Out of all of the sports that exist in the world, I find nothing more boring to watch than golf. My dad tried to teach me how to play it growing up, but it never connected with me. At least with sports like basketball or football, there’s always something that’s happening, some action that is constantly taking place. Not so with golf, which is mostly watching a person standing around only to hit a ball, then go walk over to it and hit it again. Then when you have to repeat that process 17 more times, it’s a miracle for someone to actively watch a full game of golf. I know there are some people who are obsessed with it, but it just isn’t for me. This is why Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story impresses me so much.
It makes golf exciting for me to watch. The anime premiered last spring, and from the end of the first episode, I was hooked. The story follows an unbeatable amnesiac golfer named Eve who meets another golfer her age named Aoi Amawashi, who is actually able to defeat her at golf, driving Eve to challenge Aoi to a full match, something that Aoi is head over heels for since she’s also head over heels for Eve. But life gets in the way, and the two young ladies need to overcome all of the obstacles standing between them and their dream match.
I think what made me immediately fall in love with Birdie Wing when I first saw it last year was the fact that, like most sports anime, virtually everything is over the top. Characters will blurt out special names for their golf skills and come with their own unique gimmicks. Eve’s gimmick though is to just hit the ball really, really, really hard, and people are in awe of how powerful her swing is. Eventually, the series introduces more outlandish powers for its players, like a woman who can predict the path of her ball or a woman with a cyborg arm that enhances her swings, but there’s nothing more pure and delightful than a golfer whose secret ability is to just hit a ball really damn hard.
But it’s clear early on that Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story is melodramatic beyond comparison and spends its first arc just selling how ridiculous this world is. To do so, we need to talk about the golf mafia. Yes, the golf mafia. In the world of Birdie Wing, it seems that whenever there are mob disputes over business rights or vendettas, these matches are settled in underground golf tournaments because apparently every mafia dispute can only be settled with golf. Except in the few instances where it’s settled with rocket launchers.
Anyway, the various mobs apparently have enough capital to invest in a constantly changing golf course that can simulate the conditions and terrain you may find on an actual golf course, only in a subterranean bunker underground. And in order for Eve to compete once more against Aoi, she needs to escape the iron grip of the mob she works for.
The first full match we see her participate in is against a sexy snake-themed femme fatale named Vipére. Her weird golf superpower is to paralyze people with the smell of her body odor, and she releases said snake funk by unzipping her one-piece outfit virtually all the way down to her naughty bits. What doesn’t help matters is the fact that she’s turned on all of the time because if she is able to beat Eve, then she becomes her sex slave I guess. When I reached that episode, I couldn’t stop myself from giving the show my undivided attention. How could I not? This was an anime about golf that featured a stanky snake woman going up against a golfer that hits balls faster than the average speed of an airplane taking off in an underground, multi-million dollar, mob-funded golf arena.
Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story does an admirable job of just putting it all out there right at the beginning of the show. Those first eight episodes, which almost exclusively deal with the golf mafia, are an absolute delight. Although, I will admit it was a bit of a downer when episode 9 shifted into a school dedicated to golf that Aoi attends and that Eve sneaked into. The show started to feel conventional in a lot of different ways.
The school setting, having an expanded cast of characters that all seemed normal, and the loss of a lot of the show’s straight-faced lunacy was a bit deflating. It was made even more deflating when the show then put Eve and Aoi into a tournament to compete against the best high school female golfers in Japan. Thank God that the show then shifted from stupendously dumb golf showdowns to tons of blatant yuri, or lesbian, connotations.
For the record, I’m not someone who will gravitate to a show because a show may contain yuri imagery. I’d like to think that I’m mature enough to enjoy an anime based on its animation, characters, plot, and technical merits instead of just because it has two girls thirsting for each other. But man oh man, Birdie Wing takes what was originally undertones in the first arc and makes them blatant overtones. While the two ladies haven’t locked lips in the show (yet), it’s frankly a miracle that they haven’t done so already. Aoi outright says that she loves Eve at nearly every opportunity and does whatever she can to try to be with her, while Eve plays the too-cool-for-school bad girl that totally wants to rock Aoi’s socks but is waiting for just the right moment. Plus, now the show can focus on Eve’s god-like abilities at golf and go into her backstory!
And they are god-like abilities. One of the true joys of this current arc of Birdie Wing is just watching Eve pull out new golf abilities left and right that make no sense whatsoever but are completely awesome. What’s that? Eve needs to make this next shot to win the game, but she’s too far away to putt the ball in the hole? Well, no worries! She just needs to imagine her golf club as a sniper rifle, aim for the flag on top of the pole above the hole, then hit the flag with her ball with just enough strength to stop the ball and make it fall effortlessly into the hole below!
No matter how ridiculous the show becomes though, something about it always just seems to click with me. Yes, it’s stupid, but it respects its audience and knows when to give its characters dramatic moments that, for the most part, work. There’s also something to admire about the show taking this sport that’s usually associated with rich, white-collar socialites and making it dirty. I won’t say that the series dumbs down golf, but it makes it more approachable, much in the same ways that Happy Gilmore worked in the ‘90s.
It was a shame then when the first season ended in June and I had to wait an entire year for the next season. The first season ended without any resolution to any of the plot threads and didn’t even bother with a cliffhanger. It was just an ending, and we were expected to wait for a continuation.
But when the second season premiered only a few weeks ago, hearing the opening lines of the theme song, complete with butchered English that makes “Venus Line” sound like “Penis Life,” I was in heaven again. It was like I had never left and the melodrama was exactly as glorious as I remembered it being and even bordering on becoming a soap opera. There are now secret diseases! Surprise revelations about Eve’s past! More random golf superpowers! It was everything I could have wanted out of a return for one of the best shows of 2022.
I implore you — if you’re someone who doesn’t really like sports or thinks that all sports anime are the same, give Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story a shot. It does the impossible and makes golf not only entertaining but into must-see television. I’ve never wrapped my head around why people get so worked up about sports, but if people see each season of football like I see a new season of Birdie Wing, then I finally get it. I don’t think that I’ll ever play a game of golf for the rest of my life (except for mini golf, which I dominate at), but I can live vicariously through Eve and her rainbow-powered golf abilities as she takes on more impossible and outlandish enemies on her path to playing against her rival / soulmate Aoi. What more can a guy ask for?
