When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
Watching the tepid pace of play during round 1 of The Players, I wondered if rangefinders would help. After all they were billed as a savior of the game a few years ago but have not made it to regulation PGA Tour play (they can be used in practice rounds).
Then I read Paul Kenyon's story on the Rhode Island Golf Association allowing them for use in competition. Their executive director, Bob Ward, about nailed the crux of the problem:
"I didn’t keep track, but I would estimate that at least 50 percent of the field (178 players) either had the devices or asked about them,’’ Ward said. ``I feel the only thing that will change is that the pace of play will speed up a little. I’m still not sure how much because I believe that most time is lost on the greens. It is putting that slows the pace of play. But if this helps with the pace of play, then it’s good.’’
Has anyone heard of any studies or stories documenting actual improvements in pace of play thanks to distance measuring devices?
Cameron Morfit conducts an entertaining Q&A with Steve Flesch, covering all sorts of good stuff.
Let's talk Tour policy. You've slammed course setups. What's your beef?
It's the same every week. Having every par-3 at 230 yards is boring, as is having the rough at five inches. The greens don't always have to be 12 on the Stimpmeter. They water the fairways and around the greens, forcing you to hit a high spinny shot in. We've gotten away from the fact that golf can be played more than one way.
But that's exactly how Tiger and Phil and most of the top players like to hit the ball. Maybe the rest of you guys should learn to live with it.
But let's not set up every course so it's like a major. The public wants to see us make birdies, so let's set up the courses so we can display our skills and show everybody how good we are.
Seems the boys really are in love with the Memorial these days.
Jack Nicklaus upset the pros when he toughened Muirfield Village for The Memorial and furrowed the bunkers. Who's going to call up Jack and say, "Enough!"?
It's hard. Jack should have his input, but is it really in the best interest to play the course like that? That was eight-inch rough that obviously hadn't been topped off the day before the tournament, as Jack indicated in the papers.
Are you calling Jack Nicklaus a liar?
No, I'm not, but it was eight inches on Monday and it wasn't touched the whole week. Whether it's the tournament director or whatever, don't tell us it's four-and-a-half-inch rough. I can put my foot in it and see it's over my shoes. It's the same at Arnold's event. That rye-grass rough is sticky and it's five inches long. Muirfield is one of my favorite courses, but from the first time I played it in '98 to 2008, it's gotten harder, not better. The greens are 14 on the Stimpmeter and they're not big; do you need ruts in the bunkers, too?
This may be the first time someone dared to note the issue for Phil Mickelson and his joint instructors Butch Harmon and Dave Pelz.
Your fellow lefty Mickelson had a quiet 2008. What's wrong with him?
Phil Mickelson is fantastic. I have learned so much from watching him play. He knows I respect his game, and I don't want to say anything that would upset him, but right now I think he's got two different kinds of coaches. I worked with Butch Harmon for five years, and his way of thinking about the game is a lot different than how Dave Pelz is. Dave's very analytical, very scientific, and everybody respects that. Phil is trying to find a balance between two methods that seem to pull him in different directions.
And of course, slow play...
What else is on the PAC's radar?
Pace of play. There are a dozen guys out here who are habitually slow. It's not that our fine structure isn't strong enough — it's that our officials should be more assertive. We all know who's slow and who's not, and while half of the slow guys say they want to get faster, the other half say, "I don't care if I'm slow or not." Well you know what? You've got 144 guys out there that week and most of them feel you're disrespecting them by taking that attitude. You have 40 seconds to hit the shot, and if you can't do it, you're not playing out here.
Is this why weekend golfers seem to think a glacial pace is okay?
My 10-year-old Griffin now plumb-bobs. I go, "Dude, what are you doing?" He goes, "I don't know, I see you guys doing it on TV." That's exactly why it's wrong for us to be playing that slowly.
The March issue of Golf Digest features an anonymous PGA Tour player survey and includes some pretty fun questions. My two favs:
WHO'S THE SLOWEST PLAYER ON TOUR?
