Golf tweeter extraordinaire Norm Macdonald went on a wonderful Twitter journey Wednesday night during which he revealed that Saturday Night Live alum Bill Murray’s obsession with golf nearly derailed the “Jaws Theme Song” highlight of SNL40.
Bill Murray’s love of golf nearly derailed his SNL40 highlight
Norm Macdonald held Twitter hostage Wednesday night with an inside look at the week leading up to SNL40 and worries that Bill Murray might not make it for the show because he was playing at Pebble Beach.
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Macdonald, an SNL cast member from 1993 to 1998, held the Twitter world in thrall for some two hours with a stream-of-consciousness recreation of the “quite a week” that was leading up to the SNL 40th anniversary blowout.
While the major thrust of Macdonald’s insights involved behind-the-scenes negotiations that eventually failed to get Eddie Murphy to play Bill Cosby in the “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketch, Murray’s annual appearance at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am was a primary cause for concern. Murray, an avid golfer, was attending to his annual duties as the unofficial host of the PGA Tour’s stop on the Monterey Peninsula whose finale was Sunday, just hours before the curtain would rise on Manhattan’s Studio 8H.
Murray reprising his old SNL role as Nick Ocean was critical to the show, Macdonald acknowledged and, indeed, was the best part of a raucous but uneven SNL40 evening.
Downey had remembered a thing Bill Murray used to do around the office, the theme from Jaws, and thought that would be perfect.
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015 @dustinesmith Bill Murray singing Jaws was IT, man. My old running buddy, Jim Downey, said Bill used to do it around the office.
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 18, 2015 The issue was whether Murray could go bicoastal in time for the live event.
But there was a problem. Bill Murray was in Carmel for the Pro-Am, which he had won a couple of years back with DA Points.
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015 With Bill Murray, golf always comes first.
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015 And so it was Saturday and Bill Murray may not make it and Eddie Murphy may not do Jeopardy and who was in charge of Update?
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015 In the end, the Caddyshack star -- who, after years of of grinding away finally won it with Points in 2011 -- was able to ditch his spikes in time to make it to New York, don his tacky lounge-singer tux, take the stage, and the rest is now part of SNL pop history.
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