Having conquered baseball (Bull Durham, Cobb) and basketball (White Men Can't Jump), director Ron Shelton now turns to golf -- but he's no P.G. Wodehouse. The premise here is as slick as the greens at Augusta: hardscrabble Texas driving-range pro Roy McAvoy (Kevin Costner), unfairly excluded from the lucrative PGA tour by those pampered whitebread country-club Republican types, qualifies for the US Open and demonstrates what a good ol' boy can do, in the process showing up old college pal/chief rival Dave Simms (Don Johnson) and stealing Dave's psychologist girlfriend (a painfully obvious Rene Russo). Despite the presence of numerous actual PGA players and CBS announcers (as actors they all hit straight down the middle, with Craig Stadler and Gary McCord particularly winning), the golf sequences are strictly out of bounds, as is Don Johnson's hypocritical jerk of a villain (on the real tour, where nice guys rule, his peers would dump him in the nearest pot bunker). And though Costner and Russo strike sparks, their self-absorption puts them a drive and a three-wood away from endearing old-time romantics like Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. If Shelton had cast, say, Susan Sarandon for Russo and focused on a sport he knows something about -- baseball, for example -- he'd have had a film worth talking about.