10
Loading video...
By H. Alan Scott
Senior Editor
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Hollywood has never met a slow sport it couldn't punch up. Golf, a game built on quiet walking, hushed announcers and polite applause, has somehow inspired some of the funniest movies ever made. Caddyshack turned a country club into total anarchy. Happy Gilmore gave the game a hockey slapshot and an anger problem. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis wrung a whole picture out of it with 1953's The Caddy, and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made the sport practically flirtatious in Pat and Mike. Even when Hollywood goes reverent (looking at you, The Legend of Bagger Vance) it can't resist making golf seem grander, funnier and far more dramatic than it ever looks on a Sunday broadcast.
Netflix's The Hawk is the latest entry in that long tradition, and it might be the most convincing argument yet that golf's image problem isn't the game itself. It just needs some personality.
And when you're talking about personality, there's no bigger personality in comedy than Will Ferrell. He stars as Lonnie Hawkins, a pro golfer trying to claw back the fame he had at his 2004 peak.
Read More on Entertainment
...
Full disclosure before we go any further: I grew up on a golf course. My grandmother owned one in Missouri, I crashed a golf cart on it (everyone was fine, the cart less so) and none of it ever convinced me the sport isn't boring. When I put that to Ferrell directly, he didn't argue. He agreed.
"That's what kind of drew me to this idea, is that it is such an infuriating game," Ferrell told Newsweek. "It's a life of solitude. You're just hitting a little white ball for hours at a time. To try to be perfect and you can't be perfect and you know you're not gonna be perfect. So why? Why do you continue to play? Let's examine that from a comedic standpoint, but let's also see the pressure it puts on a family dynamic." Then, the closing argument of a man who actually plays: "I do know this. Golf can be fun, OK?"
The show's real innovation is Lonnie himself. He has his own signature drink Lonnie Juice. He has a colorful camper. He has outfits that could stop traffic on the back nine. In a sport that dresses its stars in neutrals and asks them to whisper, Lonnie is a walking argument that golfers could be just as loud, branded and watchable as any NFL wide receiver or NBA point guard. Ferrell relishes the delusion of it all.
"I just love the fact that he's still holding on to the dream, that he can still be competitive, which speaks to every athlete at some point. That reckoning is upon them, and it's hard for them to accept," he said. "It's just fun to play narcissists, and yet Lonnie's not the worst guy but he's not the best. He's somewhere in between and flipping back and forth that way is just so much fun."
His castmates make the case for the sport itself. "Golf to me has it all. It has tragedy, it has humor. It really has it all," Luke Wilson, who plays Golden Fisk, a rival pro, said.
Meanwhile Jimmy Tatro, who plays Lance, Lonnie's son and fellow pro golfer, is a real-life golfer like Wilson. He pushed back on the boring charge entirely: "It seems like you're not doing a lot, but the whole time there's something going on at all times. It doesn't look like it if you watch it, but in your head you're thinking, okay, well now I have 150 yards to go, should I go with this club [or] this club?”
Fortune Feimster plays the person literally carrying the weight of Lonnie's comeback: Sam, his new caddy. She offered a different theory. "I just assume that men took up golf to get away from their families," she said with a laugh. As for her own caddying credentials: "I'd be a terrible caddy because I don't know anything about golf and carrying that heavy golf bag was such a nightmare in the heat. I was like, we can't make this lighter? This is Hollywood, come on!"
There's also a reunion happening in The Hawk that comedy fans should not overlook. The series marks the first scripted project to pair Ferrell and Molly Shannon since 2006's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and the chemistry is basically family at this point. "Will knew my dad really well, I'm really close to Will's mom and dad, so it really feels like family," Shannon said. She plays Stacy, Lonnie's estranged wife. "Working with Will is just the best. It feels like you're working with your close friend, and you feel excited to go to work."
Shannon doesn't play golf, but when asked what her golfer persona would be, Ferrell immediately started building the character for her. "I feel like your golf cart would be decorated and have a certain color scheme," he said. "I feel like you'd have accessories with your outfit, like a nice shade hat." See? Even off-camera, Hollywood can't stop making golf more interesting than the sport itself does.
Which is the whole point. "It feels like a guy you want to really root for in life," Feimster said of Lonnie. Tatro put it even more simply: "It looks like a guy you can dress as for Halloween. That makes for a great character."
Pro golf has spent decades being the quietest show in sports. Hollywood keeps handing it a model for what it could be. Maybe Will Ferrell's Lonnie will inspire some of the pros to find their own juice, so to speak.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines