Whiffs and Aces: Birdie Wings' Mixed Depiction of Golf

The surprise spring 2022 hit anime Birdie Wing -Golf Girls' Story- is...not about golf. Directed by Takayuki Inagaki and produced by Bandai Namco Pictures, the anime is instead about making the most of bad situations, finding ways to profit from the things you're passionate about while still engaging with them on your own terms, and, most prominently, lesbian camp romance. Golf is the means through which Birdie Wing explores these ideas, though, so it's only fair to examine what the anime original series gets right and wrong about its namesake sport.

As someone who started golfing shortly after learning to walk, I was immediately drawn to Birdie Wing. Thankfully, I also picked up an affinity for ostentatious dramas as I grew older, because Birdie Wing makes it clear from the get-go that it's not interested in exploring what makes golf a tense and challenging sport. From the technical aspects of the game to the mental toll of every stroke, other pieces of media do a far better job of grounding themselves in the nuances of golf than Birdie Wing. Where Birdie Wing stays below par—which is good in golf—is how it showcases the idiosyncrasies and mentalities of the players. Speaking of the titular Golf Girls, while more exaggerated than a blowhard recounting their game in a clubhouse, the anime does successfully convey the passionate feelings you'll have towards another player during a round. So while Birdie Wing's depiction of golf is a mixed bag, you can keep fourteen clubs in a golf bag during regulation play and you don't have to be a master with each of them to have a great time on the course.

Birdie Wing -Golf Girls' Story- opens with a golfer competing in a not-WPGA open and then tearing off a Mission Impossible-style face mask to reveal that she's series protagonist Eve (last name on rotation). Eve is an underground golfer who the professional player hired to preserve her public image following an injury. While this opening succeeds in immediately grabbing viewers with any fondness for the ridiculous, it also makes clear how much this show cares about getting the ins and outs of golf right—it doesn't, like, at all.

Golf is a deeply repetitious sport where a serious player will polish a number of swings for different situations to a mirror sheen and then engrave this process into their muscle memory. Professional golfers train to ensure that their feet placement, weight distribution, posture, grip, backswing, and follow-through are exactly what they need to be to hit the exact shot they want from any lie (i.e. the position of the golf ball in relation to the golfer) imaginable. Because the process of swinging a golf club is so heavily tied to a player's physique and preferences, it'd be impossible for someone to lie about their identity and impersonate another golfer.

Anyone whose job involves paying attention to these players would be able to tell from a practice swing that the person in the tee box is not who they claim to be. Now, maybe it's possible that Birdie Wing is doing some kind of commentary here and subtly drawing attention to the long-standing issues of women's sports being underfunded and underreported, implying that there aren't enough people paying attention to catch this fraud or care to address it. However, the anime then goes on to depict women's golf as the cornerstone of every society in its world, so it's more likely that the team behind the show is just uninterested in basing their lesbian golf drama on the realities of the sport.

Or even reality in general, considering the assassinations by rocket launcher, squishy prosthetic arms, and Eve teeing off without wearing a collared shirt! I cannot stress how much basic dress code is drilled into a young person learning golf. As someone who saw half a dozen kids ejected from high school golf practice for wearing jeans instead of khakis, my eye twitched every time Eve took the course while dressed like a valley girl on a summer vacay to Big Bear.

Birdie Wing eschewing the more minute elements of golf for the sake of telling a more approachable and broadly appealing story is forgivable. It's disappointing, though, that the anime doesn't capitalize on the organic tension of the sport. As most of the golf played in BW is a kind of modified match play where the first player to have more strokes on a hole than the other loses the match, the anime misses what makes golf a challenging and rewarding sport.

I'm far from the first person to write this, but golf is a game of mistakes. While a quarterback can finish a game with a perfect passer rating or a center in basketball could make every three-pointer they attempt, there's no such thing as a perfect game of golf. Technically the best possible score in a round of golf is 18, but since it's physically impossible to get a hole-in-one on every hole, golf is instead a balancing act where a player tries to hit a ball as close to the pin as possible while knowing that every inch, foot, and yard they muscle onto a shot comes at the cost of a bit of accuracy.

