Like so many of the truly great sports jerks in history, Shooter McGavin is undeniably clutch. As he should be! After all, within the cinematic universe of Happy Gilmore—the 1996 Adam Sandler classic about a titular deadbeat who discovers he has one hell of a golf drive—it is well established that Shooter is the man to beat, one of the best in the world.
He is described early in the movie as “the tour kingpin” and the “leading money winner this year.” He rolls around in a white stretch limo befitting Burt Reynolds. He racks up a somehow underrated string of tournament victories, week after week. And he does it all with the aura of a real star: clad in every shade of cream out there, so many sweaters draped over his broad shoulders, so many sneers on his face. He is rude, and he is good. “What a privileged doofus he is,” mused the actor Christopher McDonald to Vulture in 2021, discussing Shooter a quarter century after playing him. “I actually dressed him based on Greg Norman, one of the greatest golf players of all time.” Shooter and the Shark: definitely two of the most aesthetic egos in the game!
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But seriously, Shooter McGavin is no joke, which is why he does not find Happy Gilmore funny. (The only humor Shooter recognizes has to do with sand traps and David Hasselhoff.) Shooter has no “gold jacket” yet—the film’s version of the annual Masters winner’s prize—which is why he is perpetually green with envy. And Shooter has no chill, which is what makes it all the more impressive that the guy is actually quite cold-blooded on the course.
When a giant spectator with a nail sticking out of his head menaces Shooter by bending his 9-iron into a U shape? Shooter groans, “Oh my God,” rushes his drive in fear, and still sends the ball down the middle of the fairway. When some degenerate fan of the ascendant Happy Gilmore tosses a beach ball onto the green while Shooter is putting? Sure, he has a bit of a meltdown—“Damn you people! This is golf, not a rock concert!”—but then he immediately sinks the attempt.
When he is forced to play a ball off a lie that he can describe only as “Frankenstein’s fat foot”? Shooter hits an exceptionally clean iron shot that jostles nary a toe hair on the big fella. Then he follows that up with a 30-something-foot putt and a multipart celebration.
“Choke on that, baby!” Shooter hollers. “Ba-boom!” He throws his club. He raises both fists like Rocky. He breaks out multiple iterations of his trademark finger guns. With a shoulder shimmy, he announces himself in the third person: “Shooootah!” These are the gyrations of a real jerk, sure—but they’re also a hard-earned display. This is ludicrous behavior, fine. But then again: So is golf, right?
When McDonald was preparing to film that scene, he made a plea to Dennis Dugan, the movie’s director. McDonald is something of a golfer himself, and he wanted a chance to nail the putt for real—not just use classic sports-movie editing tricks like a tight shot of the ball rolling into the hole. Dugan agreed to give him seven tries.
“I lipped out twice,” McDonald recalled to Rich Eisen in 2016. The background actors and the crew started making side bets about whether he’d pull it off. And in his telling, he did, on the fifth try. “And that’s the one they kept in the movie,” he said. As it turns out, Shooter McGavin’s reaction is so memorable not because it’s particularly over the top, but because it’s exactly in line with how it feels to play the sport: so many mishaps and almosts in a semi-embarrassing pursuit of that rare ba-boom.
I know this personally because last week I played nine holes for the first time in years and was reintroduced to the idea that inside each and every golfer, there are two distinct selves: the feral animal and the preening snob. The guy who hump rides his golf club like it’s a bucking bronco after letting the long ball rip, and the guy who rage whispers his own first name after sinking a gimme putt. The Happy Gilmore and the Shooter McGavin, in other words. The jackass and the jerk.
In the movie they’re two different people, but in real life they coexist in one self. For much of my round I associated, unhappily, with Sandler’s volatile ne’er-do-well Happy Gilmore. Every time I topped an approach shot or failed to simply tap-tap-tap it in on the green, my inner self erupted. I wanted to smash my clubs over my knee in frustration; I wanted to find a one-eyed gator to rassle. I felt deeply that golf was stupid; I wished I was wearing a cutoff hoodie in defiance of the pointless norms.
But then, every umpteenth stroke, it would happen: I’d finally sink a putt, any putt, or I’d kind of accidentally hit a shot clear and true, and the Shooter inside me would emerge. Not just the celebratory tics, but the whole shebang: the arrogant paranoia, the rush of clubbish entitlement. I imagined the way my social life was about to take off, fueled by my golf skills and personality. I worked hard, paid my dues—now it’s Shooter’s turn. Shooter won’t let his reign at the top be spoiled by some freak …
“You know what would be great?” I said to my husband. “If I could get a Pepsi!” I twirled my putter with relish and curled the other hand into the international guns-blazin’ sign. “Diet.” For that moment, it felt great to be the privileged doofus on top.
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People like me make life strange for McDonald, who has been in something like a hundred films but who is so associated with this one role that he just went ahead and titled his Cameo account “Shooter McGavin.” (He is listed as “highly responsive.”) There is nowhere he can hide. He told Vulture that people yell “Shooter!” at him in the urinals at Buffalo Bills games and in airports. His hands are constantly doing the guns, making someone’s day every time. Even Tiger Woods—who made his pro debut the year Happy Gilmore came out—once asked McDonald for a selfie.
