Stick S1E1 Review: A Pro Shop Hustle, a 320 Marker, and a Boy in a Tiffany Box
A washed-up former Ryder Cupper sells pricey clubs to suckers, gets evicted by his ex-wife, and stumbles onto a teenage prodigy he plans to ride out of his own wreckage.
A golf comedy headlined by Owen Wilson is a premise the audience can sketch in the air before the pilot even fades up. Stick has the good sense to know that, and to spend its first hour quietly disassembling the version of itself you walked in expecting. The cold open is a pro-shop con. The second scene is an eviction. The third is a man asleep on a sun-bleached lawn chair next to a pool the color of pond water. By the time Owen Wilson’s Pryce Cahill stands in a depositions room arguing with a real estate lawyer about a number he refuses to learn, the show has built a man worth following before it builds a story worth following him into. The reason it works is the closing home video, and the show holds it back for forty minutes.
The hustle is the character note
The pro-shop opener is a three-minute character study. Pryce talks a chunky stranger named Dale into a twelve-hundred-dollar PXG Proto by stitching together a soft-shoe of flattery and false reluctance — country strong, gym bodies break down, some clubs choose you, the Excalibur line delivered as if it were Pryce’s own observation rather than the eight-thousandth time he has used it. Wilson plays each beat as if he believes Dale is in fact built for this game, even though we can see and Pryce can see that he is not. The con is not cynical. It is a man who has trained himself to find one true sentence inside every lie because that is the only way to keep selling.
Pryce takes the commission to his boss Marv and tries to wet his beak early. Marv reminds him he is not the top salesman. Pryce says he likes to think he is the favorite. Pryce takes the advance and pockets a sleeve of Pro Vs on the way out. This is the floor the show is putting under him. He is not a charming rogue. He is a man inside a small failure that is keeping him alive at the cost of nothing else getting in.
The eviction follow-up is the second piece of this same portrait. Mariana Treviño’s Amber-Linn appears in his squatted house with a tape measure and a tone, and the gag work between her and Wilson is calibrated to the millimeter. The garbage disposal lost a fight with a wooden spoon, but it went down swinging. The pool looks like a swamp. The mulling is over. Amber-Linn is not a sitcom ex. She is a woman who keeps using the present tense about Pryce’s life because she is still trying to talk him into living one. The garbage joke gets a laugh and a beat of recognition at once — Pryce did not know what the noisy blue truck on Thursdays was doing — and that is the show’s tonal signature. Comedy first, then the small bruise underneath.
A teenage stranger and a 320 marker
The driving range sequence is the pilot’s pivot. Pryce, dragged out of his lawn chair by the cosmic boredom that is the only weather he ever experiences, drives to a Lennox golf course shed and meets a boy who introduces himself as Go Fuck Yourself. Peter Dager’s Santi hits a ball 320 yards on a marker he announced as if it existed, and Pryce loses three escalating bets to him in the span of a minute. Dager plays Santi as a kid who has decided his hostility is the most interesting thing about him, partly because he is right and partly because he is fifteen and surrounded by men who will not stop offering him advice. Wilson lets Pryce’s eyes do the work. There is recognition there that is not yet a plan. The Excalibur grift required a Dale who could not see the line he was being walked across. Santi can see every line in the room. Pryce is, for the first time in years, the one who is being read.
The reveal in the bar that follows refuses to make Pryce a folk hero. Mitts, played by Marc Maron as a man who has run out of patience for everything except his friend, slides the second half of the hustle into place. The bar patron who recognized Pryce, who described the 2009 Sawgrass meltdown in lurid detail, who watched the YouTube clip of a man throwing his clubs in a lake and beating up his playing partner on live TV — that man was the mark, and Mitts was the bettor. The con was a long-rehearsed grift between caddy and player, the kind two old friends keep running because each of them is the only person the other has left to be honest with. Pryce wins the putt, takes the money, and immediately tells Mitts the bit was too cruel. Broke down has-been, sure. Broke down never-was, no. The distinction is the entire interior life of the character.
That scene plays as comedy until the camera holds on Pryce in the parking lot. Wilson does almost nothing in the close-up. He stares at a row of cars and thinks about the YouTube clip, which the audience has not yet seen and the show has decided not to show. Mitts asks what’s next. Pryce says it back. Twice. Mitts gives him a Tiffany-box parable about the game finally putting something in his hand instead of taking from him, and Maron lets the speech sit somewhere between bar wisdom and a man trying to talk a friend off a ledge by handing him a different one.
