Golf certainly has comic potential. Most agree the original “Caddyshack” was hilarious (shame about the sequel), and Adam Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore” films had their moments — Bob Barker fighting Gilmore comes to mind.
Golfers who shank a shot, only to watch it ricochet off a tree, bounce onto the green, and roll into the hole, can only laugh at the sheer improbability of their luck. Or how about the golfer whose ball hits a tee marker and flies backward over their head, or the golfer who loses footing when hitting from the edge of a lake and falls into the water? Try arguing that isn’t hilarious.
It’s probably fair to say golf does take itself a little too seriously, however, and that the genuinely humorous moments are too few and far between. To lighten the mood, try turning to three of golf’s funniest writers — David Owen, Rick Reilly, and Tom Coyne.
On Feb 29, 2012, Owen posted his first column on myusualgame.com, the website inspired by his 1995 book of the same name. The subject was gloves and mitts for use in the winter cold and on rainy days. “Both kinds double as nose-wipers,” he wrote, “and when they start to look shiny you can throw them into the washing machine.” That line might not cause you to laugh out loud exactly, but you definitely sense this is going to be enjoyable reading.
A native of Kansas City, Missouri, and a 1978 Harvard graduate, Owen has authored over a dozen books and written for several prestigious publications over the last four decades - most notably The New Yorker, for which he has been a staff writer since 1991. Able to write convincingly and eloquently on a wide range of subjects, he has penned articles on everything from America’s shortage of tradespeople to the scarcity of good sand, California water rights, advances in hearing-impaired equipment, cheating at bridge, facial recognition technology, and real pirate treasure. He’s also written a number of golf-related stories for the magazine because Owen — who began playing the game in 1991 — is a confirmed golf nut.
His many New Yorker articles have revealed not only a sizeable intellect but also his distinctive sense of humor. He was editor of the Harvard Lampoon while studying for a degree in English and was named one of the 50 funniest writers in the U.S. by comedian Andy Borowitz in 2011, alongside the likes of Mark Twain, Dave Barry, Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin, David Sedaris and The Onion.
BOB HACKER (REAL NAME)
In 1995, Owen became a contributing editor at Golf Digest, writing monthly columns that frequently referred to life at the nine-hole course in his Connecticut hometown where he was a member, and where his regular fourball included a gentleman by the name of Bob Hacker.
Every time Owen mentioned Hacker, he’d follow it with the words “real name” in parentheses. Readers of Time or Vanity Fair, for instance, mightn’t get the joke, but because the audience was made up entirely of golfers, it was funny. Again, not laugh-out-loud funny, perhaps but, like the shiny gloves line, enough to raise a knowing smile and provide a brilliant contrast to the scholarly tone and overall sober theme of the text.
Showing his range in 1995, Owen mixed a 6,500-word New Yorker profile of software developer Peter Norton with the aforementioned book, his second, whose title “My Usual Game” became synonymous with David Owen the golfer. Besides the many amusing insights into his own unpredictable game and devotion to the sport, the book includes numerous anecdotes about golfing trips and destinations, the best of which tells the story of his first visit to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which in the mid-1990s was largely populated by middle-aged golfers in town for a week of 36-hole days, fried food, and mediocre lodging.
The chapter “Grown Men on Spring Break” opens with a passage on golf physics, biomechanics, and instruction, designed to dissuade spouses and partners from reading the rest. “There,” the following paragraph begins, “that ought to take care of my wife. We can now speak freely.”
The idea of a Harvard graduate and New Yorker writer escaping the northeast winter to go on a boys’ trip planned months in advance, during which the participants would dry their wet socks on light bulbs or the windshield vent in their hired minivan, stock up on Advil for the morning’s aches, and stay up into the wee small hours putting on motel carpets — is just funny. And it’s especially humorous to anyone who has some experience with that sort of thing.
Owen isn’t sure where he developed his sense of humor and writing style, noting he has written in the same voice since high school. “And I’m sure the friends I made on the Harvard Lampoon had an influence,” he says. Owen says there has never been a lot of good, funny writing about golf, though he did enjoy reading fellow Harvard Lampoon editor John Updike’s beautiful and, at times, hilarious “Golf Dreams”. “His best line about golf which always makes me laugh,” says Owen, “was about taking a divot the size of an undershirt.”
Owen admits he hasn’t read about golf in a long time, though. His recent reading includes books about World War II and those of Scottish novelist Muriel Spark. “She may not have been side-splitting,” Owen says, “but she was a lot funnier than WW2.”
BAKED-IN HUMOR AND HECKLERS
The only golf writer Owen mentions besides Updike is Rick Reilly. An 11-time National Sportswriter of the Year winner, Reilly wasn’t really a golf writer, but rather a multi-sport journalist, reporter and essayist who wrote the back-page column for Sports Illustrated between 1997 and 2007, when he left for ESPN.
