Stick S1E10 Review: A Finale That Hands the Kid Back His Own Swing
Santi Wheeler walks the final round of the ReadySafe with two caddies, one father, and an Owen Wilson voice in his ear telling him the only swing worth taking is the one he wants for himself.
The first season of Stick ends on a tee box, a sprinkler, and a 35-foot double-breaking putt no one in the broadcast booth can read. That is a lot to ask of a finale that has also promised the return of an absent father, a season-long debate about whether a 17-year-old amateur can hold his nerve on the back nine of a PGA Tour event, and an Owen Wilson redemption arc carrying eight episodes of grief on its back. “Showtime” carries it because the show keeps remembering, even when the broadcast cameras forget, that this story has never been about the trophy. It has been about whose voice Santi hears when he stands over the ball.
A father in the gallery, a father on the bag
The cold open does the work of stacking the wrong father against the right coach before a single shot is hit. Gary Wheeler is suddenly back in Indiana after a year in Germany, telling a story about a cab driver and the autobahn, charming Zero with talk of castles, asking nothing of Santi except that he be allowed to watch. Pryce pulls a favor from Manny to get him an all-access pass and decides aloud, twice, that he is not going to be the guy who stands in the way of a kid getting his dad back.
Elena reads it differently. “You gotta make him leave, Mitts. He doesn’t belong here.” She knows the choreography of this man’s exits and entrances. The hour gives her one quiet line under the gallery noise — “this is how it starts” — and trusts the audience to do the rest of the math. The show has spent ten episodes letting Mariana Treviño’s Elena be the room’s clearest reader of weather, and the finale lets her be right before anyone else gets there.
The early holes belong to Santi. He stripes a drive 318 down a dogleg, chips in for eagle on a hole the booth has labeled make-or-break, and reaches a share of the lead with Collin Morikawa before a thunderstorm pauses everything. The break is when Gary slips the knife in. He tells the Allen County Juniors story, ten-stroke lead at 18, half the field quit, you didn’t, and lands on the line Santi has needed from someone all season: there is not a doubt in my mind. Then he asks for the bag.
The cracks Pryce already saw
Santi pulls Pryce aside on the driving range with a kid’s apology already loaded. “It’s not a big deal, but…” Pryce, played by Owen Wilson at his most generous, asks one honest question — is it smart to change caddies in the middle of the best round of your life — and then he reads the room. He hears Santi say “block out the noise” and recognizes his own line coming back at him. He hands over the bag without making the kid pay for it. “Okay. It’s your call.”
The hour is unblinking about what happens next. Gary stands on 14 and tells Santi to ignore Pryce’s read and swing a four iron at a flag tucked behind water. Santi clears the water, lands twenty feet from the pin, and the booth invents a legend in real time. The shot works. The phrase the announcers reach for — “this kid is not to be believed” — is the trap the episode is setting. The first father gets a hero shot before he gets to break things, and the show wants you to feel that order in your chest when the next swing goes sideways.
The break comes on 15. Santi tries to stay chill, Gary tells him to kill the ball, the drive hooks dead left and ends in trouble. The recovery shot Gary green-lights goes worse. The booth catches the tense exchange on the cart path without quite hearing it. Mitts, watching from the gallery with Elena, lands the line that crystallizes what Pryce has been doing wrong from his very first scene: “I’m not talking about the golfer. I’m talking about the kid.” Peter Dager has played Mitts as a man who notices what the room would rather not name, and the finale lets him say the one sentence the season has been writing toward.
The sprinkler and the speech
By 18 Santi is plummeting down the leaderboard. He whiffs his drive entirely off the tee, walks down the fairway with shoulders the camera is barely tracking, and Gary’s coaching has curdled into “you want me to coddle you? This is on you, not me.” When Santi asks the question that has been sitting in his chest for a year — if I quit right now, would you leave me again — Gary’s answer is the line that closes the door: “Well, you’re not giving me a lot of reasons to stick around.” It is the most quietly devastating beat Stick has staged, because it confirms everything Elena already knew and everything Santi was afraid to test.
The sprinkler is the kind of comic intervention this show has earned the right to deploy. Manny, the course superintendent who has been running a tonal sideline as a working artist of grass, soaks the 18th fairway long enough for Pryce to walk back into the picture. The rules official has to make the call. The hour gives Santi the choice it has been pointing at for ten episodes. Which one of these men is your caddy. The pause Peter Dager and Wilson and the kid playing Santi sit inside is the finale’s loudest silence.
