Keep Your Cool, Billy: Why a 1993 VHS Tape Is Still the Greatest Golf Content Ever Made

Keep Your Cool, Billy: Why a 1993 VHS Tape Is Still the Greatest Golf Content Ever Made In 1993, a man named Leslie Nielsen — best known for playing a bumbling detective in the Naked Gun films and a bumbling doctor in Airplane, a man whose entire comedic identity was built on the art of the perfectly straight face delivering the perfectly absurd line — walked onto a golf course with a camera crew, a student named Billy, and thirty-three minutes worth of the most honest golf content ever committed to tape.

The VHS was called Bad Golf Made Easier. The slogan was: I don't play golf to feel bad. I play bad golf, but I feel good.

Thirty-two years later, golf content has exploded into a billion-dollar ecosystem of YouTube empires, Netflix documentary series, LIV Golf broadcasts, celebrity pro-ams, social media influencers, and a cultural moment so loud and so omnipresent that you can barely scroll through a phone without encountering someone's seven-iron swing analysis or a drone shot of a links course at sunrise. The game has never been more visible. The content has never been more abundant. The production values have never been higher.

And not one frame of any of it has come closer to the truth of what golf actually is than Leslie Nielsen standing on a fairway in 1993 telling Billy that the reason the game is called golf is because all of the other four-letter words were already taken.

The Landscape Then To understand what Bad Golf Made Easier was in 1993, you have to understand what golf content was in 1993.

Television had the weekend tournament broadcasts — four hours of Sunday afternoon golf on ABC or CBS, with Jim Nantz and Ken Venturi describing shots in reverent tones while the camera lingered on the Augusta pines or the Pebble Beach cliffs and the whole production carried the weight of something serious and important. The Golf Channel would not launch until 1995. The internet did not exist as a consumer product. YouTube would not be invented for another twelve years.

What you had, if you wanted to engage with golf outside of actually playing it, was the television broadcast on weekends, the occasional tournament special, and the instructional video — a genre that had been thriving since the VHS tape made home video a mainstream household item. Pro golfers, teaching professionals, and various golf celebrities had been producing instructional tapes throughout the 1980s and into the 90s, all following roughly the same format: stand on a practice tee, explain the grip, demonstrate the takeaway, talk about weight transfer, and remind the viewer that the game could be improved through dedicated practice and careful attention to the fundamentals.

The instructional video industry operated on a specific and unspoken contract with its audience: we will tell you what you are doing wrong, and if you follow our instructions faithfully, you will get better. The game will reward the student who pays attention. Mastery is available to anyone willing to do the work.

Leslie Nielsen looked at this contract, this genre, this earnest and well-meaning tradition of golf instruction, and decided it was begging to be taken apart.

What Nielsen Understood Bad Golf Made Easier is a parody of the instructional video format. It is structured exactly like a real instructional tape — Nielsen as the wise experienced golfer, Billy as the frustrated pupil, a series of situations encountered on an actual golf course with tips and advice dispensed throughout. The format is faithful. The advice is not.

Among the things Nielsen teaches Billy over the course of thirty-three minutes: how to bribe the starter for a quick tee time. How to drop the ball from an extremely tall height on a free drop, maximizing the distance gained from the rules. How to declare a ball not lost but stolen — and why should you be penalized for being the victim of this crime? How to underhand-toss a ball out of a sand trap with the casual authority of someone who has studied the rulebook thoroughly and found a provision that permits exactly this. How to fake construction damage to the ground to move the ball to a better lie. How to use pre-shot preparations in the rough to improve your lie without technically improving your lie. How to sabotage your opponents. How to order your ball around. How to win by asking rhetorically idiotic questions until your playing partners give up and concede.

These are, it bears noting, things that every golfer has at minimum thought about. The genius of Bad Golf Made Easier is not that it invented anything. It is that it said out loud the things that every golfer already knew and had never heard spoken aloud in this context, with this specific deadpan authority, by a man who made Naked Gun a cultural institution through his absolute refusal to wink at the audience. Nielsen plays this entirely straight. The tips are delivered with the same calm instructional gravity that the real instructional videos deployed. The absurdity is the content. The content is the absurdity.

There is a recurring character — a golf course snob who keeps appearing in a cart to remind Nielsen and Billy about proper etiquette. He wants them to rake the trap. He wants them to remain standing after shooting. He is the game's self-appointed keeper of standards, and he is perfect, because he is every golfer who has ever lectured another golfer about the rules while secretly bending them himself. Nielsen dispatches him each time with the ease of a man who has long since made peace with the fact that the rules of golf and the actual playing of golf have always existed in a complicated relationship.

