While screenwriter and producer Jason Keller has worked to bring his newest project to life, the AppleTV+ golf comedy Stick, he has kept one particularly harsh audience top of mind.

Golfers.

The series, premiering June 4 on the streaming service, stars Owen Wilson as Pryce Cahill, a 50-something former PGA Tour pro whose playing career ended two decades earlier after an on-course meltdown. After a failed marriage and lost job at an Indiana golf store, Cahill decides to go on the road with a 17-year-old golf prodigy named Santi (Peter Dager) as a last-gasp attempt to use everything he knows about the game one more time.    

The pilot episode includes a few golf swings and flashbacks to Cahill’s best days as a pro, where he topped out at 18th in the world, won some tournaments and played on a Ryder Cup team, and picked up the nickname “Stick” from his peers for having the most pure talent on Tour.

As the 10-episode first season unfolds, there is plenty more golf talk and golf swings and golf tournaments, and Keller ensures that however critics judge his most significant project since he wrote the 2019 Academy Award-nominated racing movie Ford vs. Ferrari, the golf is beyond reproach. 

“We have endeavored to make the golf in this show as authentic and real as possible at every level,” Keller tells Sports Illustrated. “Early on when I was developing the scripts, I had a couple of professional golfers constantly reading drafts.

“We know that golf has not been portrayed in the most authentic way in previous projects and we’ve really worked hard to have golf fans be able to watch this show and say ‘they got it right.’”

Nathan Leonhardt, a Canadian teaching pro and former touring pro, was on set for the entire production of golf scenes shot in Vancouver, checking the actors’ swings all the way down to their grips.

And to make the tournaments resemble what golfers watch on weekends, Keller and fellow executive producer Ben Silverman recruited Keegan Bradley, Wyndham Clark, Max Homa and Collin Morikawa, plus CBS broadcasters Jim Nantz and Trevor Immelman.

“In retrospect maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was surprised how Wyndham, Collin, Max and Keegan were so comfortable in front of the camera,” Keller says. “When you’re making something like this and bringing in non-professional actors, you’re very sensitive to what they’re stepping into.

“You often have three cameras rolling and 200 crew people staring at you as you’re trying to deliver lines and those guys, of course, just operate on the biggest stage anyone can imagine and they just stepped in and crushed it. I found myself changing scenes because of some of the anecdotal stories that I was hearing between takes—‘oh, we’ve got to use that.’ It was such a boon to the production to have those guys hanging out for four or five days.”

All that attention to detail lifts a story that Keller, 56, said has been percolating within him for some 20 years. His father, Ron Keller, was selected in the eighth round of the first Major League Baseball draft in 1965. He appeared in nine games as a pitcher for the Minnesota Twins in 1966 and 1968, then left the game for a career in business.

“His story has always rolled around in my head, what that must have been like to spend the first 24 years of your life focused on a game, then resetting and choosing a different path,” Keller says. “That little point of inflection in my father’s life has always fascinated me, and a couple years ago I found a venue in the sport of golf to really explore that character. That character became Pryce Cahill.”