Golf Punks (1998)

The Bad News Bears set a precedent for sports movies about children. It really put the framework in place for movies that would come later. A rag-tag group of kids who weren’t good at their sport got a new coach. The coach didn’t really want anything to do with the kids. The coach also had their own personal demons that they were battling. Depending on the movie, that may have been alcoholism or gambling addiction. Over time, the children and the coach bonded. The children got better at their game, even coming close to winning. If they didn’t win outright.

A bunch of movies took that structure from The Bad News Bears. The Mighty Ducks comes to mind almost immediately. Gordon Bombay was charged with driving under the influence and forced to coach a hockey team. He didn’t like hockey or kids. Over the course of the season, though, they became a formidable team. Hardball took a similar route with a gambling addict coaching a baseball team. It is a tried-and-true story structure that just keeps coming up.

Another movie to utilize this structure was Golf Punks, a National Lampoon movie that took the structure and placed it within competitive team golf. Al Oliver (Tom Arnold) was a disgraced golf pro whose life had spiraled downward into gambling debt. To pay off his debts, he got a job at a sketchy, public golf course. He trained children to play golf, and coached the children as they competed against the country clubs that had much better funding and prestige.

If you think that Golf Punks might be the same level of quality as something like The Bad News Bears or The Mighty Ducks, you would be wrong. This could just be my childhood nostalgia talking, but I think each of the other movies I’ve seen that shared this formula were better. They were at least entertaining. Golf Punks lacked that. Golf Punks had problems that, although those movies shared some of them, came together in a way that made for a steaming pile of turd. And I don’t usually say that about the movies I watch for this blog. Here are five reasons that Golf Punks was bad.

1.  Racism

To be fair, Golf Punks came out in the 1990s. That doesn’t excuse the racism that was in it, but it does explain it. Racism was much more casual in movies of the time. It was especially prevalent in comedies. Golf Punks was a comedy. That doesn’t mean that the racism was right. It was a bad thing, which is why it made its way into the first point. It was just something that frequently got overlooked at the time, though it shouldn’t have.

And I’m not even going to say that it was the only one of these rag-tag kids sports movies to include some casual racism. The Mighty Ducks had the two Hall brothers, who were Black, on a line with Guy Germaine, who was white, and called it the Oreo Line. That’s not great either. These movies were rather cavalier in their use of racial nicknames. I think Golf Punks kind of took the cake, though.

There was a west Asian character on the golf team. He spoke in the stereotypical accent for people who come to the US from that part of the world. That wasn’t the worst part. That was typical accent racism, which people still kind of overlook today. The character’s name was Raghad. That wouldn’t be too bad, if it weren’t for the nickname that the other characters gave him. Al mistook his name for Raghead, a derogatory term for west Asian people because of their headdresses. Raghad corrected Al, but the nickname stuck. Raghad was known as Raghead for the rest of the movie. There was even a scene where each of the kids got a name/nickname graphic while playing golf, and his had the derogatory term there. Golf Punks was really pushing the racism for laughs. Racism against a child, no less.

2.  The Golf Matches

I’m not entirely sure how the golf worked in Golf Punks. The children were on a team. They all played in each match. I don’t know if they took turns hole by hole, or if they each played all the holes and their totals were tallied up. It could have been either. The movie never explained it. That’s not my issue with the matches, though. I’m fine either way, and don’t need to know which was right. They played the games. That’s all that mattered.

My issue was how the main kids won the games they won. One of the best ways to build tension in a sports movie is to have a close game. That’s the same with an actual game of any sport. Make it close and people will be stressing out about it. The problem in Golf Punks was that every game was that. It wasn’t just the final game against the rival golf club. It wasn’t just Al’s match as he tried to go pro once again. Every time the kids won a match, and they won a bunch on their way to a championship, they won by a single stroke. They didn’t win by two. They didn’t win by three. They always won by one stroke. It always came down to the final putt.

Imagine this was another sports movie, even another kids rag-tag team sports movie. I’m going to go back to The Mighty Ducks, since it’s the one I’m most familiar with. I’ve seen it the most out of them. You had the District-5 team lose their first few games. One of them, obviously, was against the rival team. After a while, they got better. They started winning. The team won by multiple goals because those middle matches didn’t matter. Those middle matches were about building up wins. They weren’t about defeating a tough team. When they got to the finals, against the rival team they lost to at the beginning, the tension was in whether they could beat the team. That was the one match that mattered. It was the match where everything was on the line. It was meant to win the championship, as well as prove themselves to be as good as the bullies who tore them down at the beginning. That was where having the close score mattered. Having everything come down to a penalty shot meant the most in the final match because it built suspense and paid things off.