The quotes that litter the production are some of the most precisely observed things anyone has ever said about the game. Never take lessons from your father, never teach your wife to play golf, and never play your son for money. Never buy a putter until you've first had a chance to throw it. Always limp with the same leg for the entire round. The statute of limitations on forgotten strokes is two holes. Whatever you think you're doing wrong, that's the one thing you're doing right. There is no movement in golf that cannot be made more difficult through diligent study and practice.

Every single one of these lines lands because every single one of them is true. Not technically true. True in the way that the things you are not supposed to say about golf are true — the things that every golfer knows and no instructional video, no Golf Channel broadcast, no Netflix documentary has ever said with this particular combination of directness and hilarity.

The final line of the tape: Golfers who never cheat, also lie.

That is golf. That is exactly golf. No broadcast, no documentary, no YouTube channel with 1.8 million subscribers has ever ended a piece of golf content on a line that perfect.

The VHS Becomes a Trilogy Bad Golf Made Easier was successful enough that Nielsen returned the following year with Bad Golf My Way, in which the instructional format is largely abandoned in favor of a plot: Nielsen encounters a cocky golfer named Brad in the parking lot and decides to spend an entire round systematically destroying his confidence, his game, and his sense of self by partnering with him and inventing an endless series of fake rules, distractions, and psychological disruptions. It is, essentially, a guide to golf's darkest competitive arts, delivered with the same unflappable authority as the original.

The trilogy concluded in 1997 with Stupid Little Golf Video — the only installment of the three to be released on DVD, which tells you something about the archival priorities of the entertainment industry and nothing about the relative quality of the content. All three tapes were produced in the specific aesthetic of the late-VHS era, complete with the kind of production values that now register as charming rather than cheap, and all three were distributed the way content was distributed before the internet made distribution a non-issue: you went to the video store, or a friend had it, or it turned up in a pawn shop for two dollars, and you watched it, and then you passed it on to someone else, and the chain of custody continued until the tape wore out or the VCR broke.

This is how the greatest golf content ever made traveled through the world. On a physical object. By hand. At the speed of friendship.

The Landscape Now In 2023, Netflix launched Full Swing — an eight-episode documentary series produced in partnership with the PGA Tour, with the access and the production values and the cinematic ambition of a prestige sports documentary. It has been renewed for three seasons. It follows tour professionals through their seasons, their families, their struggles, their rivalries, and the ongoing chaos of a professional game rocked by the emergence of LIV Golf and the billions of Saudi dollars behind it. It is beautifully shot. It is genuinely emotional in places. It has introduced golf to an audience that would never have watched a Sunday broadcast. It is, by any reasonable measure, good television.

It also explains golf terminology to its audience repeatedly throughout every episode, which is a thing a prestige documentary does when it is not entirely sure who is watching. The player interviews are warm but controlled — managed access, not unfiltered truth. The LIV storyline, for all its genuine drama and genuine money and genuine rancor, is handled with the diplomatic caution of a production that was made in partnership with one of the parties involved in the dispute. The game is presented as a world of private jets and endorsement deals and high-stakes majors and emotional family moments, which it is, but which is not quite the same thing as the game that every person reading this actually plays. Full Swing is golf seen through the lens of people for whom golf is a profession. It is not golf seen through the lens of people for whom golf is a love affair complicated by a persistent inability to stop three-putting.

YouTube golf has produced something closer to the second thing. Good Good Golf has more subscribers than the official PGA Tour YouTube channel. Their videos average 545,000 views per upload against the PGA Tour's 85,000. The Good Good Open — a tournament organized and broadcast by a group of golf content creators — drew more online viewers than a LIV Golf event in the same window. Rick Shiels, who started filming his golf swing from above in 2012 at a driving range in Manchester, England, has nearly three million subscribers and approaching one billion total views. Bryson DeChambeau, who understood that a major champion with a YouTube channel and a genuine personality was a more powerful combination than any traditional sports media strategy, gained nearly half a million subscribers in a single month after a video with a former president went viral. The numbers are staggering. The appetite is real. Golf on the internet is a genuine cultural force, and it is growing faster than any traditional golf media institution has ever grown.

