Slow play is an issue golf has wrestled with for decades.
And when it comes to the PGA Tour, the glacial pace of play hurts the viewing experience while altering the integrity of the competition itself.
For ages, the Tour has mostly ignored slow play. It has handed out fines, anonymously, while almost never penalizing players with added strokes during tournaments.
As Collin Morikawa said prior to this week’s Players Championship, that strategy hasn’t worked. “We make so much money and some guys, frankly, couldn’t care less about it.”
But after many, many years of failing to address slow play, the Tour has finally announced tangible measures to get players moving.
Will it work? And how much of an impact will it have even if it does?
A new age for pace of play?
At his annual Players Championship press conference Tuesday, embattled Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan announced some changes to how the Tour will address slow play in the future. (He also said, “We believe there’s ways to integrate parts of LIV Golf into the PGA Tour”—but that is an article for another day).
- The Tour will begin releasing speed-of-play statistics later this year which will publicly show which players are fast and which players are slow based on stroke/time data.
- They will also test rangefinders at the six Tour events between the Masters and PGA Championship to see if that helps.
- There will be a new pace of play policy on the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour Americas including the potential for more stroke penalties. That begins April 14.
How well will each of these strategies work? It’s hard to say without seeing them but we can take a few guesses.
The first is the “public shaming” category. I’ve been lobbying for this for years. The players who are slow know they are slow—and their fellow players know, too—but let’s make sure the fans understand who the worst offenders are. Let’s get some peer pressure (and fan pressure) on these players who disrespect the game by taking way too long to hit.
Conversely, the fast players should be celebrated. Even more so if you are fast and among the best players in the game.
The second category is an enormous “nothing burger” in my eyes. Sure, add rangefinders. But if players and caddies still have yardage books, they are just going to double-check all of their numbers anyway.
I highly doubt rangefinders will speed up play. The only exception is when a player hits a tee shot way offline and can benefit from having a rangefinder to figure out the distance instead of the caddie needing the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the yardage.
If it were up to me, yardage books would go away and we would only have rangefinders for distance measuring. I doubt that will happen.
The final point is, you could argue, by far the most impactful (potentially).
The Tour is (apparently) going to experiment with penalizing slow players on developmental tours. Those findings will then (hypothetically) inform how that policy is enforced on the big Tour.
What I don’t understand is … why doesn’t the Tour just enforce its pace of play policy now?
What information are we gathering from the developmental tours?
It seems like a shot clock is not going to happen for the time being but handing out stroke penalties would still add some urgency to the game.
The Tour should already be “stroking guys” (as Brooks Koepka would say) but just hasn’t had the guts to do so.
I feel like the “testing of developmental tours” is just a way to warm the Tour membership to the concept that they now have to, you know, play within the rules.
But, hey, I will take this if it actually happens. We’ll take anything that pushes these players to move.
What is the potential impact of these changes?
There is some debate about why slow play matters.
Some believe cutting off 10 to 15 minutes from each round won’t make a dramatic difference in the flailing TV product.
“I think the fans need to realize that slow play is not going to fix—like if we pick up 10 minutes of pace of play for this week, the fans won’t realize that at all,” Morikawa said. “Like zero. So that’s not the issue with watching golf.”
I agree and disagree.
I agree the TV product being abysmal is the biggest issue with watching golf. And taking some time off is not going to magically solve that.
However, I think there is more to pace of play than just total time spent watching.
It takes drama away when a guy is standing over a shot for two minutes with no consequences. A part of watching any sport is that the big moment is coming whether the player is ready or not.
That is why I love the idea of a shot clock. But if we can’t do that logistically, actually penalizing guys can provide similar valuable.
I do believe some of these changes can make the Tour more entertaining, especially if it’s done in concert with improving the TV product (Monahan also mentioned limiting commercials as a goal for the Tour moving forward.)
Total time might only go down a few minutes but the worst offenders will be called out—and hopefully penalized.
Even the penalties themselves would be entertaining. Imagine a guy getting hit with a stroke penalty while in contention?
I will believe this when I see it.
I don’t trust the Tour.
And I definitely don’t trust Monahan.
What do you think of these changes? Let me know below in the comments.
KJ
2 months ago
Mandate four-hour rounds. Assess a two-stroke penalty for over four hours. They’re playing threesomes at most and average around 70. We are expected to play in four hours and average 90 while walking. That’s 150 more strokes for an average foursome while finding our own balls and raking our own bunkers, etc. And we’re expected to to do it in four hours and we do! If one guy is slowing down the whole group, settle it in the locker room. Not our problem. Three bad times? Lose your card and back to Korn Ferry. Or find a job you can handle.