Golf Punks fumbled that by having every match be the close, one stroke match. The only two matches that mattered in the entire movie were the first and last matches for the kids. They got their butts kicked by the rival country club in their first match. The final match was the championship match, and it was against that same rival team. Everything was on the line. This was where the suspense of the one stroke match should have been. Yet, the single stroke matches had built up through the entire movie. Nearly every match had been a single stroke match, which meant the audience knew where this one was going. They had already been told. There was no surprise, meaning there was no tension. Without the tension, the stakes didn’t feel as serious. All the wind came out of the sails.

3.  The Relationships

If there was one thing really lacking in making you care about the characters of Golf Punks, it would be the relationships they had. Typically, the rag-tag kids sports movies built close relationships between the coach and at least one of the kids. The Bad News Bears had a built-in relationship between Coach Buttermaker and Amanda because Buttermaker used to date her mother. The Mighty Ducks had a relationship between Coach Bombay and Charlie that became a sort of father-figure relationship. There’s typically some sort of connection there.

There was an attempt at a relationship in Golf Punks between Al, the coach, and Peter, the main character. They never went far enough to make it feel real, though. There wasn’t enough time spent building that relationship to make it a good, substantial part of the story. Al didn’t want to coach the kids until he did. He lashed out at Peter for learning about his almost pro past, then made up to Peter by taking him golfing one-on-one. Peter helped get rid of Al’s gambling debt, offscreen. But it never felt like they built real camaraderie. It seemed like they didn’t like each other one scene, then they did the next, and that was that. There was no growth between them. There was just a switch flip.

This might not be the most important part of these movies. The story is about the kids coming together to discover that they’re better than they ever thought they were. They are movies about team building and believing in yourself. This relationship might not seem like it is essential to how well the movie works. But there’s something to the depth that the relationship gives that makes for something more well-rounded. It helps with character growth. In the case of The Mighty Ducks, the relationship with Charlie helped Coach Bombay become a better coach and a better person. He learned life wasn’t about beating the other people. It was about having fun, and maybe the wins could come along with that. Golf Punks didn’t put as much focus on a relationship like that, and lost out on a lot of growth that the characters could have experienced.

4.  Coach’s Hang-up

There’s always an obvious reason that a coach ends up becoming the coach for a bunch of children. They never want to. Buttermaker coached the Bears because he needed money and was getting money for it. Bombay was forced to coach the Ducks because of a DUI. Al was no different. He was pushed into coaching the golf team because he needed the money to pay off his gambling debts. He wasn’t doing it because he wanted to coach children. He was only in it for the money so that the bookies wouldn’t come after him.

Still, deep down, there were always other reasons that the coaches were reluctant to take their positions on the teams. They were connected to those sports in the past. They played those sports in the past. But something happened to them in that sporting past that turned them off of the sport. There was a reason they were out of the sport and doing other things. Buttermaker had a reason to be out of baseball and cleaning pools. Bombay had a reason that he left hockey and got into being a lawyer. And Al had a reason that he didn’t go pro in golf. It wasn’t just about not wanting to coach the teams. The coaches had reasons to dislike the sport that they were once a part of.

Let’s compare Golf Punks to The Mighty Ducks one more time to see the difference in how The Mighty Ducks did this well and Golf Punks, not so much. It all came down to depth, once again. Al almost went pro many years earlier. He was in a tournament where the winner would get to join the pro golf tour. He was neck-and-neck with his rival, now the rival country club’s coach, until that rival cheated and moved his ball. The officials took the rival’s word over Al’s accusation and the rival won. Al stepped away from golf after that moment. Coach Bombay, as a child, was the star of his peewee team. He scored an unbelievable 198 goals in one season. But he missed one goal, a penalty shot, which apparently cost his team the championship. For a long time, it seemed like that was the reason he hated hockey. However, that loss was only part of it. Bombay also lost his father at a young age, the father who taught him to play. It was a mixture of losing his father and losing the championship (which, clearly, was not his fault because, again, 198 GOALS IN A SEASON! Where was the rest of his team???) that broke his love of hockey.

Golf Punks went the route of having Al get upset because someone cheated, and completely quit the sport he loved because of it. The Mighty Ducks went the route of emotional damage because Gordon Bombay lost his father and had an asshole coach who put all the blame of the championship loss on his shoulders. Unfairly. Because Bombay was picking up a whole lot of slack, apparently. Why couldn’t third-line Jimmy help out a little more? Nah, the team was Bombay and Bombay only. So you have one movie that hinged the coach’s dislike for the sport on one moment that could have easily been overcome. You have another movie hinging the coach’s dislike of the sport on a mental break he had because of an emotionally abusive coach and the loss of a loved one. Which one do you think worked better?

