I’ve often been asked—fair question, really—what it is that I like so much about golf. I have a million answers—fresh air, a formidable challenge, ample opportunities for on-the-line-of-responsible gambling, the dulcet tones of Jim Nantz—and all of them represent some significant piece of the puzzle. But most of all, what I like about golf is its unique ability to generate multilayered, emotionally freighted, high-variance circumstances where drama isn’t just likely but amped up to Tennessee Williams levels of Sturm und Drang. If you need a refresher on golf’s ace capacity for emotional whiplash, just revisit April’s Masters, when Rory McIlroy completed the career Grand Slam following 10 years of frustration and a welter of concerns ranging from his marriage to golf’s relationship with geopolitics. So, even given its relatively niche status, it is unsurprising that the sport has been the subject of countless cultural touchstones, ridiculous and/or sublime. With this week’s debut of Apple TV+’s new links-centric show starring Owen Wilson, Stick, we thought it would be a good time to taxonomize the golf-and-popular-culture genre, with specific attention paid to the juiciest elements. Who raised ire, and who raised pulses? Which characters used tools on the golf course, and which just acted like tools? Perhaps no sport is richer in lore than golf: hustlers and gangsters, deadbeats and divas, magical caddies and slightly bonkers competitors—they're all here. In celebration of this most glorious and pathologically neurotic game, we hereby present the Pop Culture Golfer Matrix, along with attendant superlatives. The mission won’t be easy, but golf rarely is. As the Dalai Lama once sagely advised Carl Spackler, in lieu of cash payment: gunga galunga—when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. So we’ve got that going for us.
Best Player to Excel at Golf Using Something Other Than a Golf Club: Roy McAvoy
The seemingly obvious answer is Happy Gilmore and his fabled hockey stick, but the more interesting thing to consider is that there are other qualified contenders. Take Tin Cup’s Roy McAvoy, the onetime University of Houston prodigy who has fallen far enough down on his luck that he has to sell his golf clubs. Accompanied by his loyal caddy and, I guess, best friend, Romeo Posar, McAvoy then descends upon some tony West Texas country club and challenges a member to a high-stakes game in which McAvoy can use only garden equipment instead of golf clubs (which he doesn’t have, because they are at a pawn shop). The skeptical member puzzles briefly over this solicitation and then, impossibly, says: OK, let’s do it. Let’s stop for a minute and consider the unusualness of this scenario. A sketchy-looking man pulls up to a private club in a beat-up convertible with Cheech from Cheech & Chong (Cheech Marin plays Romeo in a delightful performance). The sketchy guy says, “I have no clubs, but I have a shovel and a rake and a baseball bat and a broken blender and an old ball of twine, and I’d like to take you on.” The member in standing, hearing this, does not: (a) alert in-house security or (b) call the police in the interest of getting these unsavory fellows out of this lovely West Texas community. On the contrary, he’s dying for the match, haughtily certain he will prevail. The competition itself is a rout. Turns out McAvoy can hit a golf ball with a broom handle 260 on the fly. I think at one point, McAvoy sinks a 6-foot putt with the end of a rake. If I subscribe to any organized religion, it is the official USGA Rules of Golf, and a lot of this behavior seems to actively color outside those lines. Nonetheless, Roy ultimately pockets 400 bucks and gets his clubs back. Cheech the caddy smirks.
Most Unusual Behavior for a Caddy: Bagger Vance
Bagger Vance wins this one not because he is a spectral figure of abundant mystery who may or may not embody the Hindu synthesis of thought around duty and devotion. None of that strikes me as strange. What absolutely fucking caves my head in is what happens on the 18th hole of Rannulph Junuh’s much-ballyhooed match against the legendary Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones. Junuh, a prodigy-level talent whose career was derailed by PTSD after a stint in World War I, has just drawn to within one stroke with one to play. Bagger Vance, basically, has been maneuvering him through this round with the curatorial genius of a benign puppeteer. “Hit this niblick, Junuh. Swing hard with your strange wooden club, Junuh. Don’t have a full-fledged, five-alarm mental breakdown in the woods, Junuh.” Now, on the brink of triumph, he decides to leave. Matt Damon’s Junuh looks incredulously at Will Smith’s Bagger Vance. “You’re leaving?” he asks. And Bagger Vance just kind of shrugs and walks toward the Savannah shoreline. Maybe he says something like: “You’ve already learned everything from me that you can.”
