There’s a scene in “Stick,” Apple TV ’s new entry in the Feel-Good-But-Also-Broken-Dad genre, when Owen Wilson’s character — washed-up pro Pryce “Stick” Cahill — tells a teenage golf phenom that this maddening sport, “if you let it,” will “unlock the mysteries of the universe.”

It’s a ridiculous line. Earnest to the point of parody. It would collapse under its own cliché if not for Wilson’s gift for charm-through-pain — the nasal, meandering delivery that suggests a man who once tried to find meaning in things like transcendental meditation and Colorado weed, only to get burned by both. Wilson can sell cosmic nonsense with a shrug and make you believe he might believe it himself. The line floats there, hazy and semi-profound, long enough for us to understand that “Stick” isn’t really about golf. It’s about lost men and father wounds and improbable redemption. Golf just happens to be the instrument. Or maybe the incense.

Which, come to think of it, makes “Stick” oddly well-timed. We may be in the midst of a mini-golf boom, at least culturally. Scottie Scheffler is dominating like prime Tiger with half the fanfare. Rory McIlroy is once again carrying the emotional weight of the sport on his shoulders, somewhere between a statesman and a tortured poet. And the bookshelves are filling up again: Tom Coyne’s “A Course Called America,” Paul McGinley’s “Leadership in Golf,” and Geoff Shackelford’s latest takedown of golf’s governing chaos have all found audiences. There’s a hunger for stories that take the game seriously — even if they don’t treat it like scripture.

And that’s fine. Or at least familiar. Like most attempts to dramatize this infuriating, subtle, internal game, “Stick” uses golf as metaphor. And like most, it mostly whiffs when it tries to show us what the game actually is.

I’m a golfer, which makes me a poor choice to write about any show that’s about golf. (Though we all know “Stick” is not just about golf.) I notice too much. I’m not very deep into the series; we haven’t seen Stick Cahill swing a club with purpose yet (and if showrunner/creator Jason Keller is smart, we never will). Do you care that his flicky putting stroke looks like a nervous 12-handicap trying to save double from the fringe? Probably not. But I do. I can’t help it.

So when a show purports to be set in the golf universe — even metaphorically — I can’t unsee the details. The clubs, the posture, the tempo, the way someone lines up a 5-footer. It all matters. Or it should, if we’re pretending this........

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