How Hunter S. Thompson and Bill Murray invented the chaotic game of Shotgun Golf

Hunter S. Thompson spent his life trying to turn American sports and politics into one long, unruly story, so it was almost inevitable that he would eventually invent a game as unhinged as his prose. Shotgun Golf, the hybrid of driving range and live ammunition he dreamed up with Bill Murray, was less a sport than a punchline with buckshot. Yet the way it came together, from a late‑night phone call to a carefully described rulebook, says a lot about both men and the strange creative space they shared.

I want to trace how Thompson and Murray took a throwaway gag and built it into what Thompson proudly called the first truly violent leisure sport, complete with roles, scoring and a vision of millions of fans. The story runs from Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo to the pages of his final published work, and it shows how a single joke can become a lasting piece of cultural folklore when the right two minds start playing with it.

The ominous summer at Owl Farm

The origin of Shotgun Golf is rooted in a very specific place and mood. Hunter S. Thompson wrote that the game was born in what he called the ominous summer of 2004 AD at his home, Owl Farm, in Woody Creek, Colo, a setting that already felt like a private republic of chaos. In his telling, the first game was played right there on the property, with the mountains as backdrop and the usual mix of friends, firearms and dark humor that defined his life in rural Colorado. That sense of isolation and menace, the idea that something apocalyptic and funny could happen at any moment, shaped the way he framed the new sport at Owl Farm.

Other accounts echo that basic setup, repeating that Shotgun Golf was invented at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo and that the first game was played on that property rather than at a formal course. One description quotes the same line about the ominous summer of 2004 AD and stresses that the game was conceived as a backyard experiment, not a commercial product, with Thompson treating his land as a laboratory for this new pastime. That version, which also locates the birth of the game at Owl Farm, underlines how closely the sport is tied to Colorado’s landscape and to Thompson’s sense that he was living at the edge of America.

Hunter S. Thompson’s last big idea

By the time he started talking publicly about Shotgun Golf, Hunter S. Thompson was near the end of his life and career, and he treated the game as a kind of final, gleefully absurd brainstorm. One retrospective on his work notes that his last story, titled around Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray, opened with Thompson writing that the death of professional hockey in America was a nasty omen for people who love violent sports, a line that sets up his argument that something new had to fill that void. From there he pivots into describing his invented sport, presenting it as both satire and solution, and using the phrase Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray as the banner for this closing chapter of his writing life in America.

Writers looking back on that piece emphasize that Thompson and Murray had known each other since the 1970s and that the Shotgun Golf story was a deliberate way of looping their shared history into his final published work. One account points out that Thompson and Murray knew one another in that decade, that Murray portrayed Thompson in the film Where The Buffalo Roam, and that Neil Young supplied music for that movie, details that underline how long their creative paths had been crossing. The same piece notes that Thompson’s decision to center his last story on Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray was not random, but a way of honoring a friendship that had been, in the writer’s words, better than good, a judgment anchored in the long arc of Thompson and Murray.

A friendship built on impersonation and mischief

The relationship between Thompson and Bill Murray was strange even by Hollywood standards, and that chemistry is crucial to understanding how a sport as deranged as Shotgun Golf could emerge. Murray first stepped into Thompson’s skin when he portrayed him in the film Where The Buffalo Roam, a performance that required him to study the writer’s voice, mannerisms and appetite for trouble. One retrospective notes that Thompson and Murray knew each other back in the 1970s, that Murray played Thompson in Where The Buffalo Roam and that Neil Young supplied the soundtrack, a combination that turned their connection into a small cult of its own around Murray.

Later accounts describe their friendship as slightly strange, highly hilarious and endlessly creative, a pairing that thrived on pranks and shared obsessions. One piece on their collaboration says Thompson’s friendship with Bill Murray was exactly as you would imagine, and that it eventually produced a sport that blended pigeon shooting and traditional golf, a neat shorthand for the mix of violence and country club ritual that defined Shotgun Golf. That same description of Thompson and Bill Murray as endlessly creative helps explain why a 3 a.m. phone call about a ridiculous new game did not feel out of character for either of them.

The 3 a.m. phone call that lit the fuse

The most vivid account of Shotgun Golf’s birth begins with a phone ringing in the middle of the night. In Thompson’s own version of events, preserved in a transcript of their conversation, the call opens with BILL saying Hello and HST replying Hi, Bill, it is Hunter, before asking Are you ready for a powerful idea. That exchange, captured in a dialogue where BILL and HST trade lines and Murray chuckles at the pitch, shows Thompson treating the game as a revelation he simply had to share with his friend in the small hours, a moment preserved in the BILL transcript.

