A Life Through Film #029: Tin Cup
That other golf movie from 1996 likes the sport more and is surprisingly good because of it
Release Date: 8/16/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
Quick question for you. What’s your favorite movie from 1996 about an unlikely, blue-collar everyman infiltrating the elite world of professional golf and capturing a wide audience of fans while he faces off against a snobby elitist and falls in love with a beautiful blonde?
You’re right, it’s Happy Gilmore!
After getting fired from Saturday Night Live, Adam Sandler was ready to be a movie star. Supporting roles in films like Coneheads and Airheads (no relation) got the comic ready for life in front of the camera, but his major starring debut, 1995’s Billy Madison [2.5/5] wasn’t exactly the explosive start that Sandler needed, even if it was firmly in his wheelhouse. The story of an idiotic young man needing to go back to elementary school acted as a perfect setup for his brash, juvenile sense of humor, but it didn’t do incredibly at the box office. He wouldn’t have to wait for long after Billy Madison to get his hit though.
Happy Gilmore follows the titular nitwit as played by Sandler, a loud, violent, unrefined working man who just happens to have the raw talent necessary to be a world-class golfer (thanks to his lifelong obsession with playing ice hockey). In a goofy effort to save his grandma’s house from the IRS, Gilmore lucks his way into the professional golf tour and turns the snooty foundations of the sport on their head. Sandler shouts absurd curses at his failures and celebrates with frat-boy bravado at his victories, to the horror of uptight villain Shooter McGavin and the delight of a more economically diverse set of fans than the sport has seen in years.
Happy Gilmore released in the dump months of early 1996, peaking in third place at the box office during the second week of Broken Arrow ruling the roost. The golf comedy still turned a profit despite never topping the charts, pulling in $40 million on a $10 million budget, and has lived on in the public consciousness far more than that Travolta/Slater movie has. Constant reruns on Comedy Central and enshrined iconic moments like Sandler getting into a knockdown brawl with Bob Barker (“The price is wrong, bitch!”) have kept Happy Gilmore a recurring favorite. To this day it’s still considered one of Sandler’s best movies, even when you factor in the man’s occasional turn to the prestigious.
Despite the long cultural tail of the movie, I’d actually never watched Happy Gilmore in full before this week. I don’t have the fondest feelings towards Adam Sandler; growing up in the 2000s meant a shitty looking movie from him basically every year, and I grew tired of the man just through constantly seeing him in annoying commercials and trailers for his movies.
But I’m pleased to report that Happy Gilmore holds up. Its absurd humor is crass and loud but never tips over the line too much into being hateful, unlike a lot of comedies from this era. It helps that it spends its entire runtime making fun of professional golf, a scene that is decidedly rich, white, and male in its makeup. Sandler still clearly wants to impress at this point in his career, and I laughed basically every time he was onscreen. And when you add in Christopher McDonald as all-timer comedy foil Shooter McGavin, you get a winner of a comedy. Consider me a fan of Happy Gilmore [4/5].
Of course, we’re not here to just talk about Happy Gilmore. Despite the rarity of golf movies in general, 1996 saw not one but two different comedies about the sport and what happens when it runs up against the working class charm of a blue-collar leading man. I don’t think these two movies releasing in the same year was one studio intentionally biting another’s hot script, but it does make me wonder: why wasn’t Happy Gilmore able to top the box office when Tin Cup was just six months later?
Tin Cup is a 1996 romantic sports comedy directed by Ron Shelton that stars Kevin Costner, Rene Russo, and Don Johnson. Costner plays Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy, a drunken driving range operator in West Texas with a hell of a golf game but no motivation to use it. That is, until old rival turned PGA pro David Simms (Johnson) shows back up with his hot psychologist girlfriend Molly (Russo) and lights a fire under Tin Cup’s ass. In an effort to impress Molly and steal her away (don’t worry, she’s also into him), McAvoy pushes past a fear of risk that permeates every part of his life except his golfing strategy and qualifies for the U.S. Open.