McDonald is beloved by the golf community and welcome at any event, anytime, so long as he doesn’t mind talking about Shooter McGavin. He probably does mind, but he also gets it. “I try to keep a cool profile because, you know, ‘Shooter shows up!’ and people know, and it’s gotten a little bit nutty,” McDonald said on the I Am Rapaport podcast. “It’s crazy, and I gotta say I’ve embraced it. I’ve learned to embrace it.” After all, a role like Shooter is as rare as a hole-in-one on a par 4.
In case I haven’t been clear, Shooter McGavin is a real asshole. He says, I think, three nice things in the course of Happy Gilmore, and all of them are sarcastic or phony. Even his fellow pro golfer brethren seem to dislike him, rolling their eyes when he tries once again to deploy his David Hasselhoff joke. He strategically buys Happy Gilmore’s grandma’s house out from under him and then threatens to burn it down and piss on the ashes. That isn’t nice!
But—and I know this will sound strange—Shooter comes by his jerk status honestly. He is this way because it’s the only way. Because for him, it’s only about golf. Even the house purchase was done with one thing in mind: to get this clown Happy off the pro tour for good and get his legacy back on track. “I didn’t want to push it so far that people would respond, Oh, he’s a jerk,” McDonald told Vulture. “Don’t get me wrong, he is a jerk, but it was all about him.” The first time we meet Shooter, McDonald pointed out, he has his back to the camera, and to a whole crowd, as he loses himself in examining the Waterbury Open trophy for a little too long.
While that scene is our introduction to Shooter, it isn’t the first one that McDonald filmed. That one would turn out to be even more memorable. “You’re in big trouble, pal,” Shooter warns Happy midway through the movie, before they go head-to-head in competition. “I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast.” The response is perfect Sandler: mocking, elementary, effective. “You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?” he replies.
McDonald, tasked with ad-libbing a comeback, couldn’t think of anything at first, so he just sputtered, “… no!” It worked perfectly, and once again, it wound up being the take that they kept. It’s also a good example of what makes Shooter such an appealing villain.
With his icy eyes and square shoulder pads, Shooter initially seems like a classic impenetrable antagonist—a perfect foil to the slouchier, schlubbier Happy. But throughout the movie, we see all the cracks in the surface as Shooter is, time and again, rekt. Happy beats him in a rhyme-off, and in a playoff. Shooter hits clutch shot after clutch shot, but it doesn’t seem to matter: The better Shooter plays, the more he is ignored by the fans and the wider golf universe. (I notice that the poor guy even starts incorporating way more pastel with the beige outfits; all for naught.) And the more he is ignored, the funnier and more frustrated he gets.
“Go back to your shanties!” he grumbles to one tournament crowd. He hires an operative to mess with Happy’s head, then is stuck fending off the guy’s invites to the local Sizzler for lunch. With a few exceptions for ba-booms, he is always in a state of seething, fuming, or grimacing that is highly satisfying to watch. I keep trying and failing to convey it in writing, but just know that McDonald’s line reading of “H-A on one side, and sure enough, P-P-Y right there on the other” is an all-time great.
At one point, the role of Shooter was reportedly offered to Kevin Costner; at another, McDonald himself told Dugan that he would have to turn it down because it would take him away from his kids for too long. We could have had a very different Shooter McGavin, in other words, but instead we got the weirdest and somehow realest one. McDonald made the character distinctly his own—and he was so good at doing it that he wound up getting owned by the role, a very Shooter predicament indeed.
“Dude, you’re always gonna be Shooter,” McDonald says Sandler has told him when he’s tried to nab other roles. And in some ways, that’s true: It’s not too difficult to see McDonald’s sparkling recent Hacks role as a casino magnate (and toxic ex-boyfriend) as existing in the same universe as Shooter McGavin. (Shooter does, after all, like to dabble in real estate speculation.)
But can we ever expect to see an actual Shooter revival? That’s neither imminent nor clear. On the one hand, Sandler hasn’t been much of a sequels guy over the course of his career, Grown Ups 2 notwithstanding. On the other, Sandler has chatted vaguely in interviews about the concept of a sequel to Happy Gilmore, even noting that he’s heard ideas from fans that include a Happy vs. Shooter showdown on some sort of senior tour.
This is a fun one to imagine: Happy in oversized basketball shorts, trying to outdrive some of the greats to earn enough money for his latest scheme; Shooter hoping to reclaim past glory while facing the indignities of age. Or maybe it’s Happy who is now the longtime, big-name, spoiled golf star, one who becomes threatened when a haggard Shooter emerges from years of obscurity to make a run for his money and his good name.
Or maybe, if they wanted it to feel realistic and current, the story could involve a rogue golf league, underwritten by some prosperous foreign adversary, that seeks to sign some of the sport’s biggest talents. Imagine Shooter McGavin representing the new league (and wearing whatever duds the Shark sports these days?) and trying to convince his old nemesis Happy Gilmore to come back and do one last job. Will Happy take the bait, or will this just be the ninth green at 9 o’clock all over again? Can Shooter learn to relax and find his own Happy Place before he gets cut?
We may never know, but the good news is that you can always find the Shooter within you at your local golf club. Take enough swings, and eventually one of them will be good enough to unleash that blessed inner jerk, sweater vest and all.
