No end in sight to the curse of slow play in golf

There is a famous scene in the goofy golf movie Caddyshack where Ted Knight’s character, Judge Elihu Smails, is about to play his tee shot on the first hole at the exclusive Bushwood Country Club.

The snooty judge waggles his club nine or ten times above the ball, lowering it carefully, like a freight container at the docks, before bringing it to rest behind the ball. Then everything stops, as if man and ball are in a trance.

Standing behind the tee, impatiently waiting to play, is Rodney Dangerfield’s character, Al Czervik, a loud, nouveau riche, real estate agent, with designs on joining this prestigious establishment.

After watching about 20 seconds of this insufferable pre-shot cockamamie Czervik cracks and fires decorum to one side.

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“Let’s go,” he shouts at the judge, “while we’re still young!”

Ten years ago, when the USGA tried to address the epidemic of slow play among the 25 million club golfers in America, they named their campaign after that line from Caddyshack. With his zinger Czervik let out a cry for every club golfer that has fumed in traffic on the golf course, swallowing their screams.

It is one of the eternal hazards of the game: a playing partner that cooks every shot like a Sunday roast, slowly basting the beef before sticking it back in the oven.

When you put your name down to play with a stranger, this is the risk you take. Lurking on the time sheet are people whose dearly beloved spouses wouldn’t dream of spending four hours with, not unless both parties were heavily sedated. It is a game of social roulette; will this round of golf take so long that your good mood will be mortally wounded? You know these people.

The week of the Masters is often cited as the time of the year when hibernating club golfers return to the fray. Inspired, maybe.

This year there were four or five pulsing storylines from Augusta, one of which was the pace of play. Without naming him directly, Patrick Cantlay was the subject of a tongue-lashing from Brooks Koepka after the final round, four years after he called out Bryson DeChambeau for the same failing.

Cantlay’s reputation as a slow player was established long before the Masters, and he was nonplussed when faced with questions about it at Hilton Head last week.

He blamed the groups ahead of them at Augusta, and the swirling wind during the final round, and the treacherous greens, and he concluded, with a boiler plate justification, that “every shot matters so much”.

Cantlay featured in one of the marquee groups in Golf Channel’s early coverage on Friday, and as he limbered up to take his tee shot on the first, the two commentators suggested that Cantlay was taking a lot of heat for an endemic problem on tour.

Ten minutes later, when he meditated for 65 seconds on a 7½ foot birdie putt, on a green that bore no relation to the slippery vagaries of Augusta, they were forced to say that Cantlay was “deliberate”.

Data produced by the PGA Tour showed that, unsurprisingly, shots taken around the green take longer and, on average, the slowest 10 per cent of players on tour take 63 seconds to hit a greenside chip and 40 seconds to hit a putt. Cantlay stretches all those numbers.

He is not alone. What is also true is that the identity of the headline culprits keeps changing. Over the years it has been JB Holmes and Kevin Na and Sergo Garcia and Keegan Bradley and Jordan Spieth and once upon a time it was Jack Nicklaus and Nick Faldo, and on the Champions Tour it is still Bernhard Langer.

How long has this been going on? Golf Digest excavated a quote about slow play from the British Amateur champion of 1896.

Forty years ago, at the Kemper Open on the PGA Tour, the pace of play was so funereal in the final round that when the cameras focused on a duck with a brood of chicks, the exhausted CBS announcer said that the chicks had only been eggs when that day’s play had started.

On it went. At the 2018 Farmers Insurance Open, when Holmes needed an eagle to force a play-off, he deliberated for an excruciating four minutes and 10 seconds over his second shot on the final hole.

When Holmes won the Genesis Open the following season, his group took five hours and 29 seconds to complete their final round. Holmes, and Langer, have never been penalised.

Applying the rules has always been the issue. A group can only be put on the clock if they lose ground to the group in front, but if every group is playing at 4½ hour pace, or five-hour pace, nobody gets out of position.

Nicklaus recalled once that at the height of his career the final two-ball at The Open used to conduct their business in three hours. The deterioration in the pace of play has happened incrementally, but also by silent consensus.

For golf, a game that is struggling to attract young players and young audiences, it is an existential problem. In the modern world, where patience is under relentless assault, golf is asking everybody to wait longer and show more patience. Is this golf’s genius plan for future proofing?

It is ten years since anybody was penalised for slow play at The Masters. A 14-year-old Chinese amateur called Guan Tianlang and one of his playing partners, Matteo Manassero, were docked a shot in the second round in 2013. Their three-ball with Ben Crenshaw took 5½ hours to complete, the same as the unpenalised JB Holmes at the Genesis Open six years later.

It was the first time that anybody had been penalised for slow play at a PGA Tour event since 1995. There is simply no stomach to confront the top players on this issue.

What does it all mean for you? Extensive research carried out by Arccos Golf two years ago, and reported in Golf Monthly, showed that slow play has a negative impact on the scores of club golfers.

Rounds that take over 4½ hours are liable to cost you a shot and a half, compared to a round that’s an hour shorter. For high handicap golfers, the impact is nearly two shots. You know how hard it is to get a shot back.

So, forget about The Masters. Take your inspiration from Al Czervik. Walk on. While we’re still young.