Ben Crane: 43%
J.B. Holmes: 32%
Glen Day: 11%
OTHERS RECEIVING VOTES: Michael Allen, Jason Allred, Tiger Woods, "any Swede"
What is it about the Swedes, anyway?
NAME ONE GOLF ANNOUNCER YOU COULD LIVE WITHOUT
Kelly Tilghman: 30%
Nick Faldo: 17%
Peter Kostis: 13%
Johnny Miller: 9%
OTHERS RECEIVING VOTES: Curt Byrum, Bobby Clampett, Brian Hammons, John Hawkins, Renton Laidlaw, Dave Marr III, Gary McCord, Mark Rolfing
Congrats Peter!
Alistair Tait gets us in the mood to not watch the Dunhill Cup, once a great event.
The Pro-Am format of the Alfred Dunhill is something that has never actually caught the imagination of Scottish golf fans. While the PGA Tour’s AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am is well supported, Scottish golf fans haven’t exactly welcomed the St. Andrews equivalent with open arms.
I put it down to three reasons. The first is painfully obvious. Play is conducted at a funereal pace. Six-hour rounds are the norm. Play at St. Andrews is usually slow given that everyone who plays there wants to experience every last second on the Old Course. However, pace of play in the Alfred Dunhill would make snails seem quick.
Then there is the time of year. October is hardly balmy weather in Scotland, so the chance to actually recognize a celebrity let alone watch one is almost impossible. Movie actress Ines Sastre was in the field the year I covered the tournament. As far as ogling went, it wasn’t easy to appreciate her full beauty when she was wrapped in waterproofs and a bobble hat.
Besides, many of the celebrities fall into the B-list category anyway.
However, the bottom line is that Scottish golf fans have no interest in watching celebrities, A-list or otherwise, hack their way around the sacred turf of St. Andrews. The year I went I counted just 29 people in the grandstand behind the Old Course’s 18th green as former soccer great Sir Bobby Charlton played his approach.
The Seattle Times' Sonia Krishnan reports that a 33-year-old man was booked into King County Jail after he struck a fellow golfer on the head with a six-iron. The Auburn Golf Course fight erupted over slow play.
According to police, Compton, his two stepsons and a friend complained to the golf course marshall because the group of golfers ahead of them was playing too slowly, court records show. Shampine was part of that group.Guess that's better than getting hit by a maple bat.
A heated argument then escalated between the two groups of men, and Shampine's brother and Compton got into a shoving match, according to court documents.
Shampine "snapped" and "charged at Compton to protect his brother," records show. He swung his 6-iron at Compton's head, "striking him hard." Officers noted that the club's shaft was bent, documents show.
The fight ended immediately after Compton fell to the ground, and Shampine was arrested at the scene, said Sgt. Scott Near, spokesman for the Auburn Police Department.
Compton's wife told police her husband had suffered a broken cheekbone, skull fracture and had blood in the brain, according to court documents. His family declined to comment when reached today at Harborview.
Employees of the municipal golf course said they were still reeling from the incident.
"I've been in the golf business 30 years; I've never seen anything like this," said Chris Morris, the course's golf professional. "Occasionally on a hot day you'll get some yelling, but it never leads to violence. This was extremely shocking."
As always I enjoyed the pre-Open Championship insights from SI's anonymous tour pro (thought it would be nice if he'd actually seen Birkdale!), including this on the relationship between PGA Tour course setup and slow play.
No doubt I'm wasting my time talking about slow play. One veteran told me that we had the same discussions 25 years ago. The Tour is trying to identify the slower players and work with them to get faster, but in the end we're probably only talking about picking up 15 minutes a round. Is that a big deal? Probably not.Yes it is!