And yet. The YouTube golf ecosystem, for all its energy and reach and genuine love for the game, is optimized for the things that YouTube rewards: the challenge format, the match, the reveal, the reaction, the watch-time metric, the algorithm. It is entertainment built for the platform rather than for the game. It is golf filtered through the specific demands of content creation, which are not the same as the demands of golf itself. The best of it — the No Laying Up storytelling, the course architecture deep dives, the moments when a creator's genuine feeling for the game breaks through the production — is genuinely good. The average of it is the same format recycled with different faces and different courses and different betting games, and the sameness accumulates over time in the way that any template eventually shows its seams.

LIV Golf, for its part, broadcasts exclusively on YouTube — which means that the most expensive and controversial disruption in the history of professional golf is being distributed on the same platform where a retired club professional in Australia named Ron Chopper films himself having a fun time. The democratization of distribution has produced, among other things, the spectacle of a billion-dollar Saudi-backed sports league and a man with 50,000 subscribers sitting on the same platform, competing for the same attention, governed by the same algorithm. Golf has never been more available or more complicated or more expensive or more accessible all at the same time.

What Nielsen Had That Nobody Else Has Found The thing that Bad Golf Made Easier understood in 1993 — the thing that three seasons of Full Swing and 50 million monthly YouTube views and a Saudi-funded breakaway tour have not quite managed to replicate — is that golf is funniest, and most true, when it is most honest about what the game actually is for the people who actually play it.

Not the professionals. Not the tour cards and the major championships and the world rankings and the equipment deals. The game as it is played by every person who has ever stood over a five-footer for bogey with their playing partners watching and felt the specific, intimate terror of a putt that absolutely cannot be missed and is about to be missed. The game as it is played by every person who has ever dropped a ball from a legally maximal height and told themselves they were within the rules. The game as it is played by every person who has ever conveniently forgotten a stroke in the haze of a difficult hole, citing the statute of limitations that Nielsen identified at two holes and that most golfers have quietly extended to the entire back nine.

Nielsen made a tape about that game. The game that every golfer plays. Not the game on television, not the game on YouTube, not the game on Netflix — the game in your head, on your home course, on a Saturday morning with your playing partners who will absolutely call you on the foot wedge if they see it but will probably not see it because they are busy worrying about their own game.

The insight behind Bad Golf Made Easier is not comedic, though it is very funny. The insight is empathetic. It says: here is what the game actually is, and it is not what the instructional tapes are pretending it is, and the gap between those two things is where every golfer actually lives, and that gap is not something to be ashamed of. That gap is the game. I don't play golf to feel bad. I play bad golf, but I feel good.

That is the philosophy behind thirty-three minutes of VHS tape from 1993. It is also, if you think about it long enough, the philosophy behind every Foresome Saturday morning game you will ever play. Keep your cool, Billy. The game is hard enough without making it harder than it needs to be.

Golfers who never cheat, also lie.

The Sequel We Are Still Waiting For Leslie Nielsen passed away in November 2010 at the age of 84, which means the trilogy ended not by design but by the arithmetic of time. He made three golf tapes, delivered several dozen lines of golf wisdom that have held up better than anything the Golf Channel has produced in the same period, and left the genre permanently improved by his brief and glorious residency in it.

The case for Bad Golf Made Easier as the single most entertaining piece of golf content ever produced is not complicated. It is honest about the game in a way that no other golf content has been before or since. It is funny in the specific way that only things that are completely true can be funny — not the manufactured humor of a challenge format or a reaction video, but the humor of recognition, of seeing yourself clearly and not flinching from the view. It is thirty-three minutes long and it contains no wasted seconds. It was made for five dollars and a camera crew and delivered something that billion-dollar Netflix productions and multi-million-subscriber YouTube channels have been circling for thirty years without quite finding.

The game keeps producing new platforms, new formats, new ways to film a golf shot and distribute the footage to the world. YouTube golf is growing. Netflix golf is growing. LIV golf is broadcasting on the internet to audiences that did not exist five years ago. Happy Gilmore 2 is in production and Bryson DeChambeau is apparently in it, because the line between the professional game and the entertainment industry has been dissolving for a decade and nobody has thought to stop it.

And somewhere, on a shelf in a house where someone still has a working VCR, there is a VHS tape. Thirty-three minutes. A man named Leslie, a student named Billy, and the most honest thirty-three minutes of golf content the game has ever produced.

Never buy a putter until you've first had a chance to throw it.

Keep your cool, Billy.

Foresome.com