What We're Reading About: Kelly Slater and Bill Murray's Golf Round

The following are a few scenes from a day on a random golf course in Florida. Kelly Slater, 11-time world champion surfer, was looking for a golfing buddy and ended up paired with a gentleman named Bill who had been stretching on the practice green for a few hours. They ended up riding 18 together.

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Kelly: This is sorta classic Florida isn’t it? With the mossy trees.

*the cart comes to a stop and the pair unloads clubs with a RATTLE*

So, we talked about this once, your first experience surfing, was in Bali?

Bill: That’s right.

Kelly: And you ended up in G-Land somehow right?

Bill: Yup, ended in G-Land. Um, I met these guys… I met these characters and they took me to Padang-Padang.

Kelly: Which is a super dangerous spot.

Bill: Yeah, which is like stupid that I was there. And these guys were surfing some rights, and they put me on the wash, ya know? And I got pushed, Rory Russell, pushed me onto my first wave.

Kelly: See I was wondering how you and Rory became buddies, so it was through Bali.

Bill: He pushed me on my first wave at Padang-Padang. And, because I paddled out with those guys and I knew nothing about how to paddle out or where to paddle out or anything, he pushed me on it and it was a real 12-foot wave.

Kelly: Wave Number One.

Bill: Yeah, wave Number One and I, uh, I’d never really been on… I mean I surfed like, I sorta boogie boarded a little bit in Malibu, ya know Zuma or something, but never to anything like that, and to see like the wave pull up and see the reef.

Kelly: You’re not even thinking about riding the wave.

Bill: You’re looking at it like “what the hell is that?” So it took me all the way into the beach. And I thought that’s fantastic, I’m gonna do that again. And then I tried to paddle out through the break and I just got beat up.

Kelly: Yeah, you gotta go around.

Bill: Yeah. It was funny to just get beat up. And then I finally got out and started paddling out to a wave and just missed it and I thought “Ah, that’s alright I’ll get the next one,” and I did not realize that the wave had taken me into the impact zone. So there I was just getting beat up and dragged all the way into the reef. And I spent a couple of hours doing that. And then I decided I was gonna go watch them. Because they were surfing these things were they had to jump off right before the mountain, kinda thing, away from the rocks.

Kelly: Yes, there’s a cliff there. Maybe in Oahu or something or still in Padang-Padang?

Bill: No, still in Padang-Padang.

Kelly: How did you get into golf?

Bill: I was a caddy. My older brothers were caddies. And that was sort of what you did, in Illinois outside of Chicago. That was sorta how you made some money, we had a lot of kids.. So you sorta had to earn some money at a certain point.

Kelly: Yeah, how many siblings do you have?

Bill: I’ve got um, about five brothers, and three sisters.

Kelly: WOW.

Kelly: So, Caddyshack. How did Caddyshack come around? How did you end up with that part? Did you write any piece of that? Were you ad-libbing a lot of it?

Bill: Yeah, I only had one line that was in my script. I was just sort of tossed in there and then they were shooting in Davie, Florida and I was working on Saturday Night. I came and did this one little scene and then they called me, “You want to come down and do another one?” I did that three times, three different times and I did more stuff. My brother was writing for that, with Harold Ramis, who directed it. Doug Kenney’s father was a tennis pro at a club in Cleveland, around Cleveland. Brian was a caddy also, so he was around that stuff.

Kelly: A lot of that stuff was just natural because you were around the caddyshack.

Bill: A lot of that was we knew that stuff. Yeah, so that stuff all came pretty easy. It was fun. There were a lot of fun people in that movie. That was a lot of fun. We lost some people on that.

Kelly: What do you mean?

Bill: It was too much fun.

Kelly: Too much, yeah.

Bill: We lost some people, some good people never were the same after that. It’s so funny when you’re with Rodney.

Kelly: He was incredible.

Bill: He was wild.

We lost some people, some good people never were the same after that. It’s so funny when you’re with Rodney.
Kelly: Cut through.

*points to short cut to the next tee box*

Bill: It’s all coming together, baby.

Kelly: Yeah, Rodney was wild huh?

Bill: Poppers and blow.

Kelly: Jesus Christ.

Bill: Here we go.

*hits ball exceptionally far*

You see, I found this place out by Malibu that was an old, tiny little old motel, like a ’50s kind of motel. They tore it down in the name of building some oil thing that was above it. They had a side building that was a discotheque. I remember when we were working on some dumb thing, I showed Rodney the place and the next time I came, Rodney was living there. He also lived where, in the compound at Davie where Caddyshack was filmed, it was like student housing kind of thing, like a dormitory, but he was so set there, he would go back there and stay months at a time in that place. Wild.

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