Disney turn golf history into a real goofy fable

George Kimball/America at Large: When Mark Frost's book was published three years ago I had a problem, not so much with the author's rather grandiose claim that the three-way play-off which settled the 1913 US Open represented The Greatest Game Ever Played, but with the fact it was descriptively classified as "golf history", which it was not.

Frost took considerable dramatic licence in his portrayal of Francis Ouimet, Harry Vardon, Ted Ray, and their supporting cast, inventing improbable thought processes for his characters, depicting conversational dialogue which could never have taken place, and sprinkling his narrative with contemporary golfing lexicon, terms which in many cases had yet to be invented. "Birdie" and "par," for instance, were rarely used in 1913, and "bogey" had a connotation completely different from today's. One kept waiting to hear a member of the gallery shout "You Da Man!" whenever young Ouimet smacked a drive down the fairway.

On the night he finished tied for the championship with Vardon and Ray, Frost had Francis walking across the street to his house and announcing to his mother "I'm about half-starved!" Such liberties would have been acceptable had Greatest Game been labelled a work of fiction, but in the end it was neither fish nor fowl, a bad novel or an imperfect history. Such objections pale, however, in light of what Hollywood has now done to the tale.

The film ostensibly based on Frost's book, and sharing its title, opened in America over the weekend, and the Disney Corporation has once again outdone itself by turning an inspirational sporting tale into a preposterous allegory.

The movie version of The Greatest Game Ever Played represents an endless sequence of unplayable lies, and the biggest whopper of all comes at the opening credits when it claims to be "a true story". Ouimet was a 19-year-old former caddie when he defeated the world's top golfers at the Country Club in Brookline on the eve of the first World War, and his victory is properly credited with having inspired the popularity of the game on these shores. But not content with those facts, Disney has decided to turn the tournament into a class struggle: "Golf is a game for gentlemen, not your kind." "But all I want is a chance!" Ouimet was, to be sure, a working-class youth, but he had worked since boyhood as a caddie at the Country Club primarily because his family lived across the street from the golf course, which hardly suggests abject poverty.

Mark Frost is credited with the screenplay, so we can only imagine his reaction when the Disney people ordered him to create a love interest for Francis. (It may have been similar to that of Larry McMurtry's first encounter with Hollywood, when producers who had purchased his fine novel Horseman, Pass By suggested he turn it into a Cain-and-Abel allegory by inventing a "bad" brother for the protagonist. ("Gee, why didn't I think of that?" wondered McMurtry, who obeyed by creating the Paul Newman character for Hud.) Harry Vardon was almost as famous for his mustache as for his grip, but for some reason Disney ordered a clean-shaven version for the movie.

Vardon, who shared Ouimet's working-class origins, was sporting in his interaction with the young upstart, but in the movie version he proclaims, "I'm the best, and I'll thank you to remember that." The film suggests Ouimet had been so battered by the class struggle he had all but given up the game, and had to be talked into resuming the chase for the US Open. In point of fact he had just nearly beaten the defending champion in the US Amateur, and had won the Massachusetts Amateur title that summer.

In the heat of battle, in the movie Ouimet is shown consulting a caddie's yardage book, even though, as far as we know, caddies didn't begin compiling yardage books for another 60 years.

That the dramatic US Open play-off took place at the same venue which infamously hosted the 1999 Ryder Cup evidently led the filmmakers to confuse the two. While a certain degree of chauvinism undoubtedly existed in the 1913 version of the Battle of Brookline, Vardon and Ted Ray were not, as is suggested in the film, members of a British "team". Turning a game of golf into an international incident apparently required the presence of an unscrupulous villain, and the filmmakers found one in an Irishman - or at least, an Irish-born man - in Alfred Harmsworth, the first Viscount Northcliffe.

Born in Chapelizod, Lord Northcliffe was a forerunner of Rupert Murdoch and at the time operated the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, and the Times. In 1913 the real-life Lord Northcliffe was probably far too busy fomenting the first World War (it was once said he did more than any other man save the Kaiser to produce the Great Conflict) to bother with stacking the deck against Francis Ouimet in the US Open, but in the film he has his reasons. "The prime minister has promised me a seat in his cabinet if I bring back this title," he declares.

And poor Ray, who would return to Massachusetts 14 years later as captain of the first Britain & Ireland Ryder Cup team, is given such a short shrift many reviewers have assumed he wasn't even a participant in the play-off.

Although Ray finished regulation play tied for the lead with Vardon and Ouimet, the nation's top film critic, Roger Ebert, his knowledge evidently based on the film, described the final-day pairing as one between "a working-class American amateur named Francis Ouimet and the great British player Harry Vardon." The New York Times, which ought to know better, describes Vardon and Ouimet as "the main competitors in the Open". But just when you're wondering what ever happened to Ted Ray, you think you've spotted his doppelganger in the gallery. "My God," says Francis. "It's President Taft!"