The suppression of slow golfers is finally here

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal 4 min Read 17 Apr 2025, 07:26 pm ist pace of play has increasingly created tension among the best golfers on the planet. (Illustration: WSJ, iStock) Summary fans have become increasingly frustrated with rounds lasting forever. Organizers act to track down the action – and punish the slices of the sport. Augusta National has long held himself as the US goalkeeper of the spirit of golf. So it reflected hard around the sport over the past week when Fred Ridley, chairman of the club, went out of his way to address one of the sensitive issues that drive a wedge through the game: painfully sluggish rounds of golf. “Playing without improper delay, as the rules and traditions of the game determine, is an essential golf skill at all levels,” Ridley said. “Respecting the time of other people, including the supporters who support the game, is a fundamental courtesy.” Every weekend, hacker knows the pain of incessant golf rounds. If the tea times are cut together at the local muni and the group ahead spends each hole through the bush for faulty tea shots, an entire day can go into smoke. The same phenomenon has also increasingly created tension among the best golfers on the planet – and among fines tired of watching them stand over the ball for what feels like eons. Now the long -awaited oppression is here. This week, the PGA tour starts a test run at second-level Korn Ferry Tour, which makes it very likely for players to receive criminal justice for slow play-equal to the approach that Baseball took when he tried a pitch in the minors before implementing it in the main subjects. The next few events of the PGA tour also enable players to use distance meal devices, known as ranglainers, to help them shave time. And from next year, the PGA tour will shrink its largest fields from 156, which he hopes to reduce logjams and shorten the rounds by about 15 minutes. It’s not just the men’s game either. The LPGA recently set lower thresholds for players to be fined and penalized a stroke for taking too long. The widespread action is not a coincidence. This is the result of the increasing feedback from fans and even some players who are tired of the sport that stop – and organizers eventually do something about it. “The players who may have a slower average stroke tend to be disruptive for the overall flow -and that’s what we’re trying to address,” says Gary Young, the senior vice president of rules and competition of the PGA tour. The pace of the playing issue was one of the most important take -away meals from a recording that the PGA tour has recently done of more than 50,000 people to make its product more fan -friendly. But speeding up the action is not that simple. One complication is that two things that fans would like to see are directly conflicted with each other. They may want golf faster, but the longer courses that also make it more exciting and challenging for modern players who powder the ball also become rounds in a slogan. “Tough conditions make it play more slowly, no matter what,” two -time grand champion Collin Morikawa said recently. The problem for the organizers is that their previous solutions to the punishment of the plodding were largely toothless. As it stands now, players on the PGA tour are sent data every week on their average stroke, and everyone whose time is seven seconds or more above average for a given week gets an offense. It takes ten of those over the course of a season before you earn a fine. Not only do it take months to pick up, but these fines may seem worth it if a single shot can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to prize money. So it’s no wonder players were very happy to play quietly. They stare at their site books, take countless training fluctuations and even step off the ball if they don’t like the wind. It adds everything in the course of a round. Therefore, the organizers are shifting to a revamped model that focuses on the punishment of players in real time, and with something that they have to encourage even more to get the pace: their scores. The PGA tour already has a way of making them disappear, but it has not been enforced in years because it is such a protracted, four-step process. First, a player is warned if he is out of position and over time. Then he is put on a timer by officials. The first time he takes too long, it’s a freebie. Only the next one delivers a penalty. (Excessive time is considered 50 seconds for the first player in a group and 40 seconds for the next players.) With which the PGA tour on the Korn Ferry Tour is experimenting is the release of the freebie to get to the penalty faster. The LPGA has implemented something similar and the idea behind both is to harm a player’s score is the best way to motivate them to reach the pace. “Obviously, our fine system didn’t move the needle,” said LPGA player President Vicki Goetze-Acherman. “Our warnings did not affect people.” The masters made the far too comfortable pace clear last week. Over the first two days, some rounds exceeded 5.5 hours, or almost the length of two NFL matches. In some cases, players only turned off an hour after their rounds on the fourth hole. When the game comes to a standstill, it is common among fans to point fingers. They blame certain golfers that they are apparently playing slowly, while praise like the world no. 5 Ludvig Aberg, who has a reputation for walking to the ball and ripening it immediately. But soon, fans will have more than reputations and anecdotal evidence at their disposal for identifying the worst culprits. One of the following steps of the PGA tour is to release the data on how fast – or slowly – everyone plays. Write