Stick: Owen Wilson's charmingly funny golf drama is as feelgood as Ted Lasso

The Guardian

a day ago

Golf is – apologies to fans, the ground is gonna get a little rough – inert material for TV and film. It's not explosively combative like say football, either American or actual. In golf, players interact with the environment, not each other. There is no time pressure. Physical adjustments are minute, the airborne ball impossible to see. For casual spectators, the experience mostly amounts to watching a middle-aged man shuffle above a tiny ball, like an emperor penguin sitting on an egg. The sound of even a world-beating putt is a soft plop.
However, a lack of basic knowledge brought me late to Friday Night Lights, a show that became one of my favourites. I'd like to avoid making that mistake with Stick (Apple TV+, from Wednesday 4 June), so let's see. Wisely, the show isn't aiming at FNL's grit and spunk, blue-collar catharsis. Stick is funny, in a gentle, humane way. Clearly, Apple+ is attempting to hit its own marker again, the one with 'Ted Lasso' written on it in gold.
Owen Wilson plays Pryce Cahill, a former pro golfer reduced to coaching retirees and pulling short cons in bars. When he catches Latino teenager Santi (Peter Dager) sneaking on to the range where he works, to ragefully hammer balls, Pryce realises the boy is a prodigy and offers to coach him. Together with his old caddy and the boy's mother, they road trip between tournaments in search of fortune. But do you know what? I think they might find something deeper.
Stick's credit sequence features a ukulele playing over a series of watercolours, so you know this isn't The Wire. It's feelgood! Expect light bickering and dissolvable disputes! Frequent sporting metaphors for emotional growth! Like Community – a comedy that offered a self-aware take on the inspirational speech – Stick is aware that if you stretch such metaphors too far, they snap back into parody. 'I used to think she liked me, but she loves you,' whispers Pryce to his protege, very much in the vein of 'playing golf is like making love to a beautiful woman'. The show just about manages to have its cake and eat it.
You don't need Google to enjoy Stick. I let references to knockdowns, casting and holding the finish wash over me like suds in the bath. Dager looks good swinging a stick, while Mariana Treviño, as his forthright mom Elena, improves every scene she's in. Marc Maron is winning as Mitts, a curmudgeonly caddy with a hidden heart – a trope he's made his own. The show finds its groove with the addition of Lilli Kay as Zero, a defiant club worker and love interest. With a she/they character on board, the show gets to prod at generational tension, and the problematic imbalance of mentor relationships. When Pryce admonishes Santi for his discipline, Zero warns him to stop 'prescribing late stage capitalist ideology to your great brown cash cow'. Elena advises Pryce to back off, without backing down. 'They smell fear, the gen Z-ers.'
Driving it all, like a high MOI titanium club, is Owen Wilson. Something about Wilson's hair invariably makes me wonder when a weed pipe is going to appear on screen (the answer is seven minutes into the first episode). It's easy to forget he's also an Oscar-nominated writer and subtle actor. With his goofy voice, broken nose and wounded smile, he excels at playing characters who are both boyish and washed-up, full of good cheer dented by time. He's perfect as the broke, dragging-his-heels-through-a-divorce Pryce, whose Ryder Cup career ended with a televised mental breakdown on a fairway years ago.
Aficionados will enjoy debating the finer points of Santi's swing. The directors get round the invisible ball problem with soaring drones and POV shots, to inject visual flair and kineticism. The show promises cameos from real-life pros including Max Homa, Wyndham Clark and Collin Morikawa for a frisson of authenticity. With Happy Gilmore 2 coming to Netflix in July, golf fans are spoilt for choice.
Which doesn't leave the rest of us out in the cold. Sport in dramas is a vehicle for storytelling, rather than being the story itself. Another tricky mentor relationship is fathering, the show's real theme. A few episodes in, I care enough to see how it plays out. Can Stick stick the landing? I wouldn't bet against it.