Snails like Holmes are condemning game to slow death
Brooks Koepka could hardly claim he had not been warned. JB Holmes, his final-round partner at Royal Portrush, has acquired such notoriety for slow play that at his last tournament win in Los Angeles in February, he spent 80 seconds stalking a single putt, as if conducting a cartographic survey.
On the 12th green, a tortured Koepka glowered at an official, mockingly tapping his wrist in a plea for Holmes to be given the hurry-up. Either his patience had evaporated in the dire weather, or he had simply decided that life was too short.
The crowning absurdity was that Holmes shot 87 on Sunday. Previously, the Kentuckian had sought to justify his glacial pace by arguing that players of his standard were competing for too much money and too many Fedex points to be bothered by such fripperies as the passage of time.
On this occasion, though, he was compiling a round so dreadful that he began the day with only two players ahead of him on the leaderboard and ended it with just three behind. Where most would have been desperate to escape on the next flight out of Belfast, Holmes chose to subject everyone else around him to his torment.
His disregard for how few years we all have left on Earth is extraordinary.
Time and again,
Holmes waited until Koepka had hit before he even deigned to put on his glove. Then began his endless sequence of pre-shot checks – wind strength, likely trajectory, alignment of his stance with Cassiopeia – before he finally felt ready to pull the trigger. There are rocket launches at Cape Canaveral with shorter ignition sequences. It was a ritual as futile as it was selfish, given that most of his shots alongside Koepka ended up in the Portrush gorse.
Holmes insists that he has sped up since his early days on tour: a period, presumably, when his rounds took
so long that they had to be carbon-dated.
His is an implausible claim, given that the average three-ball in his company nudges the six-hour mark. Koepka, at least, was fully aware of the liberties Holmes was taking. “I’m ready to go most of the time,” he said. “That’s what I don’t understand. When it’s your turn to hit, your glove is not on, and then you start thinking about it. That’s where the problem lies. He doesn’t do anything until his turn – that’s the frustrating part. But he’s not the only one who does it out here.”
As ever, a small army of rules officials patrolled Portrush, but nobody thought of imposing any sanction upon Holmes. If ever the PGA Tour does take action against Holmes, the likelihood is that you will never know about it, given its code of omerta on disciplinary issues. As a consequence, it has fallen to disgruntled players to expose the serial transgressors.
Earlier this year, Italy’s Edoardo Molinari, brother of former Open champion Francesco, announced that he had had enough, releasing a confidential list of European Tour players fined for slow play. Spain’s Adrian Otaegui, as well as South Africans Louis Oosthuizen and Erik van Rooyen, were among the worst offenders.
The telling point, however, is that the players were only fined, not handed any stroke penalties. At these rarefied levels of professional golf, fines are so trivial as to be meaningless. Oosthuizen, for example, was found guilty of two rules breaches but docked a derisory £5,400. Come September, he is in line to be challenging for a Fedex Cup first prize of
£12 million. As such, financial penalties have become meaningless as deterrents.
On paper, the protocol for punishing slow play on the PGA Tour is clear. First a player is put on the clock, then he is subject to a series of escalating fines in the event of further “bad times”, eventually culminating, if necessary, in disqualification.
But while the problem is rampant, the option of last resort is never invoked. The tours, quite simply, are too timid, too fearful of embarrassing their members, to act seriously on a matter that is killing the game. Golf ’s struggle to capture a younger audience is rooted, ultimately, in the perception that it takes too much of people’s precious time. The antics of Holmes and his snail-like brethren serve only to accentuate that image.