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, a weekly GOLF post covering all things golf from me, James Colgan. This week, we’re talking about SiriusXM’s new golf voice, rock legend Alice Cooper. As always, if you’d like to be the first to receive exclusive information like this directly from me, click the link here to sign up for our free newsletter.
Alice Cooper begins a story he has told a thousand times. It is a legend that the Godfather of Shock Rock fell in love with golf.
“All my other addictions were there to kill me,” he said dryly. “I’m from the 27 club. All those guys were my friends – Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, all those guys. They all died at the age of 27. So 41 years ago” – the year Cooper, now 76, turned 35 – “I decided not to get sober.”
Cooper, whose real name is Vincent Furnier, cleaned up his act and went on a year-long hiatus from music. He stopped recording new work and touring, and settled at home in Arizona for a year of silence – literally “Out of School.” He was a baseball player when he was young, and he was a great communicator. With its stationary ball and stationary targets, golf sounded like a great hobby to try. He picked up the club and tried to play. After a few minutes he got stuck.
“The thing is, if you have an addictive personality – and I still do – you never will get lost your addiction,” he said. “You just get addicted to new things.”
Cooper played 36 holes a day throughout the year, using the coaching of two different PGA pros — one during his morning rounds, the other in the evening — to hammer out the best swing scores. He had never played golf when his sabbatical began; by the end of the year, he had nine handicaps.
Today, the story of the rocker-turned-looper has another chance. Beginning at 6 pm ET on July 2, Alice Cooper will be SiriusXM’s newest golf voice, co-hosting the new show “Rolling The Rock” with friend and longtime pro Rocco Mediate. As Cooper prepares to launch a new show, which will air monthly on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio, he Hot Mic before the day of the visit to Barcelona to discuss all things golf and rock.
A GREAT TRAVEL
Even with a schedule that still includes travel dates around the world, Cooper says he plays golf six times per week, including a nine-hole loop in Barcelona on the morning of our interview. He says consistency is the only way to ensure he hits the 70s regularly, as he still does. But it also helps if you get his level of training.
“I met [company founder] Ely Callaway at the party,” Cooper said. “He put me to work and the first ten commercials we shot were with Johnny Miller and David Leadbetter. It was about an hour of work and about nine hours of sitting on the golf course. Johnny took me under his wing and reshaped my swing.”
“I’m not a long-distance traveler,” he said. “But I hit 245 straight up the middle every time, and that’s thanks to Johnny Miller.”
TRAVEL GUIDE
Life on the road has its perks if you’re a golf vacationer, as Cooper is. He takes his clubs everywhere, and his career has taken him, well, everywhere over the past few decades. The coolest of those places as a golfer?
“Wow. Well, we played some weird places. We played in Moscow. Oh, and who knew? There were old 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 play golf because everybody was a Communist. And there were really good golf courses in Moscow that no one ever talked about.”
ROCCO!
Cooper and Media first met when the latter invited the former to be his partner at the annual Pebble Beach Pro-Am. They played together for several years, Cooper said, and developed a fast friendship over their shared love of music.
“I meet very few sports guys who are frustrated rockers,” Cooper says with a laugh. “They click together really well, you know, the focus of knowing how to do a song and the focus of knowing how to do a phase. If you’ve been in rock and roll for 60 years, I can talk about any period of music that he wants to talk about.”
“We sat down and recorded the first episode, they turned on the microphone and we just talked for an hour and 45 minutes,” he said. “I was telling rock-and-roll stories, he was telling golf stories — and all of a sudden he was telling rock stories and I was telling golf stories. It was really good, it was really good.”
SORROW IS BORN
As we speak, I feel compelled to remind the rocker that his stage persona seems to contradict golf as a gentleman’s sport. He laughs.
“When I play the character Alice Cooper on stage, that character is a complete villain, right? He hates golf. Alice Cooper, the actor hates golf. “If you put golf clubs on his stage, he would think they were weapons,” he said. “So, you know, so when I’m playing golf in the morning, and it’s just me, my dad, my grandfather, you know, I’m not thinking about Alice Cooper when I’m at the club. The first thing on my mind is golf.”
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