Other retellings back up the basic outline of that scene. One account says Thompson rang Murray at 3 a.m. to discuss a curious matter, namely a new game called Shotgun Golf, and that this late‑night call fit perfectly with Thompson’s habit of keeping odd hours. Another version quotes Murray directly, with Bill saying Yeah, it is absolutely true, explaining that Thompson called him at some wacky hour, that he was awake of course, and that there was something about the idea that was compelling enough to be included in Thompson’s later column. Those details, preserved in Murray’s own words about Bill, confirm that the game began as a phone pitch that both men took seriously enough to keep developing.

How Shotgun Golf actually works

For all its absurdity, Shotgun Golf was not just a throwaway gag, it came with a surprisingly detailed structure. Thompson described the game as involving at least three people, a golfer, a shooter and a field judge, with the golfer driving balls downrange and the shooter trying to blast them out of the air with a shotgun before they landed. One version of the rules explains that Shotgun Golf was invented in the ominous summer of 2004 AD at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo and that the first game was played with this basic setup, the golfer swinging and the shooter timing his shot to make the golfer’s effort fail miserably, a dynamic laid out in the original description of Shotgun Golf.

Later summaries of the game repeat those core elements and add a bit more structure. One account says that Shotgun Golf was invented at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo and that the first game was played with a golfer, a shooter and a field judge, who would decide whether the ball had been destroyed in flight or allowed to land. Another explanation notes that the game proceeds in rounds, with the shooter trying to hit as many balls as possible before the group moves on to round 2, a detail that appears in a description of how players move on to the next stage of round 2. A separate write‑up of the same rules again stresses that Shotgun Golf was invented at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo and repeats the three‑person structure, reinforcing that this was not just a metaphor but a playable, if dangerous, set of instructions for Shotgun Golf.

“I’m working on a profoundly goofy story here”

Thompson himself framed Shotgun Golf as both a joke and a serious creative project. In one account of his conversation with Murray, he is quoted as saying HST: I am working on a profoundly goofy story here. It is wonderful. I have invented a new sport. It is called Shotgun Golf. We will replace the words Driving Range, a line that captures both his pride in the idea and his awareness of its ridiculousness. That quote, preserved in a later retelling of the call, shows him pitching the game as a way to rewrite the language of golf, literally swapping out the words Driving Range for his own invention of HST.

That same retelling also emphasizes the texture of their friendship, noting that Thompson’s bond with Bill Murray was slightly strange, highly hilarious and endlessly creative, and that Shotgun Golf emerged from that shared appetite for mischief. The description says their friendship eventually produced a sport that blended pigeon shooting and traditional golf, a combination that makes sense only if you accept that both men enjoyed pushing respectable pastimes into absurd territory. In that light, Thompson’s claim that he was working on a profoundly goofy story reads less like self‑deprecation and more like a mission statement for the way he and Thompson’s friendship approached culture.

Colorado and the “first truly violent leisure sport”

Later coverage of Shotgun Golf has leaned heavily on Thompson’s own grandiose description of the game. One piece on his life in Colorado calls it the First Truly Violent Leisure Sport and stresses that it was created in Colorado, tying the sport’s identity to the state’s mix of outdoor recreation and gun culture. That same account describes Hunter S. Thompson as one of the most legendary and zany journalists of his era and notes that he retreated to Colorado to invent a new sport, presenting Shotgun Golf as the logical endpoint of his time in Colorado.

Thompson himself used similar language in his original column, predicting that Shotgun Golf would soon take America by storm and calling it the first truly violent leisure sport. In that same passage he wrote that millions would crave the chance to play or watch, imagining a mass audience for a game that combined the calm of a driving range with the spectacle of live ammunition. Those claims appear in his description of Shotgun Golf as a sport that would transform America and attract Millions of fans, a vision that later writers have echoed when they describe the game as the First Truly Violent Leisure Sport that Was Created in Colorado.

Thompson, Murray and the final months

The timing of Shotgun Golf’s invention adds a layer of poignancy to the story. One account notes that, however wild the idea sounded, a few months before passing away Thompson decided to call his friend and one‑time collaborator Bill Murray, whom he trusted to understand the joke and help shape it. That same description says Thompson wanted to talk through a new sport that involved blasting golf balls into smithereens with a shotgun, a detail that underlines how much he was still thinking about games, violence and spectacle even near the end of his life, as described in the account that begins However and focuses on However.