Then comes the speech Owen Wilson was hired to give. He delivers it without raising his voice. Pretty much ever since I’ve known you, he tells Santi, you’ve been swinging the club for the wrong reasons. For me, for your mom, for Zero, for your dad just now. The line lands because Wilson does not push it. He lists the people Santi has been performing for and lets the kid hear his own name missing from the list. The first time I saw you on the range, Pryce says, alone, nothing riding on it, no one watching — that was beautiful. If you’re ready to swing the club for yourself, I’ll carry the bag. If you’re not, let’s go home, get some barbecue, listen to Mitts complain. Wilson plays the off-ramp like he means it. The finale knows the off-ramp is the speech.
The shot, the putt, the back nine that wasn’t
Santi reads the dogleg, says the smart play is a seven iron and an ease around the trees, and then asks Pryce why go around when you can go over. The driver off the deck cuts the corner. The crowd is singing “Cecilia” by then, Zero having started the chorus four scenes earlier and the gallery having picked it up the way a stadium picks up a chant when the story has finally located its hero. Jim Nantz, playing himself in the booth, calls him Showtime Wheeler and Trevor Immelman tells Jim that nickname will stick. The show is winking with its mouth full and getting away with it because the swing was the choice, not the result.
The 35-foot double-breaker on 18 is the episode’s last piece of stagecraft. Pryce admits he has no idea what the putt does. “I’d just go straight at it, but it’s your call.” Santi puts it away from the hole, a line the booth has to narrate because no broadcast camera knows how to render it as anything other than a mistake. The ball curls back, picks up the second break, and drops. The hour does not give us the trophy. It does not need to. The two-putt for the win is offscreen, an aside, a “but I still got a two-putt to win” handed to Pryce in the gallery while Elena cheers and Mitts grins. What the finale wants you to see is the back nine after that.
Santi pulls Pryce onto a back nine of their own, somewhere with nothing riding on it, and tells the man who has been hiding behind fifteen years away from the tour that David Duval is fifty-two and playing the John Deere next week. The exchange is short. Pryce calls God’s Thumb a lucky shot. Santi calls bullshit. The kid wants to see what his coach has, and the finale ends on Pryce stepping into a swing on a real course with a real ball, the metallic ring of a flush strike, and Santi’s “holy shit.” The first season closes on Owen Wilson considering his own ball flight for the first time in fifteen years. The next season’s pitch is in that sound.
What this episode argues
The thesis is in Pryce’s range monologue and in the geometry of every swing after it. Santi has been hitting the ball for the wrong audience all year — for the father who left, for the mother whose worry he keeps trying to soothe, for Zero, for Pryce, for the gallery, for whoever is watching the Instagram post. The finale strips the audience out one swing at a time. The driver off the deck is for Santi. The 35-foot putt away from the hole is for Santi. The back nine after the trophy is for Pryce, finally taking his own advice. The show argues that the swing you choose for yourself is the only one that holds under tournament conditions, and that the people who love you are the ones who hand the bag back when you ask.
Gary’s exit is the cleaner argument. The man who taught Santi the game gets escorted off the fairway, tells Elena he is owed for the kid’s existence, and gets the line that ends his arc: “Not anymore.” The finale refuses to soften him on the way out. The first father becomes the noise the second father has been teaching the kid to block out.
Verdict
The hour is doing a lot of work at once. It stages a PGA Tour final round with Jim Nantz and Trevor Immelman in the booth and somehow keeps the camera on a 17-year-old’s eyes between shots. It pulls a father back into the family long enough to remember why he left in the first place. It hands Pryce the redemption arc he has been ducking for eight episodes and makes him earn it by walking off the bag before he gets to walk back on. The sprinkler gag is the closest the finale comes to a tonal misfire, because it asks comedy to bail out a moment the drama has already loaded, and the show gets away with it because Manny has been a working bit all season and not a deus ex machina.
What saves it is Owen Wilson refusing to oversell the range speech. He lists the people Santi has been swinging for, hands the bag back, offers barbecue and Mitts’s complaining as a real alternative to winning, and trusts the kid to pick. The other reason is Mitts, who has been doing the season’s quietest work, and who reframes the whole coaching question in one line by reminding Pryce that there is a kid inside the golfer. Stick has been one of the warmer sports comedies of the year, and its finale earns the back nine it ends on.
Rating: 8.4/10