Earlier this month when I got my hard copy of Golf Magazine I was treated to a great article by Chris Nashawaty and now finally it has been posted on Golf.com. (See, buying actual magazines still pays off.)
This year marks the 20th anniversary of one of the most iconic golf movies ever made: Tin Cup.
Nashawaty spent some time with many of the culprits that worked on the movie but from the sound of things it didn’t seem there was much work going on during the shooting. It was more golf trip + bachelor party + frat house and somehow an unforgettable film was left after everyone sobered up and went home.
In An Oral History of Tin Cup: One of Golf’s Most Iconic Movies Ever Made we get a behind the scenes look from many of the cast that put this film on the Mount Rushmore of golf movies.
From Nashawaty’s enlightening piece:
Few movies get golf right. Fewer still add to the game’s lexicon. (We all know what it means to “pull a Tin Cup” or to “let the big dog eat.”) Twenty years after the film’s release, the stars of Tin Cup — Costner! Russo! Cheech! — take us back to ’96 and the making of the most authentic golf movie ever. And yeah, that 18th hole meltdown? It still hurts. “Another ball, Romeo…”
Shelton: When we started writing it, we didn’t have an actor in mind for Roy, but about 20 pages into it John and I looked at each other and said, “It’s Costner.” So I called Kevin, who I’d worked with on Bull Durham, and he said, “I’m taking some time off.” I said, “Just read it before you say no.” So he did. A few days later, we met for breakfast, and he said, “Damn it. You’re right. I gotta do this.”
Kevin Costner (Roy McAvoy): “Champagne Johnny” Norville and I had gone fishing together, and I knew he was working on something about golf with Ron. But I didn’t think about it too much because I didn’t really play golf—maybe once a year with my father-in-law. On the first tee, I tended to hit three or four balls, all to the right, and I wasn’t too f—ing impressive. Plus, I wasn’t working at the time. I’d just done Waterworld and had gone through a divorce, and my heart was pretty much on the ground. But I knew working with Ron again would be the best therapy, because he basically hands you something you can’t fail with.
Cheech Marin (Romeo): It wasn’t like, Oh, we gotta get Cheech for this! I auditioned and months went by. I’d given up hope. This was a big, fat, A-list movie, and it was my chance to run with the big dogs. I mean, I’m half joking. Cheech and Chong was bigger than a lot of movie stars, but I wanted to compete in that race.
Don Johnson (David Simms): I think it really came down to who could go toe to toe with Kevin and be believable, and who could play golf. I’m not sure that I qualify in either one of those categories, but I’m an actor, and I can pretend really well. At that time, my game was a lot better than it is now. I was an 8 or 9 handicap. I played some ProAms with guys like Payne Stewart.
Gary McCord (technical advisor): I got the script from my agent. He said they wanted me to be the technical advisor on the movie. Kevin hadn’t really played much golf, so I told him we were there to make him look as real as possible. He got pretty damn good.
Peter Kostis (technical advisor): We actually met for the first time during the week of the Bridgestone, the year before the movie was made. And I took Kevin out to the driving range at Sharon Golf Club to start the process of constructing a swing. He was a baseball player growing up, so he’s a natural athlete. About 30 minutes into the lesson, he hit an 8-iron about three feet from a flag on a green that was maybe 150 yards away, and after he hit it, he turned to Ron Shelton and said, “Ronnie, I’m hitting all the shots in the movie. There’ll be no stunt double.” And, basically, he did. That same week, we were in the bar at the Hilton in Akron, Ohio, and Kevin was regaling us with all these stories about Hollywood women. Everybody was really quite intrigued, including Jerry Pate, who was with CBS at the time and who we affectionately called “Mr. Inappropriate Man.” He tried to one-up Kevin Costner with stories about women in Alabama. Yeah. He was a moron. 
Shelton: We needed to get some professional golfers in the movie to give it a flavor of authenticity. So we started calling, and their agents wanted $50,000 for an appearance, like it was a corporate outing. We were like, “No, we’re offering them $600.” And they all said no way. Then McCord had a great idea.
McCord: I called the players’ wives and said, “How’d you like to have dinner with Kevin Costner and Don Johnson? The catch is, your husband is going to have to be on a movie set for a day.” We rented a big room in Tucson and let Kevin and Don loose on the girls. I told them, “Be Hollywood, and bulls— with these women; make them tell their husbands they have to do this movie.” In the end, we got 35 players, four U.S. Open winners—and they got SAG minimum!