The differences between Tin Cup and Happy Gilmore are pretty obvious, with the most glaring being different levels of appreciation for the sport of golf itself. Sandler’s movie resents golf as a hoity toity institution of The Man, reflecting Gen X’s takeover of American culture in the ‘90s. Meanwhile, Tin Cup is a love letter to golf, showing that the sport’s appeal can be for everyone who wants to feel the satisfaction of that one great swing. This makes sense when you realize that the movie’s origins lie with a round of golf between old buddies.
Ron Shelton had been an athlete for years, even getting into Triple A minor league baseball in the ‘70s after playing both it and golf in college. That’s a tough life to live though, so Shelton transitioned in the ‘80s to the much easier job of writing and directing feature films. It worked out for him though. Shelton is behind movies like Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump, which are among some of the most well-regarded sports movies even to this day.
Shelton never let making hit sports comedies get in the way of his love of the golf game though. One day in the fall of 1994, the writer/director was playing a round on the greens with a couple of friends, writer John Norville and producer Gary Foster. Inspired by a shared love of just hanging out with the boys and hitting some balls, Shelton and Norville had played around with writing a screenplay for a golf screenplay before. But with Foster around on this specific day, the producer pushed the creatives to pursue the idea fully, surely seeing dollar signs given Shelton’s history with sports films.
As true fans, Norville and Shelton pulled from real moments in golf’s history to find inspiration for their story and characters. Primarily, they were thinking of recent history. At the ‘93 Masters, golf pro Chip Beck played too safely on the par-5 15th hole while trailing the winner by three shots, eventually losing the tournament because of it. The writer and director took that moment and flipped it. Shelton and Norville worked backwards, starting with the idea of a reckless player losing a tournament by refusing to play it safe, and found a narrative that could build towards it. Shelton explained their draw to Tin Cup as a protagonist in 2021:
What about a guy who keeps going for it on the last hole? And his hubris, what’s great about him is also what his flaw is. He has to go for it. Even if it’s going to kill him.
Foster loved the script and reached out to Bull Durham star Kevin Costner. The actor had been on a major hot streak since the late ‘80s, putting out huge hits on an annual basis: Field of Dreams [4/5], JFK, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Dances With Wolves, The Bodyguard, and more. Some of these movies are classics, all of them were big business at the box office. The man was a certifiable movie star by 1994, and had a history of success with the director. The prospect of getting Costner onboard for Tin Cup seemed like a tap in (that’s golf lingo for making an easy putt. I don’t like using it anymore than you like reading it).
Costner, however, wasn’t in a great place when Shelton and the gang reached out to him for their golf movie. He had just finished a grueling four month shoot for Waterworld, his biggest movie to that point, on top of going through a divorce. And besides, Costner had golfed maybe a dozen rounds of the game in his life to that point (11 more than me), so he lacked confidence in his ability to convincingly play a pro like Tin Cup.
His agent pushed him though, and Costner later said that signing onto the film was one of the best decisions he’s ever made. That tracks when you consider two things. One, Waterworld was a mightily stressful movie to make that went on to be one of the most legendary critical and commercial bombs of the ‘90s. Second, it seems a lot of the making of Tin Cup consisted of a bunch of dudes hanging out and playing golf. I can’t imagine a more relaxing way to make a living, if you’re into that.
Costner’s inexperience as a golfer was only a minor concern, despite the filmmakers’ interest in accurately capturing their love of the sport. As a consultant and trainer, the team brought on pro golfer Gary McCord. He was good, but had never won a championship on the PGA tour and was transitioning to a broadcast role at around that time.
