For when you need a break from the U.S. Open.

6 grip-it-and-rip-it golf movies to tee up right now

For when you need a break from the U.S. Open.

By Jesse Hassenger

June 18, 2026 2:00 p.m. ET

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'The Greatest Game Ever Played'; 'Tin Cup'; 'Caddyshack'. Credit:

Jonathan Wenk/Disney; Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett (2)

Golf's deliberate pace and less-than-bustling scenery give it something of a handicap in the realm of sports movies. It's less kinetic than football or basketball, lacks the ensemble nature of baseball, and features a lot less bloodshed than boxing.

Yet throughout cinema history, there have been several movies that transcend the myriad stereotypes of golf (“a good walk spoiled,” per Mark Twain) to achieve something well on par with the best sports movies.

To celebrate the U.S. Open, we've ranked six of the best golf movies of all time. Our picks span well over half a century of cinema and are a mix of comedy and drama that offer plenty of different approaches to that sports-movie mainstay: the scrappy underdog story.

The Phantom of the Open (2022)

Mark Rylance in 'The Phantom of the Open'.

Sony Pictures Classics/Courtesy Everett

Golf is such a moneyed, polite sport that its most famous cinematic depictions tend to divide characters along class lines. *The Phantom of the Open* takes this to the extreme.

Oscar winner Mark Rylance portrays Maurice Flitcroft, a real-life Brit and decidedly inexperienced golfer who successfully entered the British Open by pretending to be a pro — “successfully” in the sense that he did actually play. However, he set a record for the tournament’s worst-ever score. After bans and rule changes, he nonetheless continued to attempt entry under various fake names and disguises.

*The Phantom of the Open* is at its best when using Rylance’s twinkly charm to depict his daft antics. It’s less beguiling when it contrives conflict in the form of a familial spat. Maurice’s son, you see, is embarrassed by his dad’s insistence on following his dream, possibly because it’s more of a stubborn whim than a lifelong desire.

But what makes the movie vaguely annoying as a family story makes it fascinating as a character study. While some sports may be accessible on television or in our surroundings, they are often effectively closed off to certain members of society.

Where to Watch *The Phantom of the Open*: Amazon Prime Video

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005)

Shia LaBeouf in 'The Greatest Game Ever Played'.

Jonathan Wenk/Disney

Due in part to the aforementioned class divide, golf movies tend to center around outsiders to the sport. Most of the movies on this list take an irreverent approach to their outsiders, eschewing the straight-faced inspirational dynamic that informs so many underdog athletes on film. Though *The Greatest Game Ever Played *certainly has its lighthearted moments, particularly the presence of a scene-stealing 10-year-old caddie, it’s easily the most traditional of this bunch, chronicling the pivotal 1913 U.S. Open that launched the career of young Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf).

Beloved actor Bill Paxton, directing his second and final feature film, pivoted from the harrowing horror of *Frailty* to make this Disney true-life sports drama. It's not a surprising film, but it's a satisfying and family-friendly one, with nuance granted to Ouimet's most prominent British opponents. (Their handler, however, is more of a cartoon villain.)

There’s also a metatextual element to the film’s creative success. Earlier that same decade, another actor-director made a starrier golf fable that seemed like a can’t-miss proposition: Robert Redford’s *The Legend of Bagger Vance*, starring Will Smith, Matt Damon, and Charlize Theron. Paxton didn’t have nearly as storied a career as Redford behind the camera (not least because he died relatively young in 2017), but his lighter touch gives him the edge here.

Where to Watch *The Greatest Game Ever Played*: Disney+

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Pat and Mike (1952)

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in 'Pat and Mike'.

Courtesy Everett

Even today, there are vanishingly few movies about women athletes, so *Pat and Mike* feels particularly pioneering for having premiered way back in 1952. It also feels entirely fitting that Katharine Hepburn, who had a lifetime of actual golfing experience (briefly depicted in* The Aviator*), plays a slacks-wearing sportswoman in this romantic comedy from George Cukor, her most frequent collaborator.

Hepburn’s Pat starts the movie with a fiancé, but he limits both her ambition and her talent; his presence actually gives her the yips on the green (and on the tennis court). Mike (Spencer Tracy), a shady but ultimately nurturing sports agent, more clearly recognizes her potential.

Though it maintains the light comic tone of other Tracy/Hepburn romances, *Pat and Mike* anticipates movies like *Love & Basketball* and *Challengers* by addressing the complicated nature of moving through the world as an exceptional female athlete. Admittedly, it’s not as sexy as either of those movies, and not just because of the greater restrictions placed on 1950s content; Tracy just has a more paternal, irascible energy with Hepburn than, say, Cary Grant.

