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There’s no wrong reason to appreciate the work of Carl Weathers, the actor and former pro football player who passed away on Feb. 1, 2024, at the age of 76.
Through a handful of choice roles, Weathers became a permanent mark on the pop culture landscape. He was killed on-screen by both of the greatest existential threats of the action movies from the ‘80s (really big Soviets, the Predator), gave the world one of comedy’s best celebrities-playing-themselves runs on Arrested Development, then brought the whole thing back around with another stint as an iconic action hero in Disney’s The Mandalorian.
But to a generation of giggling manchildren, Weathers will always be the begrudging mentor to one of Adam Sandler’s greatest characters – the man who taught us the importance of tapping it in and of going to your happy place. It was a part that made the world a little better but wreaked havoc on the alignment of Carl Weathers’ spinal column.
Carl Weathers’ Happy Gilmore injury, explained
Director Dennis Dugan and perpetual movie machine Adam Sandler have collaborated on a glut of projects – Just Go With It, Jack & Jill, Grown Ups, Big Daddy – but they never hit the sweet spot in quite the same way after 1996’s Happy Gilmore.
If you’re too young to remember Happy Gilmore, or if you haven’t watched it on account of never having learned how to love great art: It’s the story of an aspiring hockey player who discovers that his ability to smash stuff with a hockey stick translates pretty remarkably into an unbeatable golf drive. Desperate to earn money to save his grandmother’s home, he starts playing golf professionally, with the help of his mentor, Chubbs Peterson.
Chubbs, played by Weathers, is a former pro golfer who sees Happy’s potential. Forced onto the sidelines of the sport that he loves after an encounter with an alligator leaves him down a hand, he is the stoner comedy Obi-Wan that audiences never knew they needed.
Sadly, the story structure dictates that all Obi-Wans must die, and Chubbs meets his end when his well-meaning protege surprises him with the taxidermied head of the gator that took his hand. Chubbs, taken aback, stumbles backward out of a treehouse. It’s an iconic piece of dark comedy that, from the sound of things, changed Weathers’ life forever.
Weathers wasn’t specific about which part of Happy Gilmore he was shooting when he chalked up a permanent, debilitating injury, but it sure sounds like it was Chubbs’ death scene.
He told the story to GQ in 2020. Apparently, on the set of Happy Gilmore, Weathers was filming a backward fall, and the stunt bags that were put in place to catch him were positioned incorrectly. He recalled not saying anything after the first take, despite feeling “the pain and the burning sensation almost immediately,” describing it as a tough guy move – one that he couldn’t keep up after another three takes.
Weathers went on to state that, despite the pain, he didn’t find out that he’d fractured a couple of vertebrae until years later, when the bones had already tried to fuse themselves together, leading to worse complications. “There were three or four years there where I was just in excruciating pain,” he stated, recalling that the surgeons he consulted were hesitant to do anything about the injury for fear of making it worse. Like anyone who’s hurt their back, he had some horror stories. “(…) when you move your arms you’re affecting that. When you move your legs, your toes. When you breathe. Debilitating is a good word,” he said.
“After the fourth year, it started to calm down,” Weathers said of the pain, which he claimed hadn’t been too serious for a couple of years.
On the up side, Weathers didn’t seem to hold any grudges about the injury, even reprising the role of Chubbs a few years later in a heavenly Little Nicky cameo. He even described his time working on Happy Gilmore as “a lark, and one of the most fun times I’ve had making a movie” while talking to Rich Eisen in 2020.
Sadly, on a related note, the public may never know how severe Adam Sandler’s injuries were following his full-on brawl with Bob Barker, or their follow-up blowout at 2021’s Night of Too Many Stars. Talk about stoicism.