Back in 1915, Alexander H. Revell, a Chicago furniture retailer and keen golfer, compiled a book entitled Pro and Con of Golf.
Through a series of tales and anecdotes, some written by Revell himself, others compiled from various sources, the game is divided into ‘pros’ and ‘cons’, but such was Revell’s devotion as a golfer that the former category outweighs the latter by a considerable margin.
But amidst tales of legendary players, courses, and distinguished golfers from the upper echelons of society, one of the ‘cons’ sticks out like a sore thumb. Revell, it seems, was not a fan of slow play, calling it “a problem of deep importance to the future of this game” and placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of “young American” who felt a seemingly overwhelming need for practice swings, concentration and waiting for inspiration.
Revell told a tale from the French Amateur Championship where a match reportedly lasted three hours and 10 minutes, and it was enough to set tongues wagging almost 5,000 miles away.
“If three hours or more were taken over every game, golf as we have it now would become impossible,” Revell reasoned. “Only one round a day would be practicable, it would be a wearying thing, and the game would not be the same.”
Fast-forward a century and a bit, and only the early-morning dew-sweepers can come close to a three-hour round at regular clubs; as for elite amateur and professional competition, three-hours is barely enough to cover nine holes.
Nobody is expecting a return to sub-three-hour rounds, but particularly in the busy and fast-paced modern world, speeding up play across the board is essential. And there’s an element of monkey see, monkey do, so when we see the top pros taking godless amounts of time over each and every shot, it filters down.
It’s hard to enforce pace of play regulations at your local club, especially when members or visitors are paying good money for the privilege of playing, but they should be enforced at Tour level and enforced rigorously. And the frequency of non-weather affected PGA Tour 36-hole cuts not being finalised until Saturday morning should spell this out for the brass, but rather than doing something properly proactive, instead they’ve proposed to reduce field sizes and to actually reduce the fines issued to those in breach of slow play policy.
Given that a PGA Tour slow play two-stroke penalty and Haley’s Comet come around with seemingly similar frequency, that’s no big issue, but they are also proposing a change to the way that players are timed and it could even slow play down even further if the “Excessive Average Stroke Time” policy is approved.
This would see players whose average time per shot is 12 seconds or greater than that of the field average time hit with a €5,000 fine for their third transgression, and a $10,000 fine for each subsequent transgression. And since the Tour average is already tortoise speed, being 12 seconds slower is adding at least 14 minutes for a round of 70 strokes or more.
At present, if you’re in a group that gets put on the clock on 10 occasions, you get a $50,000 fine, and it’s $5,000 for each subsequent occasion. It’s not fair on the players who get grouped with the slowest and find themselves on the clock through no fault of their own, but the sums aren’t insignificant and the peer pressure probably prompts the snails into playing a little faster than they otherwise would.
But what if this encourages the average time to go up? What if the slower players discover that they’re still only seven or eight seconds a shot slower than average? What if it’s even less than that? Maybe they slow down even further, maybe the game as a whole gets slower, maybe rounds start breaking through the six-hour barrier.
Say what you like about LIV, but they’ve handed out more stroke penalties for slow play this year alone than the PGA Tour has in 20 years.
Something has to be done, but this is not it.
In 100 years’ time – if golf is still an actual outdoor activity and not confined to simulators – players might be looking back on Alexander H. Revell’s horror at three-hour rounds and dreaming of a day when it only took twice that long.
God forbid….
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