The PGA Tour announced on Monday evening that the Tour’s Policy Board had approved the proposed changes that would see fields cut to a maximum of 144 players, with others reduced to 132 or 120 players depending on daylight hours.
This means The Players Championship, the Tour’s flagship event, will be among those to feature just 120 players in its current March scheduling, as the Tour looks to counteract the recent trend of rounds spilling into the next day.
Tour membership will also be reduced with just the top 100-ranked players keeping their cards at the end of the year – a reduction of 25 from the current format.
But not all the players are on board with the changes, and many feel that the PGA Tour are ignoring the elephant in the room which is that slow play, rather than large field sizes, are the root cause.
Lucas Glover, the 2009 US Open champion and two-time 2023 Tour winner branded the changes as “terrible” and accused the Tour of treating the players like idiots.
“And then hiding behind pace of play, I think challenges our intelligence. They think we’re stupid,” he told Golfweek.
Glover is one of a number of the Tour’s quicker players and as a long-standing PGA Tour member, he’s seen firsthand how the pace of play has gradually become glacial, saying that there were only a handful of slow players 20 years ago but now claims there are 50.
That is the real issue, he believes, and that if the Tour was serious about tackling slow play then they would take active measures to speed players up whereas the measures agreed upon are designed to keep the Tour’s stars from leaving for other tours.
“So don’t cut fields because it’s a pace of play issue. Tell us to play faster, or just say you’re trying to appease six guys and make them happy, so they don’t go somewhere else and play golf,” he said.
Matt Fitzpatrick is another who is counted among the quickest players on tour, and he took to ‘X’ to vent his frustrations.
Replying to a post by Golfweek’s Adam Schupak, to whom Glover spoke, Fitzpatrick suggested that speeding things up is a topic that’s always on the agenda and always ignored.
He’s so right, pathetic that pace of play is spoke about every year and nothing ever gets done 😴 https://t.co/gvFNCQHHwQ
— Matt Fitzpatrick (@MattFitz94) November 19, 2024
These comments come on the back of Charley Hull taking aim at the pace of play on the LPGA Tour, having taken five hours and 38 minutes for her and Nelly Korda to complete their third rounds, finishing in near darkness because of the pace of play in the groups in front and the second round spilling over into Saturday morning.
“I’m quite ruthless, but I said, listen, if you get three bad timings, every time it’s a two-shot penalty,” she said in Florida.
“If you have three of them you lose your tour card instantly. I’m sure that would hurry a lot of people up and they won’t want to lose their tour card.
“That would kill the slow play, but they would never do that.”
But back on the PGA Tour, senior vice president of rules and competition Gary Young, has defended the move and feels that it the size of fields that are most directly responsible for the slow play issue that’s become a blight on the sport at elite levels.
“Absolutely it will,” he said of reduced fields helping to stamp out slow play.
“It’s something that we’ve been saying for years that 156-man fields are too many players.
“It’s basically 78 players in a wave, 13 groups per side and our pace of play is set somewhere around 4 and half hours.
“You do the math and if they play in time par, which is basically 2 hours and 15 minutes, they make the turn and, all of a sudden, the group ahead of them is just walking off the tee because there’s 2 hours and 12 minutes of tee times.
“It becomes a parking lot. There’s nowhere to go.”
Leave a comment