It’s time gents, please
ANYONE who suffered the pain of watching Patrick Cantlay during the final round of the Memorial tournament will welcome an interesting experiment in Austria this week.
The tortuous tortoise that is Cantlay was the chief culprit in the last group posting a time of five hours and 40 minutes for 18 holes but frankly Kyle Stanley and Bryson DeChambeau, who won the thing in a play-off in case you nodded off, were not much slicker. It was pace of play right up there with the World Chess Championship.
The Memorial being a tournament on the PGA Tour, nothing will happen as a result, but on this side of the Atlantic an innovation is occurring at the Diamond Country Club near Vienna aimed at speeding up the game.
The Shot Clock Masters is the first pro tournament at which every shot by every player will be timed and, if necessary, penalised for dawdling.
The European Tour have tested the water for the past two seasons with a shot clock on one hole at the GolfSixes at St Albans but the concept is being rolled out to 72 holes in Austria.
The idea is to cut the time of a round by 45 minutes, reducing three-man groups to four hours and two-balls to three hours 15 minutes.
All very worthy. Of more vindictive interest to the viewer will be who is caught, docked a shot and given a red card on the leaderboard for taking too long. When American Paul Peterson had his collar felt at last year’s GolfSixes it became the main talking point of the event.
Perhaps with this in mind some of the more deliberate players on tour – Paul Dunne and Adrian Otaegui for instance – are giving Austria a wide berth. So is Matt Wallace, who played for England in the GolfSixes this year.
“I’ve bottled it. I’m not going to play,” said Wallace. “It’s an interesting one but I don’t think they will get many big players going there because they just don’t want to be ridiculed. People will get done and then called out on television and social media which is huge nowadays.”
A total prize fund of just £880,000 has not helped in attracting the top players, nor the event’s proximity to next week’s US Open, but the rankand-file need to earn a living and there will be several among them nervously watching the clock. Simon Khan, for one, might want to press the accelerator.
Wallace believes there is another way to improve the viewing experience – namely by filling in the gaps between shots in a more illuminating way.
“I guess golf is going down the route of pick a number, pick a club and step up to it but what they should do more of is get players miked up talking about the shot,” he said.
“In the NBA you hear what the coach is saying during a time-out and no one really cares about the break in play.
“Actually hearing it from the player and caddie’s viewpoint rather than the commentator, what they are going through, would be good for the viewer. I think the timing issue would go out of the window then. They aren’t going to be thinking: ‘Oh, this is taking 55 seconds’.”
It is a good suggestion but the boil of slow-mo golf needs lancing as well. The curse of elaborate pre-shot routines seemingly choreographed by Akram Khan or Arlene Phillips and simple lack of self-awareness in being ready to hit when playing partners have done so has slowed professional golf to a crawl.
The backlash is coming with the R&A’s Ready Golf directive at their amateur championships and initiatives such as Austria.
For the highest-ranked player in the field, world No73 Bernd Wiesberger, the hijack of his national championship for the experiment is a win-win.
“There will be much more attention from the international sports media during the tournament and the new Shot Clock format is an ideal way to focus on the issue of pace of play,” he said.
“The game of golf should definitely be faster and this is a step in the right direction.”.