Books, Arts & Manners: Big Boys

RON Shelton, the writer-director of two baseball movies—the good Bull Durham and the hapless Cobb—has now made a golf movie, Tin Cup. Unlike baseball, which is highly cinegenic, golf is dubious movie material. Too slow, too laid-back, too ambulatory, it lacks the drama that has made, say, boxing stories a film staple. Shelton is aware that a golf film must, accordingly, include much else; so, as in Bull Durham, he gives us a romantic triangle: one woman and two dissimilar men. In Tin Cup, however, the difference is not in age and experience, but in character.

Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy (spare me the explanation of his nickname) runs a ramshackle golf range outside a footling West Texas town with his sometime caddie, Romeo Posar. Roy was a terrific college golfer, but a combination of audacity and lethargy—his “inner demons”—has kept him from making it like his old school rival, Don Simms, now a PGA star. An attractive, urbane psychotherapist, Molly Griswold, comes to take lessons from Roy, who promptly, and for the first time seriously, falls in love with her. It turns out that she is Don’s girlfriend, and quixotic Roy—much against the warnings of his Sanchoesque partner, Romeo—determines to make her his. How? Very simply by winning the toughest tournament there is, the U.S. Open.

JS

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John Simon

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RON Shelton, the writer-director of two baseball movies—the good Bull Durham and the hapless Cobb—has now made a golf movie, Tin Cup. Unlike baseball, which is highly cinegenic, golf is dubious movie material. Too slow, too laid-back, too ambulatory, it lacks the drama that has made, say, boxing stories a film staple. Shelton is aware that a golf film must, accordingly, include much else; so, as in Bull Durham, he gives us a romantic triangle: one woman and two dissimilar men. In Tin Cup, however, the difference is not in age and experience, but in character.

Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy (spare me the explanation of his nickname) runs a ramshackle golf range outside a footling West Texas town with his sometime caddie, Romeo Posar. Roy was a terrific college golfer, but a combination of audacity and lethargy—his “inner demons”—has kept him from making it like his old school rival, Don Simms, now a PGA star. An attractive, urbane psychotherapist, Molly Griswold, comes to take lessons from Roy, who promptly, and for the first time seriously, falls in love with her. It turns out that she is Don’s girlfriend, and quixotic Roy—much against the warnings of his Sanchoesque partner, Romeo—determines to make her his. How? Very simply by winning the toughest tournament there is, the U.S. Open.