Moe Norman’s Story Coming to the Big Screen

Trivia: “What player had the most longevity, winning his final PGA TOUR event nearly 29 years after his first? A) Ray Floyd B) Sam Snead C) Tom Watson D) Jack Nicklaus” Answer below.


The simplified and more effective golf swing that we teach at Parmasters KW, called Straight-Line Golf (TM) stems partly from the vast amount of time our Co-founder and Director of Instruction, Scott Hazledine, spent with Moe Norman.

Thankfully, after many years, Moe’s story is to be immortalized on screen. Please see Lorne Rubenstein’s latest Globe and Mail column here, and included below.


Moe's swing coming to the big screen

LORNE RUBENSTEIN
March 18, 2009

Fifty years ago this month, Moe Norman tied for fourth in the New Orleans Open, his best finish in the 27 PGA Tour events he played during his career.

A half-century later, Barry Morrow, the Academy Award-winning writer of the 1988 film Rain Man, is ready to make a movie about Norman, the unconventional ball-striking wizard who died in September of 2004, nine years after being inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame.

Morrow, an avid golfer and devotee of all things Moe - as everybody called the Kitchener, Ont., native - has wanted to make the film since reading a December, 1995, Golf Digest cover story by David Owen, titled Moe Knows. Morrow was interested in Moe for the same reasons that led to Rain Man, in which Dustin Hoffman played an autistic savant. Morrow completed his Norman script some time ago.

"It's a story about an underdog character you want to see protected against the slings and arrows of life," Morrow said this week from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Morrow wrote to Moe c/o the Canadian PGA on July 31, 1997, hoping the letter would reach him.

"It's been nearly two years since I read about you in Golf Digest, and marvelled at your journey as a person and golf legend," Morrow wrote. "Since then, I've thought about you many times. I am a screenwriter, and I believe your story would make a terrific motion picture. I also believe I'm the person to write it."

Morrow eventually met Moe, and close friends such as Kitchener club pro Gus Maue and his wife, Audrey, and the late Canadian amateur Nick Weslock. They helped protect Moe, a famously shy and insecure man.

Morrow also met Todd Graves, a pro and instructor in Edmond, Okla., who believes Moe had the simplest and most effective swing. The American-born Graves played the Canadian Tour in 1995. He refers to himself as Little Moe and calls his website swinglikemoe.com.

The plan is for Graves teach the actor who plays Moe to emulate his swing. The film will focus on Moe's life in the late 1950s. Moe was in his late 20s then, and made the cut in each of the 14 PGA Tour events he played from 1958 to 1960.

Tiger Woods, who met Moe, told Golf Digest's Jaime Diaz: "Only two players have ever truly owned their swings, Moe Norman and Ben Hogan."

The actor who will play Moe has yet to be determined, while Morrow could have a director in place by next week. The film will have a budget of approximately $10-million (U.S.), and is being co-produced by Morrow, and BellTower Entertainment, based in Los Angeles with offices in Toronto and Shanghai. The intent is to film in Canada, starting this summer. Financing is in place.

The actor who plays Moe is, of course, of singular importance.

"Among the actors we considered a few years ago were Philip Seymour Hoffman and Heath Ledger," Morrow said.

Hoffman won a best-actor Oscar for his role in Capote. At 41, he's now too old to play a young Moe, while Ledger, an Oscar winner for his work in The Dark Knight, died last year. So who might play Moe?

How about Justin Timberlake, a single-digit golfer who, while better-known for his singing and songwriting, received positive reviews for his role in the 2006 film Alpha Dog?

Morrow thinks Timberlake, 28, could work. He's the right age, and is into golf so much that he is the host of the PGA Tour's Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open. The inaugural tournament was in Las Vegas last October. Timberlake is also known for his good looks, but the 1950s model Moe was a slimmer, blonder fellow than the Moe most people now remember.

"I enjoy every facet of the game," Timberlake once said of golf. "I'm a pretty athletic dude, a pretty athletic person, and I think this is the toughest game I've ever played."

Could Timberlake reflect Moe's debilitating discomfort in the white-bread world of professional golf of the 1950s, along with his antic mannerisms? Moe hit balls off Coke bottles, and shuffled off muttering to himself when somebody looked at him the wrong way. Some players didn't want Moe in their midst, and he wouldn't and probably couldn't conform.

The actor playing Moe would also need to get comfortable with Moe's technique, although a body double could be used. He would need to find the moves and sink into the character of what Golf World, which put Moe on its March 20, 1959, cover, called "the most colourful player to join the tour in a long time."

Fifty years have passed, and no more colourful player has emerged. Morrow has come to know Moe. If the film comes off as Morrow envisages it, it will help others know Moe.

rube@sympatico.ca


And the answer: “A) Ray Floyd, who won the first of his 22 titles in 1963 and the last in 1992.”