5.  Peter

I hated Peter. Every second he was on screen was excruciating. Okay, that might be too intense of a word. I didn’t like whenever he was around. He was the worst of the main child characters, and he was THE main child character. Any of the other characters would have been better as the main character. Mind you, they weren’t fleshed out to be anything beyond a one-note joke. Though, Peter really wasn’t fleshed out either, so it wouldn’t matter.

Rag-tag kids sports movies usually have characters who feel realistic. The main character might not be the one you connect most with, but somewhere down the line, there’s a character you see yourself in. And even if there isn’t, you knew kids who were like the kids being shown on screen. The characters didn’t have cartoonish one-note joke personalities. They might not have had deep personalities, but they weren’t solely there to be the butt of a joke that just kept getting repeated. Golf Punks was all just that. Haha, there was a fat kid who couldn’t stop eating, even when golfing. Haha, the east Asian girl didn’t know English. Haha, Raghad. Haha, there’s a Scottish kid with a deep Scottish accent. None of the characters were anything beyond those one-note jokes. Not even Peter.

Here is Peter’s whole story. Peter was a nerd. He liked stocks and the Wall Street Journal. Adults went to him for stock tips. Peter’s parents thought he was too nerdy, so they wanted him to sign up for a sport. He chose golf. He wasn’t good. He got better. He helped Al out of his gambling debt by giving stock tips to the bookies. That was it. He was a nerd. That was all. He didn’t grow, aside from making friends on his golf team. Though, nobody ever hung out outside of golf. Aside from the girl who Peter started tutoring in exchange for help with golf. Were any of them really friends? I DON’T KNOW.

None of the children felt like real people. Peter didn’t feel like a real kid. I don’t know any kids who are up on their stock tips and Wall Street Journal to the point where they wouldn’t want to do anything else, ever. I don’t know any adults who would go to a kid for tips on the stock market. The most realistic part of Peter’s portrayal was that he tried to give a stock tip to his dad and his dad brushed him off because HE’S A CHILD. Plus, he was just kind of whiny the entire time. I’m not a fan of whiny kids in movies. I’m kind of glad he was played by Justin Kirk because I can always go to Final Destination 2 and see him get crushed by a pane of glass.

Childhood nostalgia could be playing a large part in how I feel about Golf Punks, compared to how I feel about other childhood rag-tag team sports movies. I grew up on the other ones. They have been a part of my life from a young age and, yeah, I overlook some of the more questionable things in them because of my connection to them. I saw Golf Punks for the first time this week and it doesn’t hold nearly the same cache with me. I don’t think it ever will. And that’s not just the thought of nostalgia talking. That’s me thinking Golf Punks is objectively worse than the other movies because of the lack of effort that seemed to be put into it. It felt like a clone without the substance the other movies had.

The Bad News Bears was an early example of this kind of movie. Yes, it had problems. There was racism and sexism throughout it. There were kids doing things that kids probably shouldn’t be doing, giving newer generations bad ideas. But there was effort put into making it. There was realism. Filmmakers picked up on this, and it bred future movies like The Mighty Ducks, Golf Punks, and Hardball. Some of those movies took notes and did what The Bad News Bears did pretty well. Other movies took the framework and didn’t build anything from it. Or they might have taken inspiration from movies inspired by it, leading to a telephone game that didn’t get things quite right. Whatever the case, good or bad, there are numerous rag-tag sports movies out there for younger generations to enjoy.

I hope you enjoy these notes:

• Tom Arnold was the star of Golf Punks. He was also involved in Exit Wounds (week 93) and The Stupids (week 188).
• Golf Punks was also the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Dave ‘Squatch’ Ward, who was in Jingle All the Way 2 (week 160) and Snow Dogs (week 322).
• William MacDonald was in Dudley Do-Right (week 336) and Golf Punks.
• Jerry Wasserman returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Golf Punks, following an appearance in Black Christmas (week 368).
• Finally, Golf Punks featured Marcus Hondro, who was in Say It Isn’t So (week 481).
• Have you seen Golf Punks? What did you think about it? What are your favourite kids team sports movies? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• If there’s a movie you think I should watch for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know by contacting me on Twitter. You can also leave a comment on this blog. I’m open to all suggestions.
• Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram, so check that out.
• Next week is a big week for Sunday “Bad” Movies. It will be week 500. That’s a pretty huge milestone for a blog that began because I just wanted to write about some of the bad movies I had been watching. To celebrate, I went all out and watched a bunch of movies. I watched a bunch of Amityville movies. I’m not sure exactly how many, but I’ll post about all the ones I watched. There will be multiple posts, so keep an eye out for them. I’ll see you next week with some big stuff.