Stick S1E9 Review: Santi Makes the Cut by Hitting the Wrong Fairway
The ReadySafe Invitational opens, Clark Ross makes his pitch over Wagyu, and Pryce talks his teenager into the most insane shortcut in golf.
A debut tournament episode has a built-in problem. Either the kid plays great and the season runs out of road, or he plays badly and the season starts mourning. Stick finds a third option, which is the one the show has been quietly setting up for nine weeks. The kid plays badly on Thursday, and on Friday his washed-up coach tells him to hit his second shot onto a completely different hole. The episode also, almost on the side, lets four other people decide whether to stay in Pryce’s life. The shortcut is the loud bit. The quiet bit is everybody choosing.
Round one is a stage fright episode disguised as a golf episode
The cold open flexes a muscle the show has been saving. CGN’s Jim Nantz and Trevor Immelman call the Woody Crest like a real broadcast, and that single trick makes everything that follows feel like television instead of a tournament montage. Their voices keep coming back all hour, and each return does small work: praise, doubt, surprise, mockery, finally awe. The Tour uses real-broadcast cadence the same way, as a frame that makes any small action feel measurable. Stick borrows the trick straight from the source.
Santiago Wheeler, played by Peter Dager, is the obvious focus, and the script is honest about what stage fright looks like in a 17-year-old. He nearly throws up at sign-in. He stares at his own signature on the sheet for a beat too long, then has to be told that the person standing in front of him is Keegan Bradley, because his name was right there and he couldn’t put the two things together. He asks Bradley for the pen back and gets very politely told no. He sees Max Homa and Wyndham Clark on a range and can’t find a sentence. Owen Wilson’s Pryce walks him through it the way a tour guide would, half running interference for the kid and half repairing his own status by being seen in public next to people who still play. Max Homa offers the kindness of remembering being nine years old and asking for the autograph. That is Pryce in one beat. He used to be the person on the hat.
The first round itself is short and unkind. Matt Prost, a Tour vet with a “zygote” gag he refuses to let go of, sets the room tone before Santi’s tee shot. The teen finds bunkers on twelve, finishes four over, and the broadcast confirms the cut sits at plus one. Mitts, Elena, and Zero flood the bag like family at an airport gate, telegraphing the support system Clark Ross is about to try to redirect.
The Clark Ross dinner is the season’s sharpest villain scene
The dinner comes in two pieces. First the swag tent. Santi gets cars and water bottles and Zero howls about how everything is fire. Pryce notes, correctly, that “let bygones be bygones” coming out of Clark Ross’s mouth is a tell. Then the negotiation, and the script gives it patience. Clark Ross doesn’t lie. He lays out a real pitch. Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland, Xander Schauffele all run with a real strength coach, a real sports psychologist, a real swing coach. Pryce is great. Pryce is also a shortcut guy. At this level, shortcuts don’t cut it.
The scene works because Clark Ross isn’t wrong on any single item. Pryce did hustle the kid into this tournament. Pryce doesn’t have a Tour-level support staff. The kid did go four over. What the dinner misreads, and what hole twelve is about to expose, is that the shortcut isn’t Pryce’s deficiency. It’s how he coaches. Santi listens, says less than he’s thinking, and goes back to the bus a little quieter.
The script handles the table without dressing it up. Santi asks about double-bogeying twelve. Clark Ross tells him to forget it, focus on tomorrow, eat the truffle fries. An hour later Pryce will mirror that moment on the actual twelfth tee and refuse to let Santi forget anything. The same instinct, applied opposite ways. Stick doesn’t make one mentor a saint and the other a saboteur. It makes two adults disagree about how a teenager should handle fear, and one of them happens to be a known liar.
The Panama Canal speech and the second-shot eagle
The twelfth hole sequence is the episode’s set piece, and it is funny first. Pryce calls 5-iron, watches Santi go quiet on the ball, and pulls the club back. The change-of-plan beat is written and shot like a stand-up bit, because that’s what it has to be. Pryce has thirty seconds to talk a kid out of his own panic on national television, and his only available register is rambling Owen Wilson dad-monologue. The Panama Canal aside, the Chunnel aside, the bit about carbon emissions, all of it delivered with one hand on Santi’s bag and one eye on the official timing them for a delay-of-play penalty. The point of the riff isn’t profundity. The point is to keep the kid breathing long enough to swing. Wilson plays it as a man who knows he’s killing and also knows he has maybe eighteen seconds left.
