There are two topics of conversation I know will come up within minutes of settling down for a drink after a round of golf at my club. The first is what’s happening with the PGA Tour and LIV Golf and when will it be resolved? Answers: don’t know and don’t know.
The second is slow play. Just the other day, a member was clutching a glass of whisky when he threw his head back in exasperation and uttered a roar of disapproval. He, a lifelong golfer who once had a low single-figure handicap, said: “I can’t watch golf on television any more. Too slow.”
Some men and women professional golfers are taking too long to play a round of golf and this trend has spread to top-class amateurs and rank-and-file amateurs, golfers like you and me. We who play for pleasure are taking too long, too. When I started playing golf years ago, two and a half hours was the norm for singles. Now three and a half hours is considered by some to be lightning quick, four and a half hours not abnormal.
How has this tardiness crept in? Golfers wanting to play more difficult and longer courses, lengthier walks from greens to tees, the growth of the game are all contributing factors. But mainly it is because one idiosyncratic practice after another has seeped down from the professionals.
The AimPoint putting method has not helped. Nor has the reading of putts from both ends, from side to side and sometimes from a few inches off the ground.
A few weeks ago I watched two men aim darts at a target significantly smaller than a golf hole 7 feet and 9 inches away from where they were standing. With hundreds of thousands of pounds at stake, these men threw three darts in less than 10 seconds. It made me think: why do golfers sometimes take six times as long over a putt of the same length?
Consultations with caddies or a partner can take an age. Preshot routines are often too elaborate and too long. Must you lick your forefinger and hold it up to detect the wind direction and strength? For years players have used course maps to help them calculate the line and distance from tees to fairways to greens. Now they use charts to putt on greens as well.
Slow play has become as much a pest from top to bottom of the modern game as thatch or dollar spot or fusarium on putting surfaces. It blights all golf but particularly the men’s and women’s professional game in the US because that is where the best men and women play and where the most competitive events are held and televised around the world.
“It’s ridiculous and I feel sorry for the fans at how slow it is out there.”
Charley HulL
Now though, it seems we are at a tipping point. Some things of significance are being done about slow play. The PGA Tour currently has an initiative involving 50,000 fans discussing subjects such as broadcast enhancement, whether or not to allow distance-measuring devices, slow play, using ShotLink to name the fastest and slowest players on the tour.
Did Dottie Pepper start it? All credit to her if she did. Last month the respected golf commentator and former LPGA player spoke out about the funereal pace of players in the last round of the Farmers Insurance Open. She called for the players to be respectful of the fans, broadcasts and their fellow competitors and suggested the PGA Tour and some of its players were showing a lack of respect to the game.
The pros are calling attention to themselves. Think of the outburst by Charley Hull, a British professional on the LPGA Tour, at the LPGA’s penultimate event last season. She and Nelly Korda took five hours and 38 minutes to complete their third round. “It’s ridiculous and I feel sorry for the fans at how slow it is out there,” Hull said.
Think of Justin Thomas’ recent appeal to his colleagues urging them to give “more access and insight” to PGA Tour TV broadcasts and Charley Hoffman’s open letter last week to his fellow pros. “We’ve taken a lot of heat over the last few weeks about slow play,” Hoffman wrote. “And, yeah, it’s an issue – for our fans, for us as players – cutting down the field sizes will help but only a few minutes a day. As players we still need to make a concerted effort to speed up.”
These are not the best of all times in men’s professional golf. While the amateur game is thriving – research from the R&A shows a growth of 3.1 million in on-course golfers from 2022 to 2023 – the professional game is not. A civil game is currently sundered by an uncivil war between the PGA Tour and its associated organisations and LIV Golf.
A result is that Bryson DeChambeau, the reigning US Open champion and perhaps the world’s second or third best-known golfer, does not play regularly on the PGA Tour. Nor does Jon Rahm, the 2021 US Open and 2023 Masters champion who is the best Spanish golfer since Seve Ballesteros and the heartbeat of Europe’s Ryder Cup team. TGL, Tiger Woods’ and Rory McIlroy’s golf simulator league, was launched last month, hoping to attract new viewers to its two-hour team matches.
All this swirling activity has caused the PGA Tour to realise it has to regain popularity. And not before time. For years the PGA Tour turned a blind eye to slow play. “It’s not a problem for us,” officials said.
And indeed it might not have been. Spectators rushed to tournaments, TV ratings soared, boosted by the arrival of Woods, and manufacturers profited from creating the equipment the professionals used and then selling it to golf fans.
But if slow play wasn’t one of the problems for the professional game then, it is now. Average TV audiences for golf on CBS and NBC in 2024 were said to be 15 percent down from 2023. The world’s best-known golfer, the one who moves the needle the most, is 49, balding and hardly plays these days. That’s Tiger Woods, by the way. Remember him? His world ranking at the start of last week was 1,181.
A man called Rick Shiels, a former teaching professional from Bolton in Lancashire, England, is considered the world’s most watched YouTube golfer with three million subscribers and one billion views on his channel where he posts videos of playing with Bryson DeChambeau. Danny Maude and Grant Horvat are two other YouTube successes, each with followings in the millions. “Those guys are killing it,” McIlroy said recently. “They found a niche and it’s really cool and it serves a purpose for a lot of people. I think there’s space for all of this, but I can see where the consumer might get a little fatigued.”
Falling interest in professional golf matters because pro golfers set an example that amateur golfers follow. Amateurs buy the clubs, clothes and equipment the pros use, bringing revenue to the pros and the manufacturers. If fewer amateurs are paying attention to pro golf, so this source of money will shrink.
Golf is beginning to realise what other sports have known about and reacted to already. Baseball, America’s game, uses a pitch clock. In tennis the time allowed for serves is rationed now. The time allowed for conversions after a try in rugby union has been reduced from 90 seconds to 60 in the current Six Nations Championship. The 36-hole playoff for the U.S. Open so loved by the USGA for so many years went to 18 holes and at Pinehurst last year would have been reduced to a two-hole aggregate format followed, if necessary, by sudden death.
Golf began centuries before these other sports, but they have overtaken our old game in understanding that they had to change to satisfy the demands of the spectators in a fast-moving world. It is time golf did so. Stop dilly-dallying. Slow play has been a blight on the game for far too long.
E-MAIL JOHN
Top: Charley Hull finds time for a cigarette while waiting on the ninth tee during the U.S. Women's Open.
SARAH STIER, GETTY IMAGES