Slow play not an easy fix on the PGA Tour.

WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) — In a recent magazine survey of PGA Tour players, 84 percent said they believe slow play is a problem.

That might suggest the 16 percent who don’t are the only ones causing the problem.

And it leads to a broader question: Just how big is the problem?

Bill Haas contemplated this Tuesday at the Wells Fargo Championship, and he didn’t have an answer. Haas is supremely qualified to discuss the subject because if everyone played tournament golf like Haas, no one would be talking about it.

Instead, that’s all anyone does — talk.

“My dad has said it’s been talked about in player meetings since he was a rookie,” Haas said. His father, Jay Haas, was a PGA Tour rookie in 1977. “What are we going to do about it?”

Oddly enough, it took the tour doing something to get everyone talking about it again.

Tour officials assessed a one-shot penalty for slow play last week at the Zurich Classic, the first one at a regular PGA Tour event since 1995. This one was peculiar because it happened at the first team event in 36 years in a format (alternate shot) that had never been used at an official tournament.

Miguel Angel Carballo was given a bad time on the 12th hole at the TPC Louisiana. His partner, Brian Campbell, received a bad time on the 14th hole. Typically, it takes two bad times for a player to receive a penalty shot, but the Rules of Golf defines partners in foursomes as one player.

Once the shock wore off, the dialogue shifted from “it’s about time” to “what took so long?”

All that was missing was a solution.

The problem is with the policy. The reason some of the notoriously slow players on the PGA Tour have escaped penalties for taking too long to play their shots (50 seconds for the first to play, 40 seconds for the others in the group) is because they know the system, and it’s easy to beat.

Players are timed only when they are out of position, either based on the suggested time it should take or if the hole ahead of them is open. Once they are notified the group is “on the clock,” one bad time is a warning, the next one is a penalty.

Here’s what is not in the book — when players are put on the clock, that’s not their first interaction with a rules official. They first are asked to pick up the pace, a courtesy to allow for outside circumstances (such as a lost ball). Secondly, while timing is not an exact science, players are not given a bad time if they go a few seconds over the limit. A bad time generally is a really bad time.

Either way, it’s a bad policy.

“If a slow player gets behind and they’re asked to pick it up, the first question they ask is, ‘Am I on the clock?’ Because if they’re not on the clock, they’re not going to change,” Haas said. “If they are on the clock, they change. I don’t like that. Because then all they do is run down the fairway.”