One thing I like is that the Tour is going to use ShotLink to tell us how long we take for each shot. Certain players who are slow and don't know the average time spent on a particular shot need to be made aware. Our rules officials have finally realized that — duh! — course setup has a lot to do with pace of play. It's not only the players who are slow. When you play a 510-yard par-4 with a semi-island green, you're going to take a while. It seems obvious, but apparently our officials didn't think of it. At some tournaments, like the Memorial, the setups are getting out of control. Guys don't want to play a U.S. Open-style course two weeks before the Open. What Jack Nicklaus had this year at the Memorial was way worse than Torrey Pines. Jack and Arnold Palmer, who's growing serious rough at Bay Hill, may want to have major-championship conditions, but they're in danger of winding up with bad fields. Six-inch rough, furrowed bunkers, greens running at 14 — some guys are going to think twice before coming back.
Good.
Reader Greg noted there was one problem with another the mystery pro's comments.
The Tour thinks that putting San Antonio in Atlanta's spot was a terrific swap because Valero is a great sponsor and that we might have a Texas swing: the Nelson, Colonial and San Antonio in successive weeks. The problem is that LaCantera, the Texas Open venue, is awful. None of the top players would tee it up there in the fall, and they won't play there in May, either. Anytime you can see a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel from a tee box — you can actually hear the people on the rides screaming in the background — that's a red flag. Has any great course ever been built next to an amusement park? Until the new TPC San Antonio is finished [in 2010], I don't see top players remembering the Alamo.
Technically, Pine Valley's next door neighbor is an amusement park too. But we understand his point.
This is what happened to me Friday afternoon at a public course in Western Pennsylvania I won't mention. Was the glacial pace acceptable? Absolutely not. Was it understandable? Of course, because too many players don't understand the first thing about etiquette and pace of play.
But, someone needs to explain to me how a threesome of talented young golfers, none older than 29, can take nearly three hours to play nine holes and five hours to play 18 holes on a perfectly sunny day? And in a tournament staged by an organization whose purpose, among other things, is to enforce the rules?
That, though, is what happened Tuesday in the final round of the West Penn Amateur, the oldest tournament in Western Pennsylvania that was celebrating its 108th year. But, after the final group started at 9:13 a.m. and finished at 2:15 p.m. at the wonderfully restored Bedford Springs Resort, the tournament felt as though it had morphed into year No. 109.
"The officials can only do so much," said Jeff Rivard, executive director of the Western Pennsylvania Golf Association. "The players need to say, hey, we need to pick it up."
Thanks to reader Chris for forcing me to not ignore the R&A press release on their new Padraig Harrington helmed etiquette videos, which include a pace of play segment from Europe's answer to Ben Crane.
In Golf World's U.S. Open preview, Dave Shedloski does a nice job of giving a slow play primer, though it left me wondering one key question that needs to be asked this week at Torrey Pines: why isn't the USGA's pace of play policy in effect here and on the PGA Tour.
A few highlights:
"We have almost a cart mentality to how we approach pace of play," former British Open champion Todd Hamilton says. "We're not ready to play when it's our turn. And then we go through our whole routine, and we just waste a lot of time, and who knows how that affects your playing partners or other guys behind you. The length of time we're taking … it's like we're using cart-path only rules."And, regarding the USGA pace of play policy model:
The merits of that concept are being realized at the junior golf level (see page 61), and Davis says it has helped to have a rules official walk with each group during competition to try to keep the group in position and avert a problem before it develops, a practice the USGA started in the 2006 Open. "We're telling our officials not to wait. If they think their group might be getting out of position, then they should say something," Davis says. "Because of that we've put fewer groups on the clock and we think the pace as been much, much better."Wow.
But it is still slower. A sampling of records kept by Jeff Hall, the USGA's managing director of rules and competitions, shows that the fastest threesomes in the 1998 U.S. Open took 4:24 to play Olympic Club, and in 2002 at Bethpage State Park, the quickest were buzzing along at 4:46. Last year at Oakmont CC, the best any group could manage was 5:04.