Corey Pavin: I was the reigning U.S. Open champion when we shot the film, and I still get a residual check every six or eight months, for $1.80 or something
Marin: The first scene we shot was when Don drives up to our trailer in the desert. When he makes fun of our inflatable kiddie pool, he says, “What is that, your swimming pool?” And I ad-libbed, “No, it’s a spa.” I could see the crew trying not to laugh because they didn’t want to ruin the take, but after Ron yelled “Cut” everybody f—ing cracked up. When we broke for lunch, Don disappeared into his mammoth trailer, and when he came back he handed me this script and said, “I’m doing a TV show after this, about a San Francisco cop. I want you to play my partner.” It was the script for Nash Bridges. And we went off together for the next six years.
McCord: There’s a scene in the movie where Roy hits a trick shot out of the bar and knocks a pelican off a post. Well, that actually happened to me. We were in Pensacola, and me and a few other players were trapped in our condo during a rainout. We had nothing to do but gamble. That’s what we golfers do. And I see this pelican land on a post. So I said, “Hey guys, give me 10 shots and I bet I can knock that pelican off his perch from my bedroom.” So I got up to move the lamp and open the sliding glass doors. I put the ball down, and they’re all hiding behind the couch because I’m going to fire off a 4-iron in this condo. I cut it right through the door and it sails right over the pelican’s head and he flies off. Best shot I’ve ever hit.
Marin: I’ll tell you a story no one’s ever heard. We were between scenes, standing around, and someone came up with a bet. There was this really tall pine tree, and someone said to Phil Mickelson, “I bet you can’t put your shoulder against the tree, drop a ball and hit it over the tree.” The shot basically had to go straight up. Everybody threw in a hundred bucks. I think there was $1,200 in the pot. And he did it! When the ball was still in the air, Mickelson bent over, picked up the money, and put it in his pocket.
Johnson: That set was a blast. Sometimes Kevin and I didn’t get in until the wee hours of the morning, and I remember sitting in the makeup trailer one morning and looking over at him and he looked like something the cat dragged in. I looked the same, by the way.
McCord: We were shooting the final round of the U.S. Open scenes, in Houston, with 5,000 extras, and we’re waiting for Don and Kevin to come out. And they were hacked! Don had a house that he got Warner Bros. to rent for him, and Friday nights all hell would break loose with Cheech and Kevin. This morning they couldn’t see straight, and they had to hit the ball down the fairway. I mean, the extras would have had to worn helmets, or else they’d have been killed. So I got the guys extra-long tees and told them, “Hit it straight up in the air, anywhere, and we’ll have someone else hit the shot later.” Their swings looked pretty good, but the balls landed five fairways over. Anytime we had a Saturday shoot after Friday night at Don’s house, it was not good.
Costner: All I’ll say is, Don’s a great cruise director.
Foster: Did McCord tell you the Johnny Miller story? There’s a scene where Roy is shanking balls at the driving range at the U.S. Open, and Johnny, who’s standing next to him, says, “Change your grip a little bit.” Roy turns to Romeo and mutters some four-letter words. Well, Johnny’s a devout Mormon, and he had some sensitivity to that, and expressed it. It got a little tense.
McCord: One day when we were shooting in Arizona, Craig Stadler got stopped in a golf cart by the cops. He’d driven it to a liquor store a mile away and got pulled over with a golf cart full of beer. We were laughing. He was like, “Well, I’m sitting around here doing nothing all day!” I get that. The cops let him go.
Norville: Stadler was fabulous. I think a rider in his contract might have called for two cases of beer—which, by the way, he shared with the crew.
McCord: When the movie was over, I remember we went to a test screening. I’m sitting with Kevin, and a woman in front of us turns to her husband during the last scene and says, “That’s bulls—. No pro would hit that many balls into the water.” I tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Yes, they would, because I did it on the 16th hole at Memphis.” And she looked at me like, “Who the hell are you?”
Johnson: To this day, whenever I run into Fred Couples or Phil Mickelson or any of the guys, they go, “Hey, wasn’t that a blast?” And it was! Anybody who loves golf sees that movie and says, “That’s what the game’s about.”
Shelton: Where do I think all of these characters are now? Roy, I would suspect, has managed to win a couple of small tournaments and is holding court in a small town somewhere with Molly. Romeo, I think, should be running the religious studies program at the University of Houston. And Simms has got it made with a 10-year contract with the Golf Channel—or he’s on the 15th hole for CBS, trying to wrangle his way into the booth with Jim Nantz.
There’s plenty more in the article (click here) and it seems that in this case art did imitate life…or is it the other way around?
Great movie, great article…great stuff.
Related Articles