Then again, Grant might not have been convincing as a sports operator with mob ties. And even if golf has to share some of its screen time with tennis, the sport couldn’t ask for a better rep than the always-sparkling Hepburn.

Where to Watch *Pat and Mike*: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

Caddyshack (1980)

A gopher and Bill Murray in 'Caddyshack'.

Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett

So much of golf is wrapped up in the sheer amount of space it takes to play it: the vast greens and, in many cases, the snobbish country club gatekeeping the sport. It’s a sly bit of maneuvering, then, that *Caddyshack *relocates what is essentially an *Animal House*-style campus comedy to this new setting, a country club where Judge Smails (Ted Knight) holds court and controls the fate of teenage caddies via his scholarship program.

But, unlike in *Animal House*, it’s really the de facto faculty who are the main attraction here. There is Knight's smarmy (and later apoplectic) Smails, of course, pitted against wisecracking new-money interloper Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield). And then there's a top-of-his-game Chevy Chase as a devil-may-care golfer and Bill Murray as a raffish groundskeeper.

By populating the green with so many conflicting personalities, director and cowriter Harold Ramis makes golf seem both monumentally silly and, despite its staid trappings, unexpectedly freewheeling.

*Caddyshack* might just be the most influential movie on this list, not only because it cast a long shadow over the ramshackle comedies that followed, but because it helped loosen up golf onscreen, turning the sport into fertile ground for comic hijinks.

Where to Watch* Caddyshack*: YouTube TV

Happy Gilmore (1996)

Adam Sandler in 'Happy Gilmore'.

Universal/Courtesy Everett

*Happy Gilmore *might be the ur-Sandler comedy, the one that best establishes his mix of slapstick absurdity, underdog sentimentality, and, yes, shameless product placement. It’s all the more delightful that he somehow did this in service of a comedy about golf.

Well, maybe “somehow” undersells the movie’s great innovation of making its hero, Happy (Sandler), a transplant from another sport. He’s a lifelong hockey devotee with a short temper, a wicked slapshot, and little else. When Happy unwittingly discovers he has one of golf's most powerful drives, he goes with it in order to save his grandmother’s house from foreclosure. Naturally, in order to succeed, Happy must fine-tune his short game with the help of a grizzled old coach, Chubbs (Carl Weathers).

Sandler obviously reveres the ramshackle spirit of *Caddyshack*, but he channels that film's snobs-versus-slobs sensibility into a surprisingly heartfelt sports comedy. Just as Happy brings a younger, rowdier crowd to the preppy sport (something he contends with as an old pro in the 2025 sequel), *Happy Gilmore* welcomes golf into the sports-comedy fold in a way that *Caddyshack*, funny as it is, never quite managed.

Where to Watch *Happy Gilmore*: Peacock

Tin Cup (1996)

Kevin Costner in 'Tin Cup'.

Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett

What was going on in 1996 that gave us two of the best golf movies ever made within months of each other — and from such unlikely sources?

Sure, the incongruity of Adam Sandler as a pro golfer is the whole point of Happy Gilmore, but Kevin Costner is arguably just as odd a choice, given how closely associated he is with the romance of baseball. He re-teamed with his *Bull Durham* director, Ron Shelton, for *Tin Cup*, a lackadaisical yet tart romantic comedy about a never-was golfer who missed the pros, left the game behind, and now runs a barely functional driving range — until he takes another shot at glory, on his own stubborn, arguably stupid terms.

Naturally, the impetus for his comeback is a woman. More specifically, the ’90s chemistry queen Rene Russo, who has smoldered onscreen with everyone from Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson to Pierce Brosnan and John Travolta. Her mischievous skepticism matches Costner's laid-back charm, creating sparks unseen in a golf movie since, well, Hepburn and Tracey’s day. And frankly, this is a funnier and more romantic movie than *Pat and Mike*.

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Shelton, who also made *White Men Can’t Jump*, has a great feel for the characterization of athletes, especially those on the margins of their chosen sport who are figuring out how and why they feel compelled to compete. In his hands, and with one of Costner’s better mid-period performances enhancing the material, *Tin Cup* reinvents a fussy, precise sport as something improbably and hilariously zen.

Where to Watch *Tin Cup*: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

- Sports Movies

Original Article on Source

Source: “EW Sports”