Given the difficulty of a U.S. Open layout, Davis thinks 4:45 is not an unreasonable time for three long-hitting, skilled golfers to complete 18 holes. In fact, the recommended allotted time for the opening two rounds this year is 4:40. For twosomes on the weekend, it's 4:03.
Compare that to just 10 years ago at Olympic Club, when the USGA's allotted time for the final two rounds was 3:36—27 minutes fewer.
Alistair Tait isn't too wild about the Curtis Cup pace.
Put Carol Semple Thompson in charge of golf. The game would get a lot quicker if she was chief executive of the royal & ancient game.
The U.S. Curtis Cup captain was as fed up with the turgid pace of play for the afternoon four-balls as most in the crowd of 5,800.
The last match on the course, the contest that pitted Alison Walshe and Stacy Lewis against Liz Bennett and Florentyna Parker, took five hours and 22 minutes to complete.
By the time the match got to the 18th, the only one of the three four-ball contests to go the distance, most of the crowd had gone home. Semple Thompson might have high-tailed it out of the Auld Grey Toon too if not for her responsibilities as U.S. captain.
“I thought the pace of play was horrible,” Thompson said.
Beth Ann Baldry reports on the U.S. taking the lead in the matches, as does John Huggan, who has issues with the pacing and manners displayed.
One other noticeable feature of the first two days – quite apart from the disgracefully slow pace of play – has been an apparent inability to count, with players on both sides equally culpable. On day one, the Scottish duo of Watson and Michelle Thomson lay five to six feet from the cup on the Road Hole. Their opponents, Stacy Lewis and Alison Walshe, were four feet away after three shots. Clearly, a concession was the obvious course of action for the young Scots. Not a bit of it. Only after Watson had missed did they belatedly abandon a cause the equivalent of that faced by the Light Brigade.
A similar thing happened yesterday at the 9th hole. After three-putting from not very far away for a bogey, Watson and Thomson asked Lewis to putt from three feet when the Americans had two for the hole. And, just to show that the arithmetically challenged can be found on both sides of the Atlantic, Booth managed to lag her putt stiff from no more than four feet on the 16th green when she and partner Breanne Loucks had two to win their foursomes match against Kimberly Kim and Jennie Lee.
John Hopkins reports on the slow play epidemic, and though he says the final pairing at The Players took only 4:15 (according to some readers it was 4:40), he offers this:
The answer lies partly in easing the set-up of some courses but more in harsh penalties for slow players. The LPGA Tour in the US recently introduced a policy of penalizing players who took more than 30 seconds a stroke and, furthermore, penalized Angela Park when she was only one stroke out of the lead. Compare this with the PGA Tour's policies under which a player has not bee fined for 15 years.
Tim Finchem, Commissioner of the PGA Tour in the US, said in an interview with The Times last week: "I have told the players we are going to make them play faster. I think we owe it the sport, to the players who play at this level and to the fans that we are doing everything we can to analyse and take steps on this issue."
Well, it's something. This isn't so hot:
Last Monday the World Golf Foundation, a body incorporating the United States Golf association and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, the professional tours from around the world as well as Ladies Professional Golf Association (in the US), met in Jacksonville. I understand that slow play was on the agenda but nothing substantive was discussed even though slow play was an item on the agenda.Thankfully, there is great news. According to Doug Ferguson, the big execs in golf are working on the real priorities at the expense of their carbon footprints. What for? To grow the game with 72-holes of stroke play once every four years.
PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem headed for London this week, stopping along the way to pick up USGA executive director David Fay and LPGA commissioner Carolyn Bivens.
They were to join R&A chief executive Peter Dawson and European Tour chief George O’Grady at a meeting with the International Olympic Committee, the first step toward bringing golf back to the Olympics.
It was not a formal meeting, but no less important to show the IOC a unified front in golf’s desire to be part of the games.
“This will be a protracted process,” Fay said. “But this is an important first step.”
Vital. Just vital.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
