‘Stick' creator Jason Keller takes a swing at the game of life through golf

Los Angeles Times

15-05-2025

On the most basic level, 'Stick' is about a prematurely washed-up golfer who takes a teen prodigy under his wing and on the road. Off they go in an RV to hit some big amateur tournaments, accompanied by the kid's mother and the old pro's irascible buddy. The kid gets to fall in love with a free-spirited lass. Adventures are had. Lessons are learned.
But very little about golf takes place on a basic level (except maybe in 'Caddyshack'). The sport is rife with metaphors. Lay up or go for broke? (see also, 'Tin Cup.') Keep your cool under pressure or lose it in the sand trap? So it makes sense that 'Stick,' premiering June 4 on Apple TV+, uses the game of golf to take a swing at the game of life.
The wash-up, Pryce Cahill (played by Owen Wilson), seeks redemption. Years back, he flipped out on the course, and his life has been in free fall since — he and his wife (Judy Greer) are getting a divorce, and their home is being sold. But then he meets the 17-year-old prodigy, Santi (newcomer Peter Dager), who he sees as the key to a second chance. Santi, meanwhile, knows he's good; when he pummels a ball, it sounds like a sonic boom. But his first coach was his hard-ass, now-vanished dad, and Santi now has trouble taking golf seriously or respecting his elders.
These human elements intrigued series creator Jason Keller far more than anything that might happen on the links. 'I love golf, but I'm not good at it,' he said. 'I am routinely frustrated by it.'
Frustration, of course, is a universal quality. So is disappointment. These are the elements that pushed Keller, who wrote the screenplay for the 2019 movie 'Ford v Ferrari,' to create 'Stick.'
'Long before the story was set on a golf course, I was really interested in exploring a character who had not lived up to expectations,' he said. 'I was interested in characters that had great promise but ultimately didn't achieve that promise. What happens to somebody afterward? How do they react to that? Do they let themselves be defined by not achieving that level, or do they try to reconcile that? Does it motivate them to excel in other areas of their life?'
Wilson, who also readily admits his golf game isn't the strongest — 'My dad and my brothers played, but I was always intimidated by it' — sees another key parallel to life: As much as you seek perfection, you can never achieve it.
'There's a little bit of a chess thing with golf, in that you can never really master it,' he said. 'That can feel like life too. People talk about Tiger Woods winning the Masters by like 12 strokes and deciding his swing isn't quite right. Pryce talks about how the game takes and takes and takes. I think people feel that way about life as well.'
Mariana Treviño, the Mexican actor who plays Santi's mom, Elena, agrees that 'Stick' is about dealing with hardships. 'Elena is in a moment in her life where she had a big disappointment,' she said. 'Her family broke down. Sometimes in life when something very strong happens to you, you just kind of shut out from the world. You think that you're going to protect that wound by just not moving too much from a place, or not directly confronting something that is painful.'
If this all sounds a tad serious, 'Stick' really isn't. As with most anything starring Wilson, whose Texas/California cool works just fine in the series' Indiana setting (Keller hails from Indianapolis), 'Stick' feels easy and breezy even when it gets into heavy-ish themes. The tone suggests a riff on 'Ted Lasso' but with golf instead of soccer.
Wilson and Marc Maron, who plays Pryce's grumpy, long-suffering best bud (who is dealing with grief of his own), keep up the steady banter of two guys who know each other's foibles and try to resist the urge to poke them. Zero, Santi's new friend and life guru played by Lilli Kay, is a self-described 'genderqueer, anticapitalist, postcolonial feminist,' and the series manages to have fun with her without making fun of her.
Elena, meanwhile, is mildly suspicious of the whole endeavor, but she finds the aging white golfers amusing. She also likes the cash Pryce has thrown her way for the privilege of coaching her son.
Put them all together in an RV, and on a series of golf courses, and you've got the makings of a modern family comedy. Except most of the 'family' aren't related.
'They're a sort of a found family, and they are all very different personalities,' Keller said. 'But ultimately they are what each other needed, and none of them knew it. I think that's the beauty and the fun and the heart of the show. We're watching a group of people that don't fit together at first, and then they realize they needed each other. I hope that warmth and the feel-good element of that is felt by audiences.'
But that sense of major disappointment, and the question of how to turn the page, still lingers over the story. Keller is intimately acquainted with that kind of challenge.
He was 25, newly arrived in Hollywood, when doctors discovered a benign brain tumor. It was successfully removed, but the subsequent nerve damage meant Keller had to retrain his brain to let him walk again. Now 56, he says he 'didn't realize what a gift that hard experience was. I became very grateful for being physically healthy.'
Keller used that sink-or-swim experience to write his 'Stick' characters. 'Everybody has a point in their life that just brought them to their knees,' he said. 'It could be a divorce or the death of a loved one. We all face these personal tragedies or challenges. What do you do with them after you go through 'em and survive 'em? That's the real question.'
Even Santi, the youngest character in 'Stick,' has been burned by life. 'He's scared, and he has every reason to be,' Dager said. 'His father left him.' And he responded by building a hard shell and walking with a swagger.
Dager embraced the whole package. 'I fell in love with his past but also his soul and the way he protects himself with the humor he uses as a defense mechanism,' Dager said. 'And then once we get to know him and he starts to fall in love and he starts to trust people, you really see the kid. You see who he actually wants to be.'
And if you do happen to be a golfer, if you know a birdie from an eagle, an iron from a wood, 'Stick' doesn't skimp on the sports stuff. It might even inspire you to go out to the garage and excavate that moldering set of clubs. Or not.
'The golfers I've shown it to have connected to it and appreciated it at the level of the sport,' Keller said. 'And the others who have seen it who are not golfers seem to be responding to it at a purely emotional character level. I think they're connecting to it. We'll see if we got it right. I hope we did.'