Slow Play Turns Bloody At Local Level, In PGA Tour Criticism

Ryan Ballengee Tweeted some final group pace of play times from the early part of the 2012 PGA Tour schedule and I have to say it's rather stunning to only see one group breaking four hours through five events.

But it's not all bad. After watching the recent AJGA event at TPC Sawgrass, Garry Smits was encouraged by the work of the USGA and ASGCA to address a problem the PGA Tour does not believe exists, and

He was also struck by Mike Purkey's Global Golf Post column letting the PGA Tour have it for not doing "a damn thing about slow play."

You go Mike:

The Tour simply has an alarming lack of insides and it starts and ends with Commissioner Tim Finchem. Everyone below him on the food chain, including on-site rules officials each week, are simply doing his bidding. Finchem believes the slow play hue and cry is the figment of an over-active imagination by the media. It's a sometimes effective duck-and-cover move by most CEOs in trouble--blame the media.

Which leads us to Mitch Mitchell's now widely Tweeted story in the Star-Telegram (thanks to reader Sam too) telling the story of Clay Carpenter, who was assaulted with a broken golf club shaft after a slow play fight broke out at Eagle Mountain Lake.

The brawl broke out about 3:30 p.m. Jan. 27 at the Golf Club at the Resort on Eagle Mountain Lake.

A foursome was playing the back nine ahead of a threesome, Grisham said, and the three golfers believed the foursome was playing too slow and wanted to play through.

Carpenter said a course marshal instructed the foursome to allow the smaller group of golfers to play through, and that’s when the "gentleman’s game" turned ugly.

As the golfers were fighting, Carpenter said he was on top of another man when he was stabbed with the golf shaft. Grisham said Carpenter lost a lot of blood and was "very close to death."

Carpenter said the man who stabbed him "was not willing to defuse anything, nor was he willing to accept 'please just let us go on.'"

Carpenter said he believes that the golfer who stabbed him first swung the golf club at his head, but he grabbed it and broke it off at the end.

Ah yes, the Gentleman's Game...