It’s not every day that golfers are treated to a movie about their sport, so they rejoice at every crumb from Hollywood’s table — or recoil from it. The latest such crumb is Tin Cup, a Kevin Costner vehicle about a no- account practice-range operator who gets it together and shines at the U.S. Open. So golfers at last have their Rocky (sort of). But unlike the original, this one won’t win any prizes, and shouldn’t.
Tin Cup was anxiously awaited in the golf world for over a year, and the golf press reported on every stage of its development: the hiring of the Bull Durham team of director Ron Shelton and leading man Costner; the tutoring of Costner by journeyman pro and TV announcer Gary McCord; the actor’s progress; the effort to achieve an air of authenticity by giving cameos to a host of PGA Tour players. The Internet’s most prominent golf site created a special sub-site just for the movie. Golf magazine put it this way in its August issue: “All right, this is the last you’ll hear from us about the movie, due out this month.”
Golfers were nervous about Tin Cup for good reason: The game has never been accurately or meaningfully portrayed on the big screen. So, perpetually insecure about their image in larger society, golfers fretted about the impact of a big-time movie with big-time names (the links equivalent of “Is it good for the Jews?”). Spike Lee says that when he was making Malcolm X, black people would come up to him and say, “You’d better not mess this up.” Golfers were fairly sure that the Tin Cup folks, however well- intentioned, would mess it up.
It so happens that American golf and the movies were born at about the same time. In 1888, a band of Scotsmen, nostalgic for their national pastime, scratched out a course in Yonkers, N.Y. (dubbing it “St. Andrew’s”); eight years later, the first golf movie was made, a one-reeler called Golfing Extraordinary that consisted of a poor klutz’s taking a swing and missing. It’s been pretty much the same treatment ever since. The Little Rascals made a golf movie, as did the Three Stooges. Hope and Crosby — who were superb amateurs — incorporated the sport in several of their Road movies. Tracy and Hepburn made Pat and Mike, in which Kate (who had grown up with the game in New England) played a pro and Babe Didrickson Zaharias strutted her stuff.
Things picked up a little in the early 50s when Glenn Ford starred as Ben Hogan in Follow the Sun, about Hogan’s stirring recovery from a near- fatal car accident. But many golfers, including Hogan, were disgusted by the movie because Ford, on the course, was unbelievable as a professional, and virtually nothing of the game’s emotional power was realized.
Strangely, the truest and most enduring golf movie of all is not really a golf movie but a raunchy, Animal House-inspired comedy: Caddyshack (1981). To say that this movie has a cult following among golfers is too mild; it has seeped into the bloodstream of most every golfer under 45, its sensibility and language rendered permanent, like Scripture or Shakespeare.
When preparing a shot: “Be the ball, Danny.” When admonishing a balker: ” You’re going to play golf and you’re going to like it.” When fudging a score: “Mark me down for five.” When fantasizing about a Masters triumph: ” Cinderella story. . . .” In praise of another: “That’s a peach, hon.” When refusing to leave the course in torrential rain: “Looks like the heavy stuff won’t be coming down for quite some time.” When engaging in the kind of hyperbole endemic to the game: “Big hitter, the Lama — long” (that’s Lama as in Dalai). When Bill Murray, a Caddyshack star, hits the pro-am circuit, he is bombarded by fans who shout swatches of the movie’s script to him in unison.
So what of Tin Cup? The movie starts out promisingly, showing a tumbledown range in west Texas (“Last Chance to Hit Balls Fore 520 Miles”). But we quickly ascertain that the movie will be a gentle piece of nonsense: A charming rogue (Costner) will try to steal a fetching girl (Rene Russo) from a snooty, dislikable Tour pro (Don Johnson). The movie is sluggish and trite. But worse, it does a disservice to golf — and this from a film that was to help erase a bagful of bad cinematic memories.
How golf-ignorant is it? When Russo shows up for her first lesson, Costner has her hit a driver (unthinkable), unteed (unheard of). He, the pro, hits obvious chunks that are meant to be perfect. She slices a shot right of right, and they both point down the middle, beaming.
A charity best-ball tournament is played as a cut-throat competition and is broadcast on television. Golfers have caddies hit shots in the middle of play. Peter Kostis, one of the smartest teaching pros in the country, is made to say ridiculous things. Frank Chirkinian, the longtime “ayatollah” of CBS golf production, is furious that an unknown is leading the Open, when in fact he’d be thrilled out of his gourd. The expression “chili-dip” is egregiously misused. At one point, the gallery appears to be standing on the green.
So golfers don’t yet have the movie they long for, and they may never: The sport may be impossible to capture in this medium. It is different from football, basketball, and baseball in that it is solitary, mental, interior. A golfer’s struggle takes place in his head, and the mask seldom betrays much. The rhythms of golf are ponderous, subtly discerned. There is no team, with its various characters, all coming together for victory (or not); there is no coach (except for some pricey gurus); there is no frenzied stadium or arena (in golf, the applause comes later and is of a different nature). How could a moviemaker convey the chaos in a golfer’s stomach and throat when he’s facing a slick double-breaker on the 18th hole of a Friday round when he absolutely must make the cut and earn a check? How could a movie demonstrate the stark terror a golfer feels when he wakes up in the morning to find that, whereas he had it yesterday, he has totally and inexplicably lost it today?
Golf has fared slightly better in literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, and P. G. Wodehouse wrote excellent short stories, and Walker Percy was and John Updike is golf-haunted in the extreme. Dan Jenkins, the sportswriter-novelist, has translated some of the game’s nobility and devilishness, as in his Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate and Dead Solid Perfect. But ultimately, golf may be a little like a religion — difficult to articulate and impossible to persuade others of. They will have to encounter it for themselves.
As golf’s popularity increases, its custodians and devotees are going to have to get used to seeing their pet in movies, for better or worse. Clint Eastwood has bought the rights to Michael Murphy’s novel Golf in the Kingdom, a fable of New Age mysticism that has befogged countless golf minds. A slew of other golf movies are forthcoming, with titles like Swingtime, Fast Greens, and Out of the Rough. And most portentously, there will be Stroke of Genius, the Bobby Jones story starring heartthrob Brad Pitt. Jones is the icon of American golf, our spiritual guide, the father of us all. Don’t mess this up.
