After several golf lessons for work purposes, Owen Wilson felt ready to take his game public with his island mate Don Nelson, the basketball Hall of Famer. Weekend golfers can imagine how this story goes. “You get a bit self-conscious with people watching on the first hole, and I tee off and shank it,” Wilson says. “Nellie’s like, ‘This is gonna be a long show, isn’t it?’ ”
Over a 30-year Hollywood career, Wilson hadn’t put many athletic feats on film. He threw a pass in a backyard football game in the memorable Wedding Crashers and played a pitcher in the not-so-memorable How Do You Know.
But in the new Apple TV+ comedy Stick, now streaming, Wilson is a 50-something ex-professional golfer named Pryce Cahill, a player who was good enough to win PGA Tour events and play in a Ryder Cup before an on-course meltdown ended his career.
Cahill’s life spiraled from there, from a failed marriage to bottoming out with a job in an Indiana sporting goods store where he needed paycheck advances from his boss to get by. But salvation arrives in the form of a teenage phenom named Santi (Peter Dager), whom Cahill takes under his wing and joins on the road to chase stardom.
Santi hits more shots than Cahill in the show, but Wilson, 56, nonetheless threw himself into the role by learning how to play. In the process, he caught the golf bug, fulfilling his late father’s desire.
“Both my brothers [actors Andrew and Luke] were golfers, and my dad was a good golfer, but I had never played,” Wilson says. “My excuse was I was left-handed and there were only righty clubs around as a kid. But this [show] was a great excuse to finally learn, and it kind of connected me with my dad. He would always say, ‘You know, you’ve got to pick up this game,’ and I’d have that echoing in my head as I was learning.”
The story arc of a pro needing to find a second act after an athletic career had long been on the mind of Stick creator Jason Keller (the writer of Ford v. Ferrari), who saw that in his father. Ron Keller was selected in the eighth round of the first MLB draft in 1965; he then appeared in nine games as a pitcher for the Twins in 1966 and ’68 before leaving baseball for a business career.
“His story has always rolled around in my head, what that must have been like to spend the first 24 years of your life focused on a game, then resetting and choosing a different path,” Keller says of his dad. “That little point of inflection in my father’s life has always fascinated me, and a couple years ago I found a venue in the sport of golf to really explore that character. That character became Pryce Cahill.”
And the character has turned real-life golf junkie in just two years. Wilson is a fixture around the game in Maui, playing casual rounds with Nelson and friends and visiting with players coming to the island for the PGA Tour’s annual stop. Major champions Keegan Bradley, Wyndham Clark and Collin Morikawa are among the pros who appear in Stick, and during production in Vancouver there was plenty of downtime for the actor to morph into the golfer, soaking up everything he could.
“Vancouver is beautiful in the summer and we were filming on courses, so there wasn’t a lot of, ‘Let’s go back to the trailer and sit around,’ ” Wilson says. ‘It was, ‘Let’s go over to the 7th hole and play that par-3 again.’
“Collin Morikawa was nice because he was there working and giving people advice, but the thing I remember is he asked me, ‘What’s the best club in your bag?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I hadn’t really thought of that,’ ” Wilson continues. “But I answered decisively: ‘My putter.’ And I could tell he was like, ‘O.K., you commit to something and that’s the way to do it.’ ”
Wilson is committed, all right. It’s gonna be a long show.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Thanks to a New Apple TV+ Show, Owen Wilson Connected With His Golf Roots.
