I’ve been watching The Hawk on Netflix.
[For those that don’t know, it’s basically a Will Ferrell vehicle that has him at his silliest as a washed-up golfer trying to make a comeback. Hijinks ensue.]
Many time the camera focuses in on The Hawk’s shoes while he’s lining up for a drive. Here he is wearing the shoes.
I immediately became intrigued by those shoes. I used to watch golf on TV with my dad and uncle. I remember that style of golf shoes. It takes me back to a time when middle aged men playing golf wore what I called “funny” clothes on the course. Plaid pants. Polyester shirts. Golf shoes with ruffles.
So why, on a show in 2026, is Hawk wearing those shoes? I’ve thought a lot about what it might mean. (Probably too much. But you can thank my English professors from Davidson for that ability to deep dive into meanings of literature, art, and film.) Here are my thoughts:
1. They’re beat up and scruffy. So obviously he’s had them a long time. Maybe they were the shoes he wore when he choked in the U.S. Open, and it’s a reminder of what he’s fighting for.
2. They show the character’s personality, brash and non-conformist. The Hawk does what he wants, whether that means driving a tour bus into the country club’s parking lot or wearing bright colors on the course.
3. The shoes symbolize in a visual way the “washed-up” status of the character. Back to the worn and scruffy of idea #1, but in a way that show the once popular, PGA championship golfer is ow touring the country in a bus, just trying to make ends meet on the Korn Ferry tour.
All of those are good ideas, and probably all correct in their own right. But then last week I went to play tennis, and I had an epiphany. Stick with me on this, and you’ll see how it leads back to The Hawk.
At one point, picking up the ball with my racket against my shoe, I looked down at those K-Swiss’s on the bright green of the tennis court, and I felt like I was 16. It was a brief, fleeting moment. But it was so real and so visceral. Those shoes took me back in time. To this time: High School.
I started playing tennis in high school because I thought I needed a sport on my college applications to get me into a good school, and tennis was the only sport at my school that didn’t have tryouts. Everyone who came out got to be on the team. Partly because not that many people played tennis. We were a very rural school. Not many people had access to tennis courts, let alone rackets. But I had my dad’s old wooden racket, and the church down the road from us had a black asphalt court, so I knew a little about the game.
I was not great. I never made it to the top six. But I sweated it out on those courts like the rest of the girls.
“Tennis is a good sport to know how to play. You’ll be able to play it the rest of your life, not like softball, where you need a team,” my mom said. And she was right. I don’t play regularly. But I have played with different people over the years, off and on, and am glad that I’m at least good enough to say, “yeah, let’s go play tennis” if someone asks.
So why is it that now, as a middle-aged woman who has continued to play tennis through the years, I look at my feet in those shoes and feel 16?
Honestly, I don’t know the reason. But I like it! I like feeling young and energetic and like I don’t have a care in the world, even if it is just for a fleeting moment. It’s like I travel back in time to a different space in my brain.
And that’s when it clicked.
The reason The Hawk is wearing those shoes is for the feeling it gives him. He looks down at those wing tips, and remembers the time in his life when he was the greatest golfer in the world, on the cusp of a grand slam.
Well, it could be that. It could be all the other reasons above too. It is a TV show. It’s open for interpretation, and he’s a fictional character.
But for me, I’m sticking with the idea that The Hawk and I lace up these shoes because they’re our time travel machines. These shoes enable us to feel something a little out of this world.
Even for just a fleeting moment.