Shelton thought that this was perfect for the character of Tin Cup: a talented, top level golfer who wasn’t so jaded by absolute victory in the sport as to be a true elitist. In Golf Digest’s thorough, loving 2021 history of Tin Cup, the filmmakers adulate McCord as a golf tutor for Costner but really seem to love him as one of the boys in the gang. Dude was just a great hang, and he got rewarded handsomely for it. For his role in helping the team get the film right, McCord was paid $250k, the most for any Hollywood consultant at the time.1
A group of fellas getting together and having fun while making a goofy movie isn’t too dissimilar to other bro-out comedies that I’ve seen and written about for this series, but there is that age difference. A young guy like Sandler and his team throwing out increasingly ludicrous jokes unconcerned with respectability while making Happy Gilmore sounds like a fun process that I wouldn’t have minded being a part of. I read about Costner, Shelton, Foster, and McCord hanging out and making Tin Cup and it sounds more like being a kid and seeing the circle of dads chatting at a summer barbecue. They should definitely have their own space, but I don’t think it’s for me.
I’m generally not excited by the prospect of a sports movie, probably because I’m not that much of a sports fan. I like Remember the Titans [3.5/5] and Field of Dreams, but watching movies that rely on sentimentality towards a hobby that I’m not all that connected to can be tough. Golf, especially, is an extremely tough sell for me in cinematic form. As entertaining as Caddyshack [4/5] is, most movies about the sport seem to lean closer to the maudlin, overly sentimental The Legend of Bagger Vance [2/5] than that classic comedy. Because of this, I wasn’t excited to watch Tin Cup for the purposes of this column.
The best sports movies are about underdogs fighting the odds though, and though every fiber of my personal taste pushed against it, I enjoyed Tin Cup. It’s a cleverly written romantic comedy that even made me care about the sport at its center, anchored by a few great performances. It’s not a perfect movie, but there’s something to its dedication to its title character’s journey that compels me even after credits have rolled.
Tin Cup reveals itself as a well-written movie in its first scene. Beyond great dialogue and chemistry between Russo and Costner, it’s cleverly structured to make the movie appealing to both fans and non-fans of golf. The title character weaves tastefully drunken descriptions of the beauty of the sport between lessons on what goes into a great swing. Newcomers learn the mechanics of the game and begin to get inklings as to why the players and fans swing on ball after ball in the search for that perfect moment of contact.
The smartest thing Tin Cup does as a sports movie is spend more time focused on the characters and their dynamic than on the actual playing of golf. Shelton admits that directing the sport in a way that excites and engages is tough because it’s such a repetitive, mental game. Two and a half hours of guys swinging a club would be boring no matter how funny the dialogue, so instead Tin Cup finds entertainment its central character and how he’s forced to evolve over the course of the film.
Tin Cup McAvoy is as close to a bad boy as a sport like golf is allowed. He’s often drunk and never wrong, at least according to him. His talent at the game is undeniable, but pursuing it professionally would mean leaving the comfort of his small, decrepit driving range and gaggle of sycophantic good ol’ boys. And yet, he's so skilled at golf that it’s the one place in his life where he’s willing to take risks. Keeping this adventurousness exclusive to this one field where he’s most confident is Tin Cup’s most relatable quality. Let me try any video game you put in front of me, but do not ask me to learn a complicated new skill unless there’s literally no other choice.
This opting for comfort by always having a cold beer handy and a new ridiculous wager to play with the boys in between rounds of golf is ultimately self destructive, and on some level Tin Cup knows that. Is it perhaps shallow storytelling that the beauty of Rene Russo is what pulls him out of this spiral? Maybe, but I’d be lying if I didn’t get it. Costner and Russo spark from the moment they meet, with clever banter, longing gazes, and just-too-close moments of synchronous body language. By the time Molly leaves the antagonistic Simms for McAvoy later in the movie, the smug asshole doesn’t even seem mad about it. He must have seen the writing on the wall with the rest of us.
Russo’s character could use a bit more complexity, but her dynamic with Costner is strong enough to distract from the fact that you can count the things you know about her character on one hand. Both of their performances are believable, which is what you want with a story like this. If you don’t buy that there is something weirdly compelling and sexy about this drunk layabout who’s stupidly good at golf, the movie doesn’t make sense. Thankfully, Tin Cup is one of the more cohesive narratives I’ve watched in a sports movie. The characters, story beats, and dialogue all coalesce into a unified theme of taking the risk of being yourself, even if part of that risk is failure.
