The Long Game (2023)

I was test driving watching movies and sewing on my Featherweight while traveling by car for work-related reasons, and was restricted by what I could stream on Netflix and this seemed like a good bet. It is a film that is an an adaptation of a true story about the golf team from San Felipe High School in Del Rio, Texas, set in the 1950's. They're a group of Mexican-American boys who all caddied at an upscale private country club in their community where they were not welcome to play and certainly not be members. They aspired to play golf themselves, so they built their own crude practice course in the middle of the South Texas desert. They're brought together as a golf team under their coach (JB Peña), who has just taken a job as an Assistant Superintendent at the high school and is an avid golfer. He is a veteran of WWII and like many brown and black soldiers he was treated better abroad than at home, and aspires to membership at the (all-white) country club where the boys work, but is denied because of his ethnicity. They face a lot of obstacles and discrimination in the golf world and the community as a whole as they strive for legitimacy and acceptance, and deal with their own individual struggles in handling and overcoming it. Cheech Marin plays "Pollo", a longtime employee of the country club who shares his (often humorous) outlook and serves as kind of a mentor to both the youths and Peña. They're also helped by Frank Mitchell (played by Dennis Quaid), a former PGA Tour player who is a member at the country club but sees potential in the youths, so he takes on the role of teaching them the game and uses his influence as a country club member to get them into golf tournaments. It's a good story with some unforeseen twists and turns, a good mix of humor and drama, and some very touching moments. It's a golf movie, but one that non-golfers can enjoy. If you're looking for a light movie to watch, it's worth your time.