Astonishing! And objectively not true! What if Junuh needs someone to give him the yardage on his approach shot at the 18th—you know, the kind of thing caddies are supposed to do? Things only get weirder from here. Hagen drives his ball into the ocean at 18 but gets a beachy lie and hits it onto the green, a miraculous par save that delights his still-present caddy, “Spec.” Jones makes a pretty routine par. Down by one, Junuh rolls home a 35-foot snake of a birdie putt to create a three-way tie—and that’s how it ends. In a tie. No playoff. Over the end credits, we learn that Bobby Jones immediately retired from golf after this event. There is also the detail that Hagen, going forward, plays “only exhibitions.” I don’t want to even get into Jack Lemmon and the heart attacks, but suffice it to say, this is a highly peculiar picture. Is The Legend of Bagger Vance the strangest movie ever made about golf? Ha. No, and not by some measure.
Most Peculiar Golf Movie: Seve: The Movie
Unless you watch degenerate-level amounts of the Golf Channel, it is possible that you are not aware of 2014’s Seve: The Movie. That’s OK. Golf freaks, on the other hand, will know all about this underground treat, the golf cinematic universe equivalent of a long-forgotten ’70s grind-house classic. Seve: The Movie is, of course, about the fiery Spanish legend Seve Ballesteros, who captured five majors, was a European Ryder Cup hero, and thrilled millions over the course of his too-short life (Ballesteros died in 2011 at the age of 54). Ballesteros was a wildly offbeat player—a temperamental repository of off-the-cuff brilliance and astronomically boneheaded misjudgment, often within the same hole. Such a player deserves a weird biopic, and man alive, does Seve: The Movie serve the dinner in this regard. Buñuel himself would have struggled to make anything stranger. To wit, see old network footage of Seve capturing the 1976 Open Championship as a 19-year-old, in a remarkable performance at Royal Birkdale, with all the standard talking-head break-ins with insights from media members and fellow competitors. And then, suddenly, everything shifts. Now see young Seve, perhaps age 8, in his hometown of Pedreña. He is out on the beach after curfew, trying to perfect his short game. We are made to understand that practicing on the beach will be the secret to later dominance. No explanation is provided as to why we were in a documentary 10 seconds ago and now we are inside of a somber, barely explained bildungsroman shot on a conspicuously low budget in a place I have a pretty strong suspicion isn’t Spain.
And so it goes for two hours and four glorious minutes of avant-garde, multimedia exploration. Like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Seve: The Movie ends with a young man in progress at the edge of the water, contemplating a limitless future. Unlike in Truffaut’s film, the young man in Seve: The Movie is beating one range ball after the next into the sea. It’s only a matter of time before Criterion takes note.
Most Unlikely of Victors: Dorf on Golf
Tim Conway was a bona fide legend and a comedy genius whose infectious mischief elevated everything from The Carol Burnett Show to SpongeBob SquarePants. It is appropriate that this is how he should be remembered. But how many actually remember him is via the short film Dorf on Golf, a roughly $29.99 videotape-by-mail proposition that was released in 1987 and by 1989 had sold a staggering 360,000 units. Here, again, is the mystery of American commerce. To call Dorf “funny” is to generously extend the traditional definitions. The Dorf character was Conway, playing a small man, who was also an ostensible golf instructor, with a fairly haughty manner. I don’t even quite know how to describe the rest. There were three characters: Dorf; his incompetent caddy, Leonard, played by the legitimately great character actor Vincent Schiavelli; and “Boom Boom” LaRue, a short-shorts-clad, one-person Greek chorus played by Michele Smith.
It’s a kind of golf satire, I think. Strangely, Conway imbues Dorf with the same voice he used for his popular recurring Swedish character from Carol Burnett, “Mr. Tudball.”
In Dorf on Golf, there is a comedic money shot that is hard to describe. Because Dorf is only 5 feet tall, for some reason, Tim Conway needed to be planted in the ground seven inches. So, low to the ground, Dorf would take an enormous swing. Then, strangely, thanks to some prosthetics, Dorf would tip over all the way to the ground, then pop back up again unharmed. It’s hard to overstate the importance of resilience.
