Happy Gilmore imitators are back, and golf clubs are paying the price

Golf was never meant to be a violent game. Played amid rolling landscapes on idyllic summer days, the sport lacked the bloodshed of the boxing ring or head-on collisions of the gridiron. But recently golf-club urgent care centers have been treating casualties in the form of shattered graphite and guillotined clubheads. 
 
The cause? “Happy Gilmore 2.”
 
Almost 30 years after the original became a hit, the sequel to the Adam Sandler comedy debuted on Netflix in late July. Of the tens of millions of viewers who have watched the cameo-heavy golf flick during its first month, many surely have reveled in the film’s nuanced bon mots; others have found inspiration in the titular character’s trademark hockey swing.
 
These copycats line up several steps behind their balls and barrel headlong into a slap-shot grip-and-rip. The results aren’t always pretty.
 
Cut to the practice facility at Moorland Road Golf Center in New Berlin, Wis., just outside Milwaukee. Marion Accola, Moorland’s director of golf, reports that the range burns through 5,000 rental clubs per year, most of them drivers. Shafts snap. Heads break free. Some of this is the result of crummy swings or old-fashioned wear and tear. But increasingly, she said, the damage has been at the hands of Happy wannabes.
 
“They might break them with any kind of bad swing, but most of the drivers are because of the Gilmore,” Accola said. “They lose a clubhead in the field downrange on a regular basis.”

And it’s not just loaners in the body count.
 
“The broken clubs also include our customers’ own sticks,” Accola said.
 
Unlike box office sales, the scope of the problem is hard to quantify.
 
Sean Cain is director of operations and PGA director of instruction at TaylorMade’s The Kingdom at Reynolds Lake Oconee in Georgia. As an elite club-fitting and instruction facility in the shadow of a five-star Ritz-Carlton, The Kingdom is something of a boutique emergency room for golf clubs but certainly not ground zero for PGSD (Post-Gilmore Stress Disorder). What’s more, diagnosing such an ailment can be difficult. But Cain says there are familiar symptoms.
 
“Most of the time the type of mishit that a ‘Gilmore-esque’ swing would cause would lean much more cosmetic on the top of the driver head rather than cracking the face,” Cain says. “Most people aren’t athletic enough to make contact well enough using that swing type to create a face issue.”
 
He presumes other venues might be harder hit.
 
“I would think that the big-box stores may have a slight increase of issues due to the popularity [of the movie],” Cain says. 

Golf Galaxy and Dick’s Sporting Goods representatives did not respond to inquiries on the matter, but a screen-golf expert did. At Golf VX, a seller of high-end simulators in Arlington Heights, Ill., venue manager Nick Dentone saw what was coming in the film’s release and took preemptive action, turning potential tragedy into opportunity. 
 
“Being a fan of the original movie, I think the release of ‘Happy Gilmore 2’ was certainly highly anticipated in the golf world,” Dentone says. “Golf VX did not want to shy away from another uptick in playing interest, so we embraced the opportunity by holding a month-long putting contest, but with a catch.”
 
Dentone and company purchased a branded hockey stick and asked contest participants to leave their putters at home so that they could try their luck on the “darts portion” of the simulator for amusement and prizes with Happy’s stick.
 
But even those precautions did not prevent carnage to Golf VX’s loaner clubs, among other movie-related indignities.
 
“You know when they are trying to do the ‘Happy swing’ because we hear a nice thud,” Dentone says. “It’s either the clubhead hitting the screen as it flies off or the kid eating turf because he whiffed it and fell.”
 
Maybe that’s what it will take to break the fever gripping the golf world — a critical mass of faceplants supplanting bruised heads for broken ones.