“Sorry, I don’t date golfers.”
“Well, that’s good cause I’m a hockey player.”
Today marks 25 years since the release of Happy Gilmore, one of Adam Sandler’s best-known goofy 1990s comedies. The above exchange takes place when Happy Gilmore, at the start of his first pro golf tour, asks the tour’s PR Director Virginia out on a date. His response to her rejection, along with a myriad of other moments throughout this surreal underdog story, point to a film that is more intelligent than it first seems. Rewatching the film today, you cannot help but notice the commentary on the practices and vulnerability of class identity when it comes to sport hiding underneath every joke, skit and playful montage.
Sandler stars as the eponymous Happy, who puts his faltering ice hockey ambitions on hiatus to take up golf. Originally, it’s only to win enough money to save his grandmother’s house. For reasons never really explained, she hasn’t paid taxes in over a decade. What follows is a story that makes a mockery of elitist sporting conventions and the biases of players for whom privilege outweighs talent.
The early parts of the film leave you with the impression that Happy is a loveable but dim blue-collar worker. Albeit, with a far-fetched dream of making it big in hockey. This is exactly the kind of satirical, gently mocking perception that the other golfers come to have of this lowly schmuck when he swaps his sticks for clubs. But under the mentorship of ‘alligator hater’ Chubbs Peterson (a wonderful Carl Weathers), he learns to adapt his persona and way of thinking for the game of golf.
Writing for the Chicago Reader, Michael Milner explores his own experiences of how ice-hockey is intimately tied to the North American working class. He states that “When I think about where hockey players come from I think of the mines of Sudbury and plains of Saskatchewan… not the private prep schools of the North Shore. I also think about fathers with a lot more resolve than education coming from far and wide to work those mines”. Milner captures this perception of hockey as a sport that is, or often seen to be, a spectacle enjoyed and brought to life by blue-collar workers. In this case, Happy Gilmore is a prime example.
In the film’s opening montage, it’s clear that Happy has held down a number of different jobs. All of these fit the atypical description of manual labour (construction work, a janitor, and a plumber are just some examples). He’s also shown to be rather thuggish and prone to fits of bad temper. This is especially evident when somebody questions his ambitions or mocks his involvement in hockey. As later becomes clear, this is at least in part because Happy takes it seriously. Hockey is all he is.
Until, clearly, he discovers golf and rubs shoulders with the rich fancies that call the green their home. In contrast to hockey, golf has traditionally been seen as the remit of the upper class and privileged. The snobbish, callous worst of golf’s leading men is Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald). He ends up spending more time trying to chase Happy away from the game than he does trying to win the tournaments. But such is the sheer viewership that Happy’s antics bring to the sport, the tour managers have no initial interest in dismissing him.
For both Shooter and Happy, their chosen sports are central to who they are as people. Shooter’s concern is that he sees Happy and the more “colourful” crowd that he attracts as a threat to golf and, less directly, to him. This is why Shooter goes to sensational lengths to try and get Happy kicked off the tour, including baiting him into an admittedly very funny brawl with Bob Barker from The Price is Right.
Shooter’s rivalry with Happy boils down to it dawning on him how vulnerable the middle-to-upper-class shield surrounding his precious golf really is. When he shrieks in terror upon meeting Happy’s old foreman, Mr Larson (the 7”2 Richard Kiel), it’s not just the terror of confronting a mammoth of a man that gets to him. Larson embodies what Shooter sees as the ugliest, most abhorrent and least desirable spectres of working-class America. The prospect of such people partaking in the world of golf is a scenario he finds to be terrifying.
The film takes care to ensure that Happy’s class identity is not just a personality trait, but a communicative device. It’s used to tell the audience that he is the good guy of the story. Nowhere better is this seen in a scene where a homeless man (long-time Sandler collaborator Allen Covert) is dragged away by security after cleaning Happy’s car. Happy tries to reason with the guard, pointing out that the unnamed man is just trying to make some money. Later, Happy makes him his golf caddy. His working-class background, it is implied, makes him an ally to the less fortunate and down-on-their-luck.
This is in stark contrast to Shooter, who regularly voices his disdain at the so-called “economically diverse” crowd. At one point, he tells them dismissively to “go back to your shanties”. Class allegiance draws the lines of heroism in Happy Gilmore, clearly lining the two protagonists up against each other. However, this is more for comic effect than anything else.
For Happy at the start of the film, hockey is tied up with the way he perceives himself and wants to be perceived by others. It is indicative of his status as a rugged, practically-minded, working-class man. While this lessens as the film goes on, it is only when Chubbs presents him with a golf club shaped like a hockey stick, thereby merging his old and new selves together, that he becomes a winner. He manages to succeed at a rich person’s game without sacrificing who he is. It’s a timelessly optimistic story of achieving success without losing sight of who you are. This association between sport and class provides almost all of the film’s comedic tension but also gives it relevancy that has markedly outlived the rest of Sandler’s output from the time.
Happy Gilmore is currently streaming on Netflix.
Words by James Hanton.
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