Jared Van Snellenberg, once the bleached blond looper in “Happy Gilmore”, is now (fittingly) a psychiatry professor.
He’s a living golf legend, one of the game’s great folk heroes. To golf fans, he might be more recognisable than some recent PGA Tour winners. And yet, he’s never even played a round of golf.
It’s been nearly three decades since Jared Van Snellenberg played the role of Happy Gilmore’s first caddie in the original comedy classic and iconic golf movie that has been in the news plenty this year since its long-awaited sequel premiered on Netflix in July. You couldn’t miss the then-14-year-old with a giant mushroom of bleached blond hair on the big screen. While he carried the bag for a character who was pretty much clueless about golf, it’s actually Van Snellenberg who was – and still is – a golf novice.
“I’m sorry,” Van Snellenberg, now 44, says with a laugh when asked if he’s into golf. “I have to admit, no.” Still, some of Van Snellenberg’s fondest memories came on the course during the filming of “Happy Gilmore”. “ I still think that was probably the most fun I ever had on a set,” Van Snellenberg says of his first feature-film role. “Adam Sandler had this exuberant energy, and it really infected the set. Carl Weathers and everyone else were so nice to me. Everyone seemed like they were having a good time. People were playing pranks and telling jokes all day, every day.”
After a few years of booking acting gigs, life took the native of Vancouver in a much different direction. Van Snellenberg said he “squeaked into” college at Simon Fraser University, partly due to an essay he wrote about his experiences acting. Once there, he discovered a love and aptitude for psychology, which led him to doing extensive grad studies at Columbia University. That kid caddie at the Waterbury Open now goes by Dr Van Snellenberg, associate professor at Stony Brook University Renaissance School of Medicine in New York.
“ I eventually had to make a choice. I was going into my senior year. I was volunteering in three different labs simultaneously, including doing an honours project and TA-ing a class on top of a full course load,” recalls Van Snellenberg, who says his only other experience with golf came on one trip to a pitch-and-putt as a kid. “I told my agent, ‘I can’t do auditions anymore; I’m going to take a different route.’”
Van Snellenberg’s extensive film and TV credits and his impressive academic résumé combine to create one of the most interesting Wikipedia pages. Van Snellenberg’s research is focused on patients with schizophrenia, primarily using functional magnetic resonance imaging to study their brains. Of particular interest to him is something called working memory, which he describes as “ a cognitive ability that’s very important for higher order reasoning and intelligence that’s significantly disrupted in patients with schizophrenia”. Imagine him explaining that to Happy.
When he thinks back to his time on set, Van Snellenberg fondly recalls one prank in particular, a playful slap-off with Weathers – who played Gilmore’s one-handed coach Chubbs Peterson – escalating to the point of leaving Weathers’ “perfect, red handprint” on his stomach. A photo he has of himself with the now-deceased Weathers [above] is the lone lasting memento from his time on set. Gone also is the bleached look, replaced with a greying, although still robust, head of hair. Van Snellenberg says that signature look helped land him the part – even though it got him in trouble.
“I really wanted to dye my hair because a lot of my friends had, and my mum said, ‘No, you can’t do it. You’ll never book any roles. Don’t do it. It’s stupid. You’ll look terrible,’” Van Snellenberg says. “Eventually, I did it without permission. I don’t think I would have booked that role if I hadn’t bleached my hair, so my mum had to eat a little bit of crow.”
After being cast, Van Snellenberg was ordered not to cut his hair for the next three months before filming began. The first of his four days on set was mostly spent getting his coif just right. “It’s my real hair, but there was so much hairspray in it,” he says. “It was like a helmet; it was rock hard.”
While Van Snellenberg doesn’t follow golf, he’s aware of the comparisons between his character and PGA Tour star Will Zalatoris, one of the tour players who appears in the sequel, playing a grown-up version of Happy’s first caddie. Although Van Snellenberg was disappointed to not be asked to reprise his role for the new film, Netflix negotiated the rights to re-use his footage from “Happy Gilmore”, so he still makes several brief appearances in the follow-up film, which could earn him some serious street cred with students he says are too young to have seen the original.
“People don’t really recognise me from that film anymore, but I get Googled,” Van Snellenberg says. “Anytime I’m giving a talk, which we do in academia pretty frequently, it’s 50-50 that ‘Happy Gilmore’ gets worked into the introduction.” Van Snellenberg finds that amazing considering he had no clue at the time of being cast that he was about to be a part of a piece of cinema – and golf – history.
“In all honesty, I was not very plugged into popular culture at that time or really throughout my teenage years,” he says. “It was a friend of mine who was a big movie guy who said, ‘Wait, you’re gonna be in an Adam Sandler movie?!’ I got some sense of how big a deal it was.”
And still is. So how would he help Happy now as a “caddie” given all his real-life job training in psychology? The doctor made it clear that he’s not qualified to make an official diagnosis or give prescriptions, but he played along with the question.
“For the sake of the bit, I think some mood stabilisers would be in order,” he says. “It might smooth out some of his outbursts.” Of course, that probably wouldn’t make for as entertaining a movie – or in this case, sequel.
Main photograph by conor ralph
