• Louis Oosthuizen +1
• Ernie Els +1
• Collin Morikawa +1
• Padraig Harrington +3
• John Daly +3
• Zach Johnson +3
• Brooks Koepka +4
• Phil Mickelson +5
• Marc Leishman +6
• Tiger Woods +9
• Mark Calcavecchia +21

World’s worst golfer story a fairway from faultless

JAKE WILSON

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Flitcroft

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPEN

106 minutes, rated M, selected cinemas

The giveaway moment in The Phantom of the Open comes at the outset, when everyman golfer Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance) sits down to be interviewed about his improbable rise to fame.

To steady his nerves, he asks for a cup of tea with six sugars, a fair analogue for what’s on offer in this British underdog story: based on fact, but heavily sweetened.

A shipyard worker from the north, Flitcroft appeared on the golfing scene in 1976, a middle-aged newcomer who bluffed his way into the British Open qualifying round.

Immediately, a star was born. Not that this bid for glory got far in any usual sense: Flitcroft’s firstround score was woeful enough to earn him a media profile as the World’s Worst Golfer, a label he fruitlessly resisted.

As it turned out, he was just getting started – and while he was ridiculed for his antics, they also won him an international cult following, as a standard-bearer for the principle that lack of talent is no reason not to have a go.

Clearly, nothing of the kind would be allowed to happen now: this lends the whole saga a nostalgic quality, a testimony to an era when even professional sporting bodies were amateurish enough to let the odd gatecrasher through.

To some degree, nostalgia of this sort is the basis for the film, although wider social context remains in the background (he switches channels when Thatcher shows up on his new colour TV).

The spirit could equally be described as one of timeless whimsy, which makes sense given that director Craig Roberts wasn’t born until 1991. Then again, the main creative force may be Gen Xer screenwriter Simon Farnaby.

Roberts and Farnaby seem bent on reassuring us that they themselves are on Flitcroft’s side, unlike the TV presenters who are shown as holding him up for snobbish ridicule. For the most part, he’s portrayed as an innocent sincerely reaching for a dream.

Of course, that viewpoint could itself be taken as a snobbish, patronising one. As if to fend off this charge in turn, we’re regularly reminded that Flitcroft isn’t the simpleton he might initially appear. The upshot is a character who isn’t entirely easy to swallow, except in the anythinggoes terms of a sitcom.

Beyond this lies the paradox of the casting: a notorious incompetent played by an actor who is a virtuoso and never lets us forget it. Rylance’s performances often have an uncanny quality, suggesting a precise lifesize simulation of how an actual person might behave. Here is yet another studied portrait, with every detail under full control: the slow speech, the wandering eyes, the tentative but knowing smile as if he were privy to some folk wisdom beyond words.

This too could be hilarious, if we weren’t invited to accept the character as the salt of the earth. As things stand, he’s fascinating but not entirely human.