The Colorado native has written or contributed to 16 books, seven of them about golf, to which he is utterly devoted. The most recent of them is 2022’s “So Help Me Golf; Why We Love the Game,” in which he recounts tales that only someone with his access to the rich, famous and newsworthy - and nose for a good story could possibly get. And it’s funny. Identifying lines, or even whole paragraphs, that trigger anything from a grin to a cackle means the page is soon covered in yellow highlighter.
In a book full of quotable lines, one of the best may be “Before you left for the course this morning, you told your bros to listen for it, and they’d know you were there (referring to the “Impact Idiots” who yell after a shot.) “Can’t you just buy them a ticket stub? I mean, do we come to your job and holler “Supersize it!”
Like Owen, Reilly believes his sense of humor developed in his formative years. “I suppose it’s sort of baked in,” he says. “My mom was really funny.” Reilly remembers reading a Bennett Cerf joke book at the age of about six and cracking up at the story of a guy who got bitten by a dog after asking a nearby kid if his dog bit people. The guy protests, saying to the kid, “I thought you said your dog didn’t bite,” to which the kid replies, “That’s not my dog.” If you’ve heard it a hundred times or seen actor Peter Sellers use it in “The Pink Panther Strikes Again,” it’s obviously not funny anymore. But you can imagine how it might impact a six-year-old hearing it for the first time? Reilly says it was the moment he realized words weren't just things “the nuns at my school diagrammed on the chalkboard. They could make people double over in glee.”
Reilly remembers reading Jim Murray’s syndicated Los Angeles Times columns. ”I couldn't believe how many sentences were just jumping off the page at me and making me laugh,” he says. He also read the books of Damon Runyan, the legendary English humorist P.G. Wodehouse, and, of course, Dan Jenkins, the great Texan golf writer whom Reilly replaced on the golf beat at Sports Illustrated after Jenkins left for Golf Digest. “Reading Jenkins’ stuff,” says Reilly, “was when I discovered how to be extra pithy and sardonic in one short sentence.”
Reilly believes golf is ripe for humor because of its power to humiliate. “It will steal your lunch money and pull your pants down in front of the entire school, and there's nothing you can do but laugh about it,” he says. “There's no teammate that missed the block and no curveball that nobody could've hit. It was just you and the stupid ball on the stupid little peg, and you launched it into the Hendersons’ backyard. It's the ultimate game of unforced errors, and it makes you think you're Rory McIlroy on one hole and Charles Barkley on the next. What's funnier than that?”
CADDIES, HOOLIGANS AND HARSH REALITICES
One writer who believes golf’s penchant for the absurd might actually make his job harder is Tom Coyne. His trilogy of travelogues — “A Course Called Ireland,” “A Course Called Scotland,” and “A Course Called America,” plus his new book about owning and running a nine-hole course in New York’s Catskill Mountains, “A Course Called Home,” have all appeared on the New York Times best seller list.
“It's hard to be funny about golf without wandering into cliché,” Coyne says. “And it's even harder when your audience is serious golfers who have seen it all and likely have funnier stories than yours.”
Coyne counts Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald among his influences, saying their sentences were so powerful and interesting they made him want to try writing.
“As a storyteller, though, by far my biggest influence was the caddies I grew up with,” he adds. “I spent so many hours of my youth waiting for a loop and listening to old men and young jokers tell the most hilarious tales with impeccable timing.”
Coyne is another who says he reads almost no golf though he has enjoyed Reilly’s books in the past. “He’s sort of fearless in his commentary and observations,” Coyne says. “He's not afraid to mix it up, which is a rare sort of courage in today's world.”
Michael Bamberger’s “To the Linksland” — half an account of caddying on the European Tour, half an ode to golf in Scotland, and first published in 1992 — is another of Coyne’s favorite golf reads.
“It isn't exactly funny,” he says, “but it's joyful in a very compelling way. I read it young, and it showed me that you could write golf and be humorous, literary, and personal. And those are three things I've been chasing ever since.”
Most would say Coyne has succeeded in finding them. He combines them so well, in fact, picking out just one passage from any of his last four books would be like having to choose a single song from a Beatles setlist.
There are countless examples of his enviable ability to mix stinging humor, lyrical prose, and harsh reality throughout each book. One such is the description of his brother-in-law Tim’s less-than-happy experiences in Ballycastle in “A Course Called Ireland.”
Besides battling a “phone box of a shower” and a “trickle of ice-cold water” in his guesthouse bathroom, Tim has to gamely fight the Ballycastle traffic, which always seems to come from the wrong direction. He then gets into the driver’s seat of his car and discovers that “hooligans had gone and switched around the damn steering wheel on him.” Arriving at Ballycastle Golf Club, it occurs to Coyne that if Tim’s day was to get any better “It was going to have to first make a stop off at worse.”
It’s true we may not have libraries filled with side-splitting golf writing. But readers with any of the past greats — Jenkins, Wodehouse, Updike, or perhaps Golf Digest’s Peter Dobereiner - on their shelves, or any Owen, Reilly, and Coyne on their nightstands, will tell you they have all they need.