Do the math: $29.99 times 360,000 amounts to $10,786,400. Dorf’s best lesson about golf and the go-go ’80s is that money could be yours, should you contort yourself the right way.
The Most Amazing Lady Golfer in a Golf Movie, and This Is a Depressingly Small Category: Pat Pemberton
In the 1952 George Cukor classic Pat and Mike, Katharine Hepburn plays the titular Pat, a college instructor and breathtakingly wonderful athlete who appears to excel at all sports, but most significantly at golf. She’s also engaged to this complete shit-heel named Collier Weld (William Ching), who can’t help but dim her light any time she’s in a big spot. That’s where Mike Conovan (Spencer Tracy), a “sports promoter,” comes in to save the day.
Early on, Pat competes in the U.S. Open and makes it to the final round, competing against Babe Didrikson Zaharias (actually played by Babe Didrikson Zaharias). Mike wants her to throw the match in some kind of convoluted gambling situation, but Pat is too principled and narrowly loses on her own. The action takes off from there, with Pat deciding to pursue sports as a vocation and Mike coming in as her agent. What follows is a series of contests where we see Pat compete against a roster of sports luminaries. This includes a completely psychedelic tennis match with Gussie Moran (actually played by Gussie Moran) where the net grows and Pat’s racket shrinks in an Alice in Wonderland–esque manner, throwing poor Pat off while stupid Collier looks on from various vantage points and cackles. It’s weird and tragic. Aldo Ray plays a boxer who probably isn’t getting into Mensa but is very amusing. There’s also a gangster called “Spec” (not Walter Hagen’s caddy from Bagger Vance) who drinks a glass of milk in a sorta menacing manner.
Hepburn is radiant and does all of her own stunts—she was an accomplished golfer and tennis player in her own right—and it’s a joy to watch her and Spencer Tracy trade barbs, flirtatious witticisms, and winning dialogue like: “I don’t know if I can lick you or you can lick me, but together we can lick the world.” I won’t spoil the ending, but needless to say, there is golf and Pat’s heart to be won.
Most Tortured Relationship With the Game: Larry David
He killed the beautiful black swan. He sat on a bench and surreptitiously stole golf lessons. These were perhaps the most heinous country club infractions, but hardly the only ones committed by Larry David over the 12-season run of Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a recent interview with Stick cast member and WTF podcast (RIP) host Marc Maron, David admits, “I’ve chosen a hobby that I have no aptitude for. It’s insane. It’s really crazy. I’ve wasted so much time and been so unhappy doing this. And yet I continue to do it.” It is the best explanation of golf I’ve ever heard. If you want to group the entire concept of life into the subcategory of “hobby,” it may be the best explanation of life I’ve ever heard.
I’d suggest David’s HBO running mate Tony Soprano as the second-most awkward amateur duffer of the Peak TV years. Needled by his old-money neighbors, who have some inkling of Tony’s illicit revenue streams and want to hear all the dirty details, he never feels more emasculated than when Dr. Cusamano and the rest of the high-society foursome tell him they know exactly what he does and it doesn’t frighten them at all. Golf can be that way.
Heroes and Villains: Golf and James Bond
James Bond’s understanding of and compliance with the rules of golf is like my relationship with the rules of what goes into the recycling bin: pretty comprehensive and uncompromising, but with an abiding willingness to flout decorum entirely, particularly when you’re trying to outwit a criminal mastermind or figure out the murky middle ground that is a greasy pizza box. In an iconic match during Goldfinger at an astonishingly beautiful club in Kent, Auric Goldfinger blatantly cheats his way through the game, but Bond is somehow way weirder and worse because he’s also using his own brand of sleight of hand and hoodwinking trickery to win while simultaneously reminding Goldfinger of the “strict rules.”
At the end of the day, it’s the pedantry that makes golf’s insufferably long rule book such a bummer. Golf is a solitary practice of discipline and a willingness to call a penalty on oneself, and 007’s schoolmarmish adherence to the rules—only to bend them when it works in his favor—makes him a Patrick Reed–style golf villain. Sure, Goldfinger is planning on cutting Bond’s actual balls in half with a laser shortly after the 19th hole, but at least he wasn’t a scold.