The broadcast voices, again, do half the work. Trevor Immelman can’t quite figure out what is happening on twelve. Jim Nantz is the one who clocks that Santi is trying to play the hole down the seventh fairway. The shot itself gets sold by reaction. Bend the ball over the seventh’s big tree, clear the water hazard, leave a 3-iron back to the fringe on twelve. Pryce whispers, “you just gotta get quiet in here,” and that is the most Pryce-coaching line the show has written all year. The first ball lands clean. The second ball lands on the green in two, and the gallery doesn’t know what they just watched. Wheeler has an eagle putt where ninety minutes ago he had a punch-out from a deep bunker.
The episode’s most generous decision is not making the eagle the moment. The moment comes after. A talking-head montage cycles through real-broadcast lookalikes in English, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, and Hindi, each one reacting to a 17-year-old who hit onto another hole on purpose. Santi’s press-room answer about the shot is, “I was scared of the sand.” When pressed on how he manages the pressure, he names a Simon and Garfunkel song and has to be reminded of the second guy’s name. The kid is a star. The kid is also a kid who is still figuring out his own punchlines.
The bus, the ex-wife, and the dad
The third act drops the tournament for forty minutes that decide the season’s emotional math. Around the table, the bus crew tells the story of Pryce and Mitts being found passed out in a full-on embrace at some long-ago hotel, Francine took the picture, and Pryce wants it burned. Mitts, played by Marc Maron, declines the bit and turns it into a love note to his oldest friend. The room is loud. Elena watches Pryce instead of the joke.
Outside, Mitts calls Pryce a fucking idiot to his face. The point is Elena. Pryce is hesitating. Mitts cashes in the bus-station moment when Pryce told him he was being an asshole about Santi, and flips the IOU. The kitschy embroidered pillow lines Mitts has been quoting at himself all season come back as actual advice: “If you don’t take a chance, how will you know?” The episode lets a supporting character coach the lead through a single decision, and the role reversal lands without anyone underlining it.
Then the ex-wife. Amber-Linn arrives in Tulsa to root for Pryce and ends up sitting on the curb outside her hotel having the real conversation. She brings up the grief group Pryce dragged her to, and her line about acceptance does the most dramatic lifting in the hour. She was afraid that accepting their son’s death meant letting him down. Pryce says, “I think I would have been a good dad,” and the show holds on him while Amber-Linn answers, “You were the best dad.” The scene is short. The line lands because nine weeks of restraint have built the silence around it. Amber-Linn invites Pryce up. Pryce declines, because both of them are starting something, and rocking either boat would cost them both. He tells her to root for him. She tells him she always is.
The episode then performs its hardest pivot. Pryce is back in the bar with the family, a fan named Gary is telling him his swing was as good as Tiger’s and Phil’s, and Santi looks up at the door. A man is standing there. The man says he wants to see his son. Santi says, “Dad.” Cut to black on a tournament still in progress and a teenager whose absent father has just walked back in on the night of his biggest round. The show hasn’t introduced Santi’s father before tonight. The ambush is the point.
What the twelfth hole means
Coaches like Clark Ross tell a kid in trouble to forget what just happened and dial it in. Pryce’s version is that you can’t forget anything when you’re 17 and the broadcast is calling you a Cinderella story. You can only reroute. The Panama Canal speech sounds like a comic bit because it mostly is one, but it also doubles as Pryce’s whole coaching philosophy spat out in one improvised rant. A shortcut is a route. You pick it because the straight line isn’t available to you. Clark Ross treats shortcuts like a moral failing. Pryce treats them like the actual game. The eagle settles the disagreement on screen, but Santi handed him back the bag before the swing.
The smaller story is about who gets to be in Pryce’s orbit. Amber-Linn decides not to come in. Mitts decides to stay loud. Elena decides to wait him out. Clark Ross decides to keep recruiting. And Gary Wheeler decides to show up to a tournament he hasn’t earned a seat at. The script stages a quiet referendum on Pryce’s surroundings on the same night the kid plays the round of his life. That’s a deeper structural choice than a fairway gag.
Verdict
The penultimate episode of a debut season has to either set up the finale or steal the finale’s job. This one sets up. The tournament is alive, Santi is alive on the leaderboard, and the cliffhanger is a father, not a putt, which is the better instinct. Owen Wilson plays Pryce’s twelfth-hole rant as the funniest scene the show has given him, and the bench around him gets full scenes instead of reaction shots. The Clark Ross dinner is the season’s best villain writing, because nothing the man says is dishonest. The Amber-Linn curb scene is the season’s best dramatic writing, because the dialogue refuses to inflate. The episode loses a little air around the bar montage with Gary the fan, which exists mostly to clear the room before the door opens, and the broadcast-voice gag occasionally leans on the same beats twice. Those are small costs. Stick has spent nine weeks setting up a closer that plays a teenage prodigy off against an absent father on the night he finally became somebody, and the runway got built honestly.
Rating: 8.7/10