James Caan hits the links

Published April 27th, 2008

By Mario Sarmento
SPORTS EDITOR

James Caan isn’t one to play in many celebrity golf tournaments. He likened the experience to that of a young actor coming to work with veterans like himself or Robert Duvall on a movie set.

“It would be like a veteran who had to play a scene with a young kid,” he said. “It’s not fair.”
But there Caan was this week, playing with partner and LPGA professional Christina Kerr at the Stanford International Pro-Am at the Fairmont Turnberry Isle Resort & Club.

Caan talked about his 80-film career prior to the start of the event, and his recent stint as an assistant volunteer coach at Glendale College.

Over the course of his 40-year career, Caan is most famous for three roles: Brian Piccolo in the TV-movie “Brian’s Song” in 1971, doomed mobster Sonny Corleone in The Godfather and unfortunate author Paul Sheldon in Misery in 1990.
Caan said he had turned down the role of Brian Piccolo “three or four times” before finally signing on for his seminal role.

“I played a little ball at Michigan State and it was soon after I graduated,” he said. But after accepting the role, Caan said he went into it full bore.

“I thought I had a chance to play for the Bears,” he said. “I got to meet Joy (Piccolo’s wife) and he had just died. And that was strange, especially when she would say to me, ‘Where’d you learn to push your tongue in your cheek like that? Brian used to do it all the time.’”

During the course of the shoot, Caan said the coaches started to treat him like a real player.
“They started yelling at us,” he said. “There were saying stuff like, ‘why doesn’t he cut back?’”

Part of the reason Caan refused the role was the stigma in those times about movie actors going to television, which at the time was thought to be a career-killing move.

But he said of the movie’s success and longevity, “All the credit goes to the writer of that thing. It was a tear-jerker kind of thing.”
Caan said his movie experiences are always good fodder for playing partners on the golf course. When talking about Corleone, who was riddled with bullets at a toll booth in the movie, he said people tell him, “I wish you hadn’t gone to the toll booth.”
He also said he hears “a lot about the Misery thing, the ankle injury.”

Caan has played golf for much of his life, but he recently was drawn back into the game by stand-in and PGA member, Greg Osbourne. Caan found out there was an opening for a volunteer coach at Glendale College, and he asked for the job.
“I’m pretty good at telling people what to do,” he said. “I’ve been around it (golf) so much that I can help things out.”