RICHARD GILLISsays Shane Lowry's Irish Open win can be seen in many movies, but a film is a distinct possibility
WHEN ASKED for a response to Shane Lowry’s remarkable Irish Open win in May, Walker Cup captain Colin Dalgleish shook his head and said it was “fairytale stuff” and journalists agreed, with several writing up his achievement as the classic “Cinderella story”.
Lowry was a gift to media: the plucky amateur battling unlikely odds to beat the pros and win the big trophy.
So compelling was it, one senior European Tour official was moved to suggest they should make a film about it. The truth is, they have. Several times: Cinderella has been the basis of virtually every golf film ever made, and the Shane Lowry part has been played by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Happy Gilmour
In Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler plays Happy/Lowry, an ice hockey player who finds that he can hit a golf ball 400 yards and straight. His grandmother, who he dotes on, is thrown out of her house by the taxman. Happy needs $275,000 to get her back home. To this end he goes from hitting balls in his front garden to the PGA Tour. Happy is not happy however, he is angry. He vents on opponents, clubs, the PGA Tour, golf, life. All that fighting we see in ice hockey is taken from the rink to the course. This being a comedy, the juxtaposition is supposed to be funny, but it's not. The basic problem with the film is that to make the Cinderella plot work we've got to empathise with the Sandler character. That he's a charmless and violent thug makes this difficult. By the end, we want that other cliché of the golf film, the pompous PGA pro, to stuff him.
Tin Cup
In Tin Cup, Lowry gets a makeover, and appears as Kevin Costner. The plot is identical: "Tin Cup" McAvoy must win the US Open to find redemption and true love, in the shape of Rene Russo. Tin Cup was a great college player, the best ever some say, but he threw it away. Now he's running a tatty old driving range and living in a caravan, wasting his life and his talent, drinking the nights away with his mates. All the time, his nemesis from college golfing days, played by Don Johnson, is a successful Tour pro with the money and more importantly, Russo, who as luck would have it, is a professional psychologist. She takes golf lessons from Costner, who is a bit of a deep thinker himself – when you hit a perfect shot, 'a tuning fork goes off in your heart' – and he sees what he's been missing. He goes to play the US Open, where he comes up against, you guessed it, Johnson, who by the way, has the best actor swing in movies (Worst? Matt Damon in The Legend of Bagger Vance).
The Greatest Game Ever Played
Steven Speilberg saw enough of Shia Lebouef in this film to cast him Indy's sidekick in the latest Indiana Jonesmovie. Lebouef plays Francis Ouimet, who did a Shane Lowry nearly a century before: win his national championship, in this case the 1913 US Open, as an unfancied, wrong-side-of-the-tracks amateur. The villain is again the golfing establishment, against which Lebouef struggles and overcomes. The final two acts are taken up with his final match against Harry Vardon, the great English pro of the time, himself a working class lad who sees in Ouimet more than a bit of himself.
Caddyshack
Veteran Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman ( Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, Misery) said recently that our judgment of a film's worth depends almost entirely on how old we were when we first saw it. Caddyshackis nearly 20 years old and to a generation of golfers, it's the most quoted, and certainly the one held in the greatest affection. To keep it in this exalted place, it's essential you don't watch it again. It's basically a bunch of Saturday Night Livesketches thrown together by director Harold Ramis (the one who wasn't Bill Murray or Dan Ackroyd in Ghostbusters,and later directed Groundhog Day) who lets Murray, Rodney Dangerfield and Chevy Chase wander on, do five minutes of gags and then wander off again.
The central Cinderella story is so slight, its almost submerged in the comedy routines, but if you watch closely, Shane Lowry is there again, as the caddy striving to win the club championship and with it entry on to a college scholarship, and a ticket out of Palookaville.
Why does every golf film have the same plot?
The best stories can be told in a sentence, which is how movies are pitched to Hollywood studios. "A young man and woman from different social classes fall in love aboard an ill-fated voyage at sea" ( Titanic) or, "An illiterate kid becomes a contestant on Who Wants to be A Millionairein order to find the girl he loves, who he knows will be watching" ( Slumdog Millionaire), or how about: "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again" ( The Wizard of Oz).
Every great story has at its heart, a transformation, where the lead actor undergoes a fundamental change over the course of the two hours of a movie (dumb to smart, nobody to somebody, bureaucrat to whistle-blower). For this to work effectively, the hero has to overcome “a great monster” and in each of the films listed above, the barrier standing between nobody to somebody is social class.
In each film, the outsider rails against authority, played by a golf establishment figure. For example, in Happy Gilmore, “golf” is represented by the absurdly pompous PGA pro, Shooter McGavin. In Tin Cup, Don Johnson plays exactly the same character, albeit with less ham. Cadddyshack takes place in a swanky east coast Country Club, owned by Ted McKnight’s upper class judge, supported up by his cretinous son, Spalding.
And early on in The Greatest Game Ever Played,when Shia Lebouef's dad tells him "A man should know his place", we know that can't be allowed to happen, and that our hero is not just fighting the links, he's a human rights campaigner.
Can Shane Lowry write his own script?
In the film of Shane Lowry’s life, the Sunday of the Irish Open would be the final scene, and the cinema audience would wander off to the pub safe in the knowledge that their hero had won his happy ever after. Real life is less neat, however, and the question for Lowry is whether he plays out the story he’s been given, or tries to change it.
His initial response suggests he's bored of the tale and wants to move on. "They way people are talking, you'd think I sat at home doing nothing all day," he said, puzzling over the media's fascination with his unconventional practice routine. To make the Lowry character sing, journalists will amplify his outsider credentials – the amateurism, the waistline, the practice routine, the unorthodoxy: anything that sets him apart from the clichéd modern golf pro. That he had an excellent amateur record and was a favourite to play himself on to the Walker Cup team are details that get in the way. Moments before he teed off in his first pro event, the European Open at the London Club in Kent, Lowry was playing to type: casually wandering around the putting green, dropping four balls on the turf and holing them all, while still talking to his agent Conor Ridge, who stood to the side of the green smiling. Alongside him the editor of Golf Punkmagazine salivated over the raw material that would keep him in features for months.
Better players than Lowry have gone through their careers unnoticed, playing to empty galleries away from the TV cameras. Yes, of course, he has to play well, win occasionally and compete. That’s a given, he’s a pro after all. But as the crowd followed him on his journey around the London Club that day there was something in the air that is quite rare, should be cherished and could be, longer term, potentially very valuable: affection.
Harness it, and the real version of The Shane Lowry Storycould have a very happy ending.
