One scene from the first season of Stick, Apple TV+’s comedy series set in the world of golf, keeps sticking in my craw. At the end of the seventh episode, Owen Wilson’s hotheaded former PGA Tour–pro character is at a crossroads with Santi (Peter Dager), the protégé he’s been trying to mold into the sport’s next great star. Santi tells Wilson’s character, Pryce, that he no longer wants to play in amateur tournaments. What, then, is he aiming for? Santi says: “I’m talking about the show.”
As in, the PGA Tour. Santi wants to compete against the best players in the world. And so, in the series’ newly released ninth episode, “Showtime,” the washed-up former pro and the upstart amateur figure out a way to get the latter into a professional tournament. There’s just one problem with this whole storyline: I am not sure that anyone in the history of golf has referred to the PGA Tour as “the show.” Major League Baseball is commonly called “The Show,” and the moniker is so well established that The Show is even the name of the most popular baseball video game. But, as someone who has attended and covered many professional golf tournaments, who plays golf almost every week, and who has posed the question to several friends in the golf media, I can safely say that at no point in the long history of the PGA Tour has “the show” ever been a nickname that any group has used to describe the top golf tour. Even within the bounds of a fictional TV show, this is certainly not how one of the best amateur players in the world would describe the circuit he’d like to join.
This implausibility illustrates the main problem with Stick, which premiered in June to lukewarm-to-positive reviews. The series has several things going for it: It’s got Wilson playing a role with a ton of heart, avenging demons from both golf and fatherhood as he helps Santi reconnect with the game after the young player’s manipulative dad ruined it for him. It’s got a fun buddy-cop routine, of sorts, between Pryce’s former caddie, “Mitts” (Marc Maron, back from podcasting for his first television role in a bit), and Santi’s mother, Elena (Mariana Treviño). It’s got a textured teenage romance between Santi and his caddie/friend/hookup, Zero (Lilli Kay).
Which is why it is disappointing that Stick fails one of the most important tests that any show or movie about sports needs to pass: It needs to dramatize the sport enough to make it compelling for everyone, but without botching so many basic details that it feels cheap to people who follow the sport closely. By no means does that mean a sports show needs to be realistic to be good, something that Apple TV+ already learned with its hit series Ted Lasso, a decidedly impossible story of an American college football coach taking his talents to English soccer. Sports art just needs to do enough to live in the world it inhabits—and that’s where Stick’s sloppiness lessens what would otherwise be a much better show.
Showrunner Jason Keller does not dwell on the nuts and bolts of golf, because most people have the good sense (which I lack) to not be interested in the finer points of wedge play and lag putting. Some of us may have enjoyed a detailed discussion of why Santi was overdrawing his midirons or struggling to control his low point, but if you are one of the nearly 100 percent of humans who don’t care much about golf, your eyes would glaze over. You’d just as soon tune in to the Barracuda Championship on Golf Channel.
So the show takes some fun and even aspirational liberties. Pryce and Mitts run a recurring hustle with Mitts goading bar patrons into betting that Pryce won’t make a putt into a drinking glass. Santi, in showing off his skill, hits a 250-yard shot that clanks off a tiny sign, a level of control that even Tiger Woods in his prime could not muster with any consistency. Stick also imagines a much more inclusive world of high-level golf than actually exists. Zero, a restaurant server who becomes Santi’s caddie, uses they/them and she/her pronouns and has extensive conversations with Santi about gender and sexuality. Nobody says anything mean or moves to exclude Zero from the sport. I fear the reception would be much different in actual high-level golf, which drips with cultural conservatism. (The PGA Tour doesn’t even post token Pride month appreciations anymore, and the one noncisgender player on either the PGA Tour or LPGA Tour in the past few years faced rampant transphobia and was banned from competition.)
It’s great that Stick doesn’t let that slow it down. The low-hanging description that the series is Ted Lasso for golf is not all the way wrong. Where the two shows diverge is in the more basic presentation of the sports that serve as their respective backdrops. Ted Lasso is a hyperdetailed love letter to English soccer (fine, football), meant to look exactly like a show set around a small, underdog club would look: The facilities are a bit ratty. The local pub is the nexus of the club’s supporter group. The soccer references aren’t overly technical, but they have some meat behind them, because the whole premise of the show is that a redneck American must learn about soccer. The show’s exploration of seedy ownership and investors was almost too on the nose for some fans.
Stick just makes too many mistakes in this area for the show to reach its potential. The references to “the show,” a moniker that does not exist in golf, are but one example in a water hazard full of them. In an early episode, Pryce warns Santi not to play too aggressively with his approach shot on one hole because the green is guarded by a difficult bunker known by the locals as “The Copacabana,” which Pryce cautions sounds like a good thing but isn’t. This is a neat little attempt by Stick to lean into a real part of golf culture—that lots of courses have intimidating design features that take on their own lore and can be scary for players who haven’t seen them before. (The U.S. Open was just played at a course with a bunker called “Big Mouth.”) But when Santi actually hits a shot into that bunker, we see that this sand trap should not be so intimidating. It doesn’t require the player to hit over a high lip, and there’s tons of green between the sand and the hole. A player like Santi would make par from this glorified patch of dirt almost every time.
The show tries to channel more parts of the sport’s culture in ways that just don’t quite click. At one amateur tournament Santi plays, there are two guys who exude a certain Barstool Sports energy and scream “MASHED POTATOES” after a player hits his shot. Some PGA Tour events are crawling with this type of guy, but nondescript amateur tournaments definitely are not. Plus, the one guy’s yell about potatoes comes just a beat too late to sound like what a real golf bozo would yell. “I hate golf bros,” Elena says in response. Indeed, but they wouldn’t be here. The show also struggles repeatedly with the pronunciation of a famous golf course name (Muirfield is “meer-field,” not “morry-field”) and scatters a bunch of turns of phrase that are just far enough off that an actual golf fan would notice. In Stick, a chip shot is “made,” rather than “hit” or even “played,” as someone would say in real life. A “PGA tournament” is referenced, when the character clearly is talking about the PGA Tour, a separate governing body. (Most of the country makes this mistake, but elite golfers aspiring to a career in the sport don’t.) Santi refers to one event as “the first tour I ever saw,” rather than the first tournament. These are all tiny things, but there are so many of them, and, as Arnold Palmer said—and Wilson’s character reminds us a few times—golf is a game of inches.
The issue with Stick isn’t that Santi hits unrealistic shots or that the sound effect of his club striking the ball is a little hammed up. Happy Gilmore is one of the most enjoyable sports movies ever made, and the golf it depicts is intentionally ridiculous. (Just look at it.) But that movie nailed the environment around golf, which allowed Adam Sandler to successfully play a chaos agent among a tour of straight men. (Remember when the stuffy tour pros send him out to “the ninth green at 9” to get soaked by sprinklers?) Stick, by contrast, uses golf as a vehicle to move along plot points about growth, grief, and parenting, but the volume of avoidable errors it makes raises the fair question of why it needed to be a golf show in the first place. Sometimes, it only sort of is one; the series’ fourth episode, one of its best, doesn’t even go near a golf course, and is all the better for it.
Non-golfers, there may still be something in here for you. If I didn’t really like golf and care about its ins and outs, I would’ve liked Stick more. Botched references to the tapestry of the sport aside, the show builds a strong on-screen relationship between Wilson’s character and his young charge, who fill a vacuum left on one side by an absentee father and on the other by the death of a child. And, to be fair, the con that the ensemble puts together in Episode 8 to get Santi into a PGA Tour event is a riot. Stick takes some big swings, and enough of them connect to make something decent. The show just misses too many tap-ins to be truly great.