to Happy Gilmore proper, part of the joy of his sequel character is that he's a goofy, older, white-haired homebody who doesn't take himself seriously at all. Which is a much easier role to pull off later in life, and not when one is in their professional prime. Who knows what kind of personality his fictional counterpart would have had in the mid-'90s?

To that end, Daly is very appreciative to have had as sizable a part as he did in Happy Gilmore 2, given his total lack of education in performances. As he put it:

Is it too early (or just stupid) to start petitioning for Adam Sandler and John Daly to co-star in a future season of True Detective as the lead investigators? It sounds like a joke, but now I feel the need to fill a fan-fiction notebook with ideas for that.

Happy Gilmore 2 is one of many Adam Sandler comedies fans can watch via Netflix subscription, alongside other streaming hits like Hubie Halloween, Murder Mystery and its sequel, The Week Of and more. His next feature Roommates, which will have the Sandman co-starring opposite his daughter Sadie, Nick Kroll, Natasha Lyonne and Storm Reid. It’s expected to debut among many other 2026 Netflix movies over the next 12 months, but the real question is whether Daly will show up in this one or in the sequel 30 years from now.