The comedy helps this all go down nice and smooth as well. Tin Cup is a legitimately funny movie that doesn’t rely too much on insider jokes that only golf aficionados would get. McAvoy’s crass nature running against Molly’s professional psychological analysis leads to a scene full of big laughs early on, and later the film takes great fun in paying off a recurring gag about Simms supposedly hating old people, kids, and dogs (in that order).
Happy Gilmore is a goofier and more fun movie overall, but Tin Cup manages to nail a more mature sense of humor. The crux of the story is two different kinds of messed up people trying to figure out how to make their mutual attraction work, and the jokes help us root for that relationship to happen. Plus, the crassness of the language further helps to bring golf down to a more human level, rather than project it as this upper-class exclusive game for our most civilized of men.
Golf has ever been shot so compellingly or so accurately as it is in Tin Cup. Shelton shoots the action from the greens, making the geography of important holes seem more logical and making us think about the strokes necessary to hit par or better. I wouldn’t say this is the finest cinematography I’ve ever seen, but watching Tin Cup, you can tell that Shelton has a lot of love for golf and the desolation of the American Southwest. Both are shot to highlight their beauty and distract you from the fact that, in reality, both are really rather boring on the whole. This movie offers their platonic ideal.
It helps that, unlike Happy Gilmore, Tin Cup was able to pull together real-life PGA branding and a whole gaggle of real players to make cameos. It adds legitimacy and reinforces this as the more “mature” golf movie. Granted, the only player I recognized was Phil Mickleson, but I’m a filthy casual to this world. If you were tapped into the world of ‘90s professional golf, I’m sure this would be a super fun movie to watch while pointing at the screen every time a player you recognized showed up.
The strong writing and compelling filmmaking come together in the film’s famous climactic moment. Against all odds, Tin Cup is about to win the US Open. He just has to make birdie on the par-5 18th hole, and with his second stroke he can get closer to a water feature between him and the green and make a safe lay up near the hole. But despite the journey the character has been on, that’s not what McAvoy is about. He wants to go for it, to really just whack the hell out of the ball and drive it over the distant water feature, just for the hell of it.
Over the course of the next five agonizing minutes, we watch in horror as Tin Cup sinks ball after ball into the water hazard. Soon, he loses any shot of winning the tournament, and yet he keeps asking for more balls to hit. The crowd moan and groan in anguish, and the TV commentator mirrors my exact thoughts when he says that it’s the most painful thing he’s ever watched. Seeing a man so beholden to his most negative traits even at this important point in his life is frankly devastating, and the worst part is I kept convincing myself that this time, he would hit the ball onto the green and be able to put it in. Every time, I winced as it just landed in the water again.
The fact that I was so invested in this wrinkle of the main character after nearly two and a half hours was the final proof I needed: Tin Cup is an exceptionally written sports film.2
That said, it isn’t a perfect movie by a longshot (is that a golf joke? I don’t even know anymore). It is frankly too long, especially with an extended coda that really adds nothing to the film overall. You could trim off 25 minutes of this thing easily and not miss much. And as much as I like the script, it does leave a few noticeable dangling threads. Tin Cup himself is robbed of an interesting reason behind his own “fucked upness,” though the movie seems to imply that he’s conquered some great trauma and is ready to move forward by the end. I didn’t see it personally; I just thought he was learning how to be himself.
And at the end of the day, this is a movie that’s best enjoyed if you’re a golf fan. The filmmakers do their best to ease me into that world as a viewer, but there are too many unexplained technical terms and uses of “driving range pro” as a derogatory term for me to feel let into the clubhouse. Costner is handsome, talented, and ultimately not an actor I ever feel I can connect to. He’s one of those stars I associate with Dad Movies, in that I could lovingly imagine my own Dad stumbling upon one of his better movies on TV on a Sunday afternoon and watching the rest of it while eating a tasty sandwich.3 That’s ultimately who Tin Cup is for, not me, so I can’t fault the movie too much. It does mean I’ll probably never count it as a close personal favorite is all.
