‘GOLF DOESN’T NEED REINVENTING TO TACKLE SLOW PLAY’
Slow play. It can be a bit of a mystery to the new golfer. In fairness, when your entire brain is focused on getting the ball into the air, there’s not much room to be worrying about how quickly you’re doing it. But the deeper you go into a golfing life, the more it will rear its ugly head. Club message boards, committee meetings, Whatsapp groups, it’s probably the most discussed topic in club golf.
While we spend time working on our tee box tea-pots and firing balls a little too close to the group in front as they faff around seemingly unaware that anyone else in the world exists, it seems that we spend very little time actually doing anything practical to solve the problem.
Perhaps this is what inspired European Tour chief Keith Pelley to brainstorm some ideas about how to address slow play. Whether it’s banning practice swings, limiting players to two-and-a-halfhour two balls or promoting Golfsixes, all of these novelty solutions share one problem: they make no real difference to slow play in golf’s most sacred format: the 18hole fourball. Each of his initiatives mean you have to set aside little chunks of the day for people who want to whizz round, because it’s no good having a two ball playing six holes with no practice swings and the pin in if they end up butting up against a fourball playing at a perfectly reasonable pace.
Personally, if you want to whizz round in the open air for an hour on your lunch break, I don’t think a golf course is the place to do it. It’s not designed for that. If there is a market for it then surely six-hole courses are the perfect solution. A few have popped up and would be ideal for inner-city areas where there is a short supply of space and a vast supply of lunch breaks.
There are few worse feelings on a golf course than being rushed when you’re not doing anything wrong and it’s important to make a crucial distinction for newer golfers (and some more experienced ones!). Being bad at golf is not the same as slow play. And this is proved by the fact some of the greatest players on the planet are amongst the slowest. As long as we bemoan the hacker and celebrate the ponderous pro, the problem will remain.
If we want club golfers to play faster then Tour players can’t keep getting away with slow play. Regardless of the tournament’s gravitas or the amount of money on the line, our idols have to set the standard of reasonable pace just as they do in every other area of the game. If it takes a professional two ball, with their skill (and caddies) more than five hours to complete 72 shots, then the bad habits will continue to filter down. Why are the tours happy for perfectly innocent, respectful and speedy players to have their games affected but not willing to impact the games of those who push the rules? If the tours crack down and start making examples of the big-name snails then the rest of us will follow suit.
And none of these tiny fines that are pocket change to the superstars – punish them by adding shots to their score and you also punish them financially. Win-win.
Have you ever tried taking three minutes over a putt? I have no idea what I’d actually do with the time. Maybe catch up with my correspondence? Clean my clubs a couple of times? Copy my scorecard out in my best calligraphy?
Golf doesn’t need reinventing to tackle slow play because the solutions are already written down in the rules. We either don’t know them or don’t enforce them – and neither state is acceptable.
This is why we need to start teaching people not just how to swing a club, but how to play golf. So much that is vital to being a good golfer cannot be taught on the range, and unless you have a particularly clued-up mentor who introduces you to golf, there are essential parts of the game, such as course management, rules and etiquette, that you could easily spend a lifetime not employing. Not because you’re lazy or inconsiderate but because no one ever taught you.
Etiquette shouldn’t be a set of old-fashioned principles designed to make people feel unwelcome at a golf club, but rather a code that allows everyone to enjoy their game, whether it’s you, your playing partners or the group teeing off three hours behind you. Like unrepaired pitch-marks and footprints in bunkers, slow play is inconsiderate – the cardinal sin of golf. Like a friend who’s always late, it’s behaviour that says ‘your time is worth less than my effort’.