Caddyshack’s Top Five Characters You’d Like to Play a Round With
5. Judge Smails (Ted Knight): He’s an insufferable prick, and he’ll almost definitely cheat. He says things like, “I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. I didn’t want to, but I owed it to them.” And: “The world needs ditch diggers too.” And, yes, you might end up watching him conduct a vaguely lascivious courtship ritual with his special putter, “Billy Baroo.” None of this is optimal, but defy him, and you could very well end up arrested like Scottie Scheffler.
4. Carl Spackler (Bill Murray): It doesn’t require medical training to conclude that Carl Spackler is experiencing a psychotic break pitched someplace between Fear and Loathing Hunter Thompson and up-the-river Colonel Kurtz. And it’s fair to say that one does not exactly “play” golf with Spackler but rather “gets experienced” by golfing with him. He does seem to spend a fair amount of time in the thrall of vivid hallucinations, but then again, you know Schopenhauer’s maxim: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Is Spackler a genius? Only one way to find out. Heavily invested in explosives and not necessarily versed in decorum, this is not likely a round that will lower your handicap, but it may well expand your mind to the breaking point.
3. Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield): All unrestricted id with cash tips, Journey dance parties, and one-liners to spare, the ostentatiously wealthy and entirely uncouth Al Czervik is probably the golfer you’ll have the most fun with on the course, even if it’s comprehensively clear that he’s not very good at the game. His ability to drive his ball straight into Judge Smails’s nutsack, however, is uncanny.
2. Ty Webb (Chevy Chase): He’s got a smooth swing and an easy swagger. Webb is a weird kind of cultural tweener—not fully country club but with a healthy suspicion of hippies. When he ends up in Spackler’s weirdo golf compound following an errant shot, they play out an intense scene of class-driven anxiety worthy of David Mamet, but with more stuttering. Still, Ty is no prude. With Danny Noonan looping for him early in the film, a functional father-and-son talk organically occurs:
Webb: “Do you take drugs, Danny?”
Danny: “Every day.”
Webb [enthusiastically]: “Good.”
They call that mentorship.
1. Danny Noonan (Michael O’Keefe): He’s a nice young man and a terrific talent. In Caddyshack’s climactic action, just before Carl Spackler turns the entirety of Bushwood Country Club into a blast crater, Danny finally refuses the fruit from the poisonous tree of Judge Smails’s caddy scholarship, setting the template for future principled rebels like Randall “Pink” Floyd from Dazed and Confused and salvaging his own soul in the process. And then he drains it. College is for suckers anyway.
“Are We Sure He’s the Villain?” Award: David Simms
David Simms, the ostensible antagonist in Tin Cup played by Don Johnson, is kind of a dick. He’s smug and preening; plays a tedious, conservative style; and makes nice on camera but blows off fans looking for autographs once no one else is looking. He’s probably a lot like many actual pro golfers. I don’t love him.
But consider the circumstances: He offers his old University of Houston teammate Roy McAvoy a job caddying for him when McAvoy is flat broke—$100 and 5 percent of their winnings, which could be a lot depending on how well they finish. McAvoy, as always, ends up making it about himself—taking a club out of Simms’s bag, on national television, in order to prove he can carry a shot some preposterous distance because, I think, Craig Stadler doesn’t think he can. Simms fires him on the spot—as he should: They are in contention at a nationally televised tournament. This is a worse dereliction of caddying duty than Bagger Vance’s decision to go walk around the ocean prior to the 72nd hole of his charge’s most important match. Simms seems to be something of a loner; McAvoy travels with a boisterous entourage of down-at-the-heels yes-men. McAvoy steals Simms’s girlfriend with impunity and not a hint of an apology. Simms wins McAvoy’s car after outwitting him in a bar bet and then gives it back, which is very important because McAvoy is very, very broke. With the U.S. Open on the line, trailing by a shot, Simms has to sit and watch McAvoy rinse five balls on the 18th hole just to make a point. McAvoy finally does, sort of, sending the gallery into Phoenix Waste Management levels of paroxysm.
Can you imagine that level of distraction? If there is a bully in this relationship, I’m not sure it’s Simms.
