You probably assumed the over-the-top scenes during the Maxi Golf tournament in Happy Gilmore 2 were produced by artificial intelligence. Who could blame you? Who would think that a golf course would allow a film crew to cover a fairway with six inches of sand to create a desert golf scene that took up just a few minutes of the movie? Or to do the same with ice on a fairway? Even the crazy rotating putting green seemed computer-generated at first glance. In reality, the absurdities were real and the product of one of golf’s leading construction companies, LaBar Golf, moving swiftly once the Happy Madison folks called.
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Todd Saganiec, the Director of Operations for LaBar, routinely fielded calls from the movie’s art director with just a few days of a heads-up. “They’d say, ‘Hey, need to build a jump for a golf cart that flies through the air and crashes and catches fire,’ ” he recounted. “And they’d need it within a day or two.”
It was a busy fall for the Happy Gilmore crew and LaBar Renovations, who helped the crew create their golf scenes throughout New Jersey, specifically four golf courses where filming took place: Fiddler’s Elbow Country Club in Bedminster, Beacon Hill Country Club in Atlantic Highlands and Alpine Country Club and Rockleigh Golf Course in Bergen County. All while having about 15 projects going at the same time around the country, Saganiec says.
LaBar works alongside golf’s top-name architects at some of the most prominent courses, like Shinnecock Hills, Merion, Winged Foot, Seminole and Oakland Hills to name a few. Usually, their work comes after months of strategic planning and scheduling. Not so much when it came to Happy Gilmore 2.
“Movie writers aren’t really familiar with how golf construction works,” Saganiec joked.
A writer would decide they wanted a golf cart to fly through the air, and the next day LaBar would mobilize a nearby crew—thankfully many of their projects come from courses in the Tri-State area—and he’d have dozens of workers at the scene. That scene with the golf cart necessitated the building of a new bunker at Rockleigh Golf Course, then a jump so that the cart could fly through the air and blow up into flames.
The other part where LaBar excels? Putting things back the way they were, so that golfers could be playing golf on that hole in no time.
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That’s particularly true at Fiddler’s Elbow, where the bulk of the golf scenes were shot. The club has 54 holes, so the crew had carte blanche to do what they wanted on one of the courses, and members were back playing the course as they knew it within months after filming—even if one of the holes had been turned into a Sahara-like desert scene.
The rotating elevated green is probably the most memorable feature created for the movie, and that was created by LaBar as well, though that took weeks, not days to design and build. The crew installed hydraulics under the green so that the crew could control how the green would rotate, so that Adam Sandler and the other characters could actually putt out on the fiction-like putting surface. And the bunker with five-inch-high wood planks was actually built right next to the green as it is in the movie.
Courtesy of LaBar Golf Renovations
Courtesy of LaBar Golf Renovations
How did this work compare to anything else they’ve ever worked on?
“Nothing really comes close,” Saganiec says.
And nothing ever will. That’s showbiz.
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