This turns a round of the more common stroke play, where each shot counts towards a total score and the lower score at the end of a round wins, into an emotional rollercoaster. Here a player's mistake won't cost them a single point or end a match outright, but instead every extra stroke is carried with them for the rest of the match. There is nothing more humbling in all of sports than to be ahead in a golf game, having to tack on a few extra strokes because of a dumb mistake, and then, maybe becuause your opponent saw weakness and played their best hole of the match, you suddenly find yourself down one or more strokes with a finite number of opportunities to catch up.

This is so frustrating because a player knows it's their own fault that they're in this situation, and that they know they can play better than this. Birdie Wing does not care about the emotions or narratives that arise in a golf game. Its focus on the sport often feels like more of a novelty, than an integral part of the story the people behind it want to tell. Thankfully, there are a good number of golf-focused series that are steeped in the hobby!

Tadatoshi Fujimaki's Robot × Laserbeam is about a neurodivergent high school student, Hatohara Robato, who discovers that he has a knack for golf and slowly dedicates his life to the sport. This manga is at its best when it conveys moments like the glee of mastering a new kind of shot or the devastation of suddenly losing because your opponent made an incredible chip in Eagle. All 62 chapters are available digitally on Shonen Jump and, while the layouts are a bit bland and some of the jokes have aged like milk, seeing the reserved protagonist shout in victory after making a clutch shot conveys the highs of golf better than any other piece of media I've seen.

Then there's the more typical shonen sports fare, King Golf by Ken Sasaki. This series follows brash delinquent Sōsuke Yūki as he picks up golf to impress a cute girl and snobbish boy, but falls in love with the game as he trains to master its intricacies over the course of hundreds of chapters. While some of the character designs and motivations are eyebrow-raising, it has a fun 2000s throwback look and walks a reader through everything from basic practice drills to high level minutia. Good luck finding anywhere to read it, though!

In fairness to Birdie Wing, it does successfully hit on truths in the personal and social dimensions of golf. Case in point, Birdie Wing knows exactly how superstitious, anal, and pretentious professional golfers can be. The anime highlights characters painting meaningful symbols—including Pac-Man—onto their golf balls. While this is a fun character detail for much of the anime's cast, it's also a real thing players do! My dad hasn't played a meaningful golf match without using a Titleist Pro V with one of two sets of markings markered on in twenty-one years. I don't think he's physically able to! Anyone who puts enough time, effort, and passion into a game to make it a key part of their identity or job is a weirdo on some level and this show knows that.

Birdie Wing also touches on the kinds of relationships that can form through golf. While most people won't have a rivals-to-lovers relationship with their golf buddies, some passionate feelings can bubble up. This is because, outside of very high-level play, a golfer is competing with or against a very small group of people for hours at a time with little interruption. With how stressful the game can be, people are going to show their true selves to the rest of a foursome. If someone is the kind of person who will cheat to get ahead, they'll do so on the links—even if they aren't simultaneously rocking a snake and a vampire motif. If two people are capable of being friends or more, chances are they'll figure that out over five hours of play and conversation. If a person cares about golf and improving, they're their truest self on a golf course and it's a slow and intimate enough game for other players to really get a sense of who that person is.

If it wasn't apparent in the opening of this piece, hopefully it's clear now that Birdie Wing -Golf Girls' Story- is A LOT. Some of what's going on in this bold, queer hodgepodge relates to golf, but mostly not, and that's okay! While I'm personally disappointed that Birdie Wing doesn't appreciate the sport at the core of its story, it's so joyously itself in every minute of every episode that I don't mind too much. So what if it doesn't nail the good parts of a sport that's largely been co-opted by out-of-touch rich people? Birdie Wing is a wild and refreshing lesbian camp sports anime that is succeeding without having to fall to skeezy fanservice or shameless merchandising efforts, and that's worth celebrating.