Golf’s newest radio star? Rock legend Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper will join Rocco Mediate on a new SiriusXM show called "Rolling The Rock."
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Welcome back to another extended edition of the Hot Mic Newsletter, GOLF’s weekly send covering all things golf media from me, James Colgan. This week, we’re discussing SiriusXM’s newest golf voice, rock legend Alice Cooper. As always, if you’d like to be the first to receive exclusive insights like these directly from me, click the link here to subscribe to our free newsletter send.
Alice Cooper starts a story he’s told a thousand times. It’s the tale of how the Godfather of Shock Rock fell in love with golf.
“All of my other addictions were killing me,” he says dryly. “I come from the 27 club. All those guys were my buddies — Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, all those guys. They all died at 27. So 41 years ago” — the year Cooper, now 76, turned 35 — “I decided to get sober.”
Cooper, whose real name is Vincent Furnier, cleaned up his act and went on a yearlong sabbatical from music. He stopped recording new work and touring, and settled in back home in Arizona for a year of quietude — a literal “School’s Out.” He’d been a baseball player as a kid, and a particularly good contact hitter. With its stationary ball and stationary targets, golf felt like a good hobby to try. He picked up a club and tried playing. Within a few minutes, he was hooked.
“The thing is, if you have an addictive personality — and I still do — you never lose your addiction,” he says. “You just get addicted to new things.”
Cooper played 36 holes a day for the rest of the year, employing the tutelage of two different PGA professionals — one during his morning rounds, the other for the evenings — to hammer in the finer points of the swing. He’d never played golf when his sabbatical started; by the end of the year, he was a nine-handicap.
Today, the story of the rocker-turned-looper has another turn. Starting at 6 p.m. ET on July 2, Alice Cooper will be SiriusXM’s newest golf voice, co-hosting the new show “Rolling The Rock” alongside friend and longtime pro Rocco Mediate. As Cooper prepared to launch the new show, which will air monthly on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio, he caught up with the Hot Mic before a tour date in Barcelona to discuss all things golf and rock.
THE BIG MOVE
Even with a schedule that still includes Tour dates all over the world, Cooper says he plays golf six times per week, including a nine-hole loop in Barcelona on the morning of our chat. He says consistency is the only way to ensure you’re regularly scoring in the 70s, as he still does. But it also helps when you’ve received his level of training.
“I met [company founder] Ely Callaway at a party,” Cooper said. “He put me on staff and the first 10 commercials we shot were alongside Johnny Miller and David Leadbetter. It was about an hour of work and about nine hours of sitting around on a golf range. Johnny took me under his wing and really reshaped my swing.”
“I’m not a long-drive guy,” he said. “But I hit 245 straight down the middle every time, and that’s thanks to Johnny Miller.“
TOUR GUIDE
A lifetime on the road has its perks if you’re a golf tourist, as Cooper is. He travels with his clubs everywhere, and his career has brought him, well, everywhere over the last few decades. The coolest of those destinations as a golfer?
“Wow. Well, we did play some odd places. We played in Moscow. Oh, and who knew? There were classic, classic golf courses in Moscow,” he said with a laugh. “Wow. I mean, we were there during the Cold War, and apparently nobody was supposed to be playing golf because everybody was communist. And there were some really good golf courses in Moscow that nobody ever talked about.”
ROCCO!
Cooper and Mediate met for the first time when the latter invited the former to be his partner at the annual Pebble Beach Pro-Am. They played together for several years, Cooper says, and developed a quick friendship over their shared love of music.
“I meet very few professional sports guys that are not frustrated rock musicians,” Cooper said with the laugh. “They click together very well, you know, the concentration of knowing how to do a song and the concentration of knowing how to make a par. If you’ve been around like me for 60 years in rock and roll, I can talk about any era of music that he wants to talk about.”
“We sat down to record the first episode, they turned the microphone on and we just talked for an hour and 45 minutes,” he said. “I was telling rock-and-roll stories, he was telling golf stories — then suddenly he’s telling rock stories and I’m telling golf stories. It was really, truly great.”
A VILLAIN IS BORN
As we talk, I feel compelled to remind the rocker that his on-stage persona seems at odds with golf as a gentleman’s game. He laughs.
“When I play the character Alice Cooper on stage, that character is a total villain, right? He hates golf. Alice Cooper, the character hates golf. If you were to put golf clubs on his stage, he would think that they were weapons,” he said. “So, you know, so when I play golf in the morning, and I’m just me, just dad, granddad, you know, I never think about Alice Cooper when I’m on the course. The first thing on my mind is golf.”
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