By most accounts, one of the best movies of 2025 (and possibly one of the best sports movies of all time) was Josh Safdie’s table-tennis stresser Marty Supreme, but the director’s Uncut Gems star Adam Sandler delivered one of the year’s other most sporting efforts with the long-awaited sequel Happy Gilmore 2. To be expected, Sandler shined as bright as ever, but it was his pro-golfing co-star and on-screen BFF John Daly who stole the show for me.
For all the seemingly countless callbacks to the original film, Daly himself wasn’t one of them, as he did not pop up in the 1995 release. What fans like me definitely didn’t know at the time was that Sandler and Daly were already pals, what with Daly popularizing the grip-it-and-rip-it driving approach. And in speaking with Hard Rock Bet, Daly revealed that he’d hoped to appear in Tamra Davis’ movie, but he was unfortunately nowhere near the production location at the time. As he put it:
