This Actor Can Swing Any Role

Forget Shaquille O’Neal and his millions. Never mind how much Emmitt Smith got. Skip Barry Bonds’ take. Or Greg Norman’s.

Ribbon clerks.

I sat next to the most bankable star in Hollywood the other day. Doesn’t have to make a putt, hit a homer or crack a line. But takes home more money than anyone who does.

A “bankable star,” a producer friend of mine once told me, is “a guy who could make a movie out of the phone book and still have a blockbuster at the box office.” He doesn’t need a great script or rave reviews, merely a good director and an attractive co-star and a lot of close-ups.

Clark Gable was probably the most bankable star in the history of Hollywood. John Wayne, too, although he had to be on a horse or in a war. Redford and Newman qualify. So did Jimmy Stewart.

But Kevin Costner is the most daring mega-star in the history of the business. Where Jimmy Stewart had to play Jimmy Stewart, Duke Wayne had to have a horse or a machine gun, and Cagney needed to be going to the electric chair, Costner takes role risks.

In particular, the place he defies conventional wisdom is in his choice of sports roles. He could probably be a star into the next century doing remakes of “Dances With Wolves” or “The Untouchables” but Costner likes it on the ledge.

You have to understand Hollywood’s relationships with sports movies. They don’t do any. Oh, they like to think they do. They point to “The Pride of the Yankees” as the pride of Hollywood. Now, “The Pride of the Yankees” was about Lou Gehrig. But it wasn’t about baseball. It was about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. What we used to call a “fourhandkerchief” movie.

Hollywood doesn’t trust sports to carry the load. The “fight” movie isn’t about pugilism. It’s about gangsters (sure-fire box office). There’s always someone (see about Sheldon Leonard for the part) about to fix a fight for the mob (Brando and “I coulda been a contendah!”)

Football movies are about Toby Wing as a cheerleader in a skimpy skirt. “Navy Blue and Gold” was about Annapolis, not the Army game, “Knute Rockne, All American” was about Rockne and Gipp dying, not the Notre Dame shift. In fact (hold your head), they had the Notre Dame shift coming to Rockne as he watched a Rockette’s chorus line!

Baseball movies don’t rely on ballplayers. Hollywood feels the need to put angels in the outfield or sell some player’s soul to the devil. The baseball is secondary. The principals in the films might as well have been jugglers. “The Fan” is not a baseball movie, it’s “Cape Fear Goes to the Old Ballgame.”

Golf movies are “Caddyshack” or the 1951 Ben Hogan fiasco “Follow the Sun.” Had a lot of hospital scenes, no golf. You would have thought Hogan was Li’l Eva, not the scourge of the tour.

Costner knew all the risks. Sports movies were poison at the box office, they told him. So he made “Field of Dreams,” a fantasy about baseball’s past that was fantastically successful.

He loved sports too much to let go of them. As a kid, he was a high-visibility athlete. But he was a better actor. “I found I could imitate anything,” he says. “That’s what an actor does. Disappears into a role.”

He was a fan. He used to get knots in his stomach when the Trojans lost. He worried himself sick when Muhammad Ali was going up against George Foreman. He had heroes. He took games seriously. He yearned to play those parts.

“I heard all the arguments,” he said. “Sports were poison unless you could add another dimension. I didn’t believe it. Americans love their sport.”

In other words: “Build it and they’ll come.”

He made another movie, “Bull Durham.” It was a milestone: a baseball movie about baseball, not medicine or theology. Tragedy was losing the girl or the game, not your life. It broke records.

Still, when Costner and his “Bull Durham” partner, Ron Shelton, wanted to do “Tin Cup,” a story about golf, Hollywood needed smelling salts. This time, Shelton and Costner had gone too far, the producers protested.

Wall Street overruled them. The bankers would bankroll Costner doing grand opera if he wanted.

“Tin Cup” is doing just fine at the box office, leading as of last week. It is, at long last, a golf movie with some golf in it.

When they made the Hogan story years ago, they cast Glenn Ford in the title role. Now, Ford was a fine actor, but, unfortunately, didn’t know which end of a golf club to grip. Hollywood didn’t think it mattered. Golf was not really in the script.

It mattered. The film was mawkish, ill-conceived. Ford was an embarrassment to the great Hogan. So was the rest of “Follow the Sun.”

So, one of the things Costner knew he would need was credibility in the part. Actors, as a class, are like athletes. They need a certain amount of rhythm, coordination and, certainly, competitiveness. Douglas Fairbanks jumping off balconies with a sword, comes to mind, Burt Lancaster making a living on a trapeze before making one on a sound stage.

Costner did not want to repeat the Ford debacle, so he enlisted the aid of the raffish Gary McCord to brush up on a game he had played only sporadically. Within weeks, he was teeing it up in the major pro-am tournaments, shooting in the 80s. Only about 5% of the millions of golfers in this country shoot in the 80s.

“As I say, ‘Show me how to do something and I can imitate it,’ ” he reminds you. “It’s the art of the actor.”

He plays the part of a supremely gifted but pigheaded golf pro, Roy McAvoy, who is congenitally unable to lay up either on a course or in life. He has frittered away a career because he cannot bring himself to hit the safe, sure shot when the reckless moonshot is available. He can play like Hogan, but thinks like a hooligan. He is a driving range pro who has beer for breakfast, a stripper for a girlfriend and a broken-down Winnebago for a home.

Guys he used to have to give shots to are now cleaning up on tour while he is going through life with cleats missing.

It’s vintage Costner. Romance puts him back on the tour. Rene Russo, who can make Sharon Stone look nunnish, would put anybody back on tour.

Like its protagonist, the film doesn’t lay up, either. It goes for the pin.

It’s great fun, but for us sportswriters, it is an affirmation of sports as a metaphor for life. You wish Costner and Shelton had been around in Hogan’s day. It ain’t “Hamlet,” but, knowing Costner, he’ll probably be doing “Hamlet” next. Unless someone comes up with a good tennis script. Whatever they don’t want him to do.