Last month, on a whim, I started on an online Twitter poll match-play tournament about golf movies, and to give it what I hoped would be a unique twist, I opted to make it a “Worst Golf Movie Ever Made” (WGMEM) poll.
With a little help from Twitter friends who supplied the names of some golf-related movies that I hadn’t heard of before, I put together a list of twenty films, from the earliest I found, the 1951 Ben Hogan bio-flick Follow The Sun, to 2022’s The Phantom of the Open, about a serial imposter (and non-golfer) named Maurice Flitcroft who tries to enter the British Open. For background and accountability, I watched the ones I hadn’t previously seen (when they were available for viewing) and set things in motion.
Composing a match-play breakdown, I opened with two matchups on the first day the much-loved Caddyshack versus its much-reviled sequel, Caddyshack II, and two biographical films about revered golfers of decades past, Bobby Jones: A Stroke of Genius and Follow The Sun. Turnout was okay in that first round, with 69 votes cast in the dueling-Caddyshacks poll, and 37 in the bio-flick matchup. Caddyshack II won in a rout, 64 to 5 (I want to talk to those five people who think that the original Caddyshack is worse than the execrable sequel), and Follow The Sun, which features a fine actor but obvious non-golfer, Glenn Ford, portraying Ben Hogan, the man with one of the most beautiful golf swings ever seen, prevailed over the Bobby Jones story 23 votes to 14.
After that first round it appeared that people lost interest. I get it, folks are busy, but totals of ten, twelve, and then seven votes in the remaining polls in the Round of 16 were frankly disappointing. I mean, I have a little over 2,100 Twitter followers, and out of all those people no more than a dozen could be bothered to take a second or two and click on a poll button? Sigh…
Voting in the Round of 8 was equally disappointing, with a total of six votes cast, and the Semifinal round pulled a two-vote tie in one poll and no votes in the other. Throwing up my hands in frustration I cancelled the final round and declared Caddyshack II, the film with the most votes as WGMEM the winner – despite the fact that it was knocked out in the Round of 8 (in a one-vote “sweep”.)
In the wake of my poll I started thinking about a couple of existential questions relating to golf movies: What is a golf movie? What makes a golf movie a good or bad golf movie (as opposed to a good or bad movie, period)? Digging deep into my memories of a college Film Studies class (fulfilling a Humanities requirement for this Engineering major), I pondered these questions.
As I pondered, I received a bit of feedback (via Twitter DMs) from one contributor, Golf.com correspondent and fellow Bay Area resident Josh Sens. In the 1990s, prior to his current golf-writing gig, Sens reviewed movies for the Oakland Tribune, and he had these thoughts to share about golf movies:
“I think most golf movies suck to the point of being unwatchable. Partly because golf is hard to dramatize and partly because the guys playing the role of pros rarely have believable swings—but maybe also because golfers are boring?”
Josh’s comment about actors with poor golf swings is valid, up to a point, but unless the disparity is obvious, and egregious, it has never been a major sticking point for me.
I have found that golfers can also be extremely picky regarding other details in golf-related movies. Five years ago I was involved in an online discussion about The Greatest Game Ever Played, a golf movie that I think works very well on many levels, but one commenter in the discussion, who was obviously a deep-dive aficionado of golf equipment of that era (the story takes place in 1913) complained that the golf clubs that the actors were using were from the wrong decade (I can’t remember if it was earlier or later), and that the anachronism ruined the film for him.
(I have spotted anachronisms in movies from time to time (the case of archival footage of a Korean-War-era jet crashing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the 1976 film Midway comes to mind), but though noticeable (and/or laughable) I have never delved so deeply into “anorak” territory that a movie was “absolutely ruined” for me because of such a thing.)
Sports movies in general fall into one or the other of two categories – they are either very specifically about the sport/game itself or a particular athlete or team, or they are framing a story about a more abstract social concept within the context of sport.
Josh echoed some of my own thoughts about golf movies in further comments:
“I remember interviewing the director Ron Shelton about Tin Cup. When the topic of Caddyshack came up, he said, ‘It’s a funny movie but it’s not a golf movie. It’s a movie about social class.’ ”
I guess you could say the same about all sports movies, that the good ones aren’t so much about the sport but about something deeper/more complex.”
I decided to try and split my list of golf movies into those two general categories: movies strictly about golf and/or golfers, and movies that use golf as a vehicle for another story concept:
Movies about golf:
- Follow The Sun
- The Caddy
- Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
- Dead Solid Perfect
- Tin Cup
- The Greatest Game Ever Played
- Tommy’s Honour
- The Phantom of The Open
- The Squeeze
Movies that use golf as a metaphor:
- Caddyshack – class distinction and snobbery
- A Gentleman’s Game – social climbing/status-seeking
- The Legend of Bagger Vance – golf as a vehicle for recovery from trauma
- Golf in The Kingdom – golf as a path to enlightenment
- Seven Days in Utopia – golf as a vehicle for personal growth
I then found that some of the movies on the list really belong in a third category: just plain crappy movies. The movies to which I assign that dubious honor are:
- Happy Gilmore
- Golfballs!
- Caddyshack II
- Who’s Your Caddy?
Not that some of the movies on the first two lists aren’t really, really bad—they are. Follow The Sun is painfully earnest, and stars an actor who appears to have never held a golf club in his life before being cast in the film; Golf in The Kingdom takes a book that I find to be a terrible load of New Age drivel and turns it into an even worse movie; Seven Days in Utopia (which I reviewed here) and The Squeeze* are equally bad, for different reasons and in different ways.
The final comments I received from Sens:
“Caddyshack is tolerable because it has some good improv sketches by some great comedians but it only ranks high on the list of golf movies because the competition is so weak. Tin Cup is probably the best I’ve seen but it’s only a good film by golf film standards.”
Caddyshack is so ingrained in popular golf culture that I would venture to say that it is not only the most often quoted golf movie ever made, but one of the most often quoted movies of all time—and probably the only golf-related movie to have a book† (two, actually…) written about the making of the movie.
It should come as no surprise that my ultimate choice for WGMEM comes from my off-the-cuff third list of golf-movie types. Caddyshack II condenses the light-hearted “snobs vs slobs” credo of its namesake original into a bitter brew of broadly offensive clichés. Looking at the other two categories, my selections are, from movies about golf – The Squeeze; and from the list of movies that use golf as a metaphor – Golf in The Kingdom.
It gives me no joy to make these selections—not because it is painful to have to pass judgement on movies that someone obviously thought it would be a good idea and a useful expenditure of time and talent to produce, but because they are so painful to watch. They are that bad.
On the other hand, I take pleasure in selecting my favorite films from the two main categories (and here you will see that I am more or less on the same page as Josh Sens – but not necessarily for the same reasons): Tin Cup, from the list of movies that are actually about golf; and Caddyshack, from the list of movies that use golf as a metaphor.
Tin Cup takes the honors in its category for its realistic but humorous examination of the angst and anxieties associated with the game of golf, plus its stellar cast (Kevin Costner, Rene Russo, Cheech Marin, and Don Johnson – not to mention dipping into the ranks of actual pro golfers of the time in supporting cameos; such names as Peter Jacobsen, Craig Stadler, Gary McCord, and even a baby-faced Phil Mickelson) and outstanding writing.
From the other list, movies that use golf as a metaphor, Caddyshack heads the list because of the great – dare I say iconic – comic turns by Saturday Night Live alums Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray (one of Bill’s older brothers, and a writer on the film), veteran standup comedian (but feature film newbie) Rodney Dangerfield, relative newcomer Michael O’Keefe in his third feature film, and veteran straight-man Ted Knight.
Golf movies, as a broadly but capriciously defined genre of film, are a very niche product, but within the short list of movies that comprise that body of work can be found a wide spectrum of styles and quality – and probably, something to please just about any golf fan.
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* Of which I wrote in another review that went down with the Examiner.com ship: “Golfers who care more about a decent golf swing than plot, dialogue, and character development will probably like this movie just fine, but I’m afraid that its eventual place in the golf movie spectrum will, in the long run, find it occupying a spot closer to The Foursome than to Caddyshack or Tin Cup.”
† Caddyshack – The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, by Entertainment Weekly movie critic Scott Nashawaty, is a fascinating deep dive into not only the making of the movie, but the Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live roots of the filmmakers and cast.