Still, I can’t believe it but I actually recommend Tin Cup. I don’t like golf, don’t love sports movies, and I can’t say I’m a diehard fan of Kevin Costner. But the total package won me over. I don’t feel all that compelled to hit the links this weekend, but I better understand those who do. Dare I say it, at its best, this movie makes golf seem almost kind of fun.
Critics at the time were also rooting for Tin Cup, as the film holds a 74% on Rotten Tomatoes. Most importantly though, golfers have continued to love the movie in the nearly 30 years since it first released. It sits only behind Caddyshack as the most replayed film on the Golf Channel, and there have been a whole litany of moments in real PGA play that are so similar to the movie that its title is invoked live on air. The accuracy and love of the game that Shelton and his team worked to imbue Tin Cup with worked wonders in maintaining the movie’s legacy since 1996. That’s in contrast to the somewhat tepid commercial response it got on release.
Like I said earlier, Waterworld was a colossal misfire for Costner, but despite that blemish on his career, people were interested enough in the Bull Durham reunion of him and Shelton to turn out for the opening weekend of Tin Cup. But its sole week on top of the box office was a weak one overall, more a symptom of poor competition and the general public turning on Jack than anything to do with excitement over this movie. A $10 million opening on track to a total domestic gross of $53 million isn’t the most electric performance overall, and a weak international release only pushed the final gross to about $75 million on a $45 million budget. That’s still a profit, but as Shelton explained in that Golf Digest history, sports movies in general are a tough sell outside of the States. With its focus on regional and cultural differences within the game of golf, Tin Cup was never going to have universal appeal.
The movie’s release overseas did have one benefit that the domestic premiere did not. Two weeks after the film’s debut in America, a young man by the name of Tiger Woods turned pro and quickly became the biggest golfer on the planet. Woods was a fresh face whose incredible talent brought in a whole new audience of golf fans quickly. Shelton says that if the film had been released a year later, they probably would have doubled their box office results solely on the back of Tiger Woods’s effect on the sport.
Everyone involved in Tin Cup is still proud of the movie though, and they should be. This is a mostly good romantic comedy with a palpable appreciation for golf that’s hard not to get caught up in. Shelton and the lads turned this mini-golf specialist into a fan of the real thing for long enough to appreciate the clever writing and great performances. This movie has entered the limited pantheon of my favorite sports movies, and it might be the one with the most earnest appreciation of its central topic that I’ve liked. The next time I find myself out on a driving range, I’ll pull up the first 10 minutes of the movie on my phone and watch it to get into the headspace necessary to find that perfect swing.
There’s been talk of Tin Cup getting a sequel as far back as the late ‘90s, and even nowadays, Costner won’t rule it out. I’m pretty sure this franchise is dead in the water, but if Son of Tin Cup ever hits Amazon Prime, I’ll give it a watch for sure. And who knows what’s possible? As I write this, a legacy sequel for Happy Gilmore just finished shooting yesterday; look forward to that probably stinking up your Netflix queue some time next summer. If Happy can get back on the course after all these years, I shouldn’t put it past Tin Cup either.
Rating: 3.5/5
Next Week: Oh brother do I have a whopper for you next time. If you thought Jack was bad, it’s time to look at a real disaster. We’re taking a trip to The Island of Doctor Moreau next Friday in the column.
See you then!
-Will
In contrast, the golf expert brought in for Happy Gilmore was Mark Lye, a golfer who reigned in Sandler’s humor and acted as the sole enjoyer of the sport in the writer’s room
This incredible moment was surprisingly controversial. Not only did the studio want Shelton to change the finale to a more traditional happy ending, but Donald Fucking Trump came up to the director after an early screening in New York and outlined exactly why it was a stupid decision to have Tin Cup lose at the end. Before Shelton could even begin to explain his reasoning, the future president got bored and walked away.
The ultimate Dad Movie? You guessed it, Apollo 13 [4.5/5]