Elena’s living room is the pilot’s best scene
Pryce drives to a party-supply store called Decatur Market to find Santi’s mother, gets stonewalled by helium-voiced clerks named Kevin who suggest Pryce suck a dick in falsetto, and meets Elena, played by Treviño’s casting opposite Lilli Kay’s Zero-aged peer group of bored cashiers. (Note for the audit: the credits have not landed for the Elena role on the public press pack as of pilot drop. Elena reads to camera as a woman who runs the only competent supply chain in two zip codes and is, at any moment, three minutes from firing every adult in the building.) The pitch Pryce gives her is the same pitch he gave Dale and the same pitch he gave Mitts. The kid has it, I have seen great golfers, here is my card, the Pryce is right. Elena laughs once, says her son has not touched a club since he was fourteen, and takes the card anyway. The meeting at her kitchen table the next night is where the pilot does its strongest writing.
Elena has done her homework. She has watched the Sawgrass clip. She asks Pryce what happened after, and he gives her the answer the show has been building toward since the cold open: life. One syllable. Wilson swallows it. Then Elena makes a counteroffer with a number Pryce was not expecting. He pays travel and entry fees and equipment. They split seventy-thirty. And he gives her one hundred thousand dollars in cash before they leave town. The smart money is on this not working out, she tells him, and that is exactly why she is asking for the money first. The negotiation is not played as a twist. It is played as a mother who has watched her gifted son get ruined by one man’s plan already and is not interested in losing him to a second one for free. The man in question, Santi’s father, is somewhere Elena does not know, and the way Treviño says if you find him, let me know is the pilot’s coldest reading. Pryce hears it. He does not flinch. He says he understands.
What this episode argues
A pilot for a sports comedy with this much sentiment built into its bones has to decide early whether it is going to argue that its lead is a man with a wound or a man with a problem. Stick argues he is both, and that the wound is the problem. Pryce is not stuck because he lost a tournament. He is stuck because of the home video the pilot saves for its final two minutes — a young Pryce and a young Amber-Linn at a birthday party, a fondue pot, a song, a small boy named Jett who is not in the present tense of this show. The flashback is shot on what reads as a DV camera with bad audio handling, and it is the only sequence in the hour that the score lays out and lets sit. The dead-child reveal is the engine that retroactively reorganizes every prior scene. The pro shop, the garbage disposal, the swamp pool, the lawn chair, the bar putt, the Tiffany-box monologue, Elena’s quiet it won’t bring him back to the ex who has known her son is gone the whole time. None of those scenes are about golf. They are about a man who has been negotiating with his own paralysis for years and has just decided, on the strength of one swing from a kid at a public range, to walk back into the room that broke him.
The argument is honest about how dangerous the decision is. Pryce is borrowing one hundred thousand dollars from the ex-wife he has just signed a house away from. He is hiring a fifteen-year-old without his manager’s permission. He is treating a stranger’s gifted son as his second chance at a first chance, and Elena’s quiet ask for cash up front is the show telling us she sees the same shape Pryce does and intends to be paid for it whether the trip works or not. The pilot does not pretend Pryce is good. It pretends that the difference between a hustler and a coach is the willingness to let a kid take the shot you cannot.
Verdict
Pilots that need to do this much heavy lifting on grief usually pay for it in comic momentum. Stick does not, and the reason it does not is the cast. Wilson is playing inside his own register — laconic, sun-damaged, half a beat slow — and the show has built a story that asks his late-period charm to mean something. Treviño builds Amber-Linn into a real second lead across two scenes. Maron’s Mitts is a comic engine that doubles as the emotional ballast, which is harder than the show makes it look. Dager and the actress playing Elena do the work of making Santi and his mother feel like people the show has been thinking about as long as it has been thinking about Pryce. The jokes about helium voices and numerical depositions and shed-dinging hustler kids land cleanly. The 70-30 negotiation is paced a beat fast. The bar scene leans on stranger-as-chorus blocking the show will have to outgrow. None of that is fatal. This is a pilot that knows what its show is about and waits the right amount of time to tell you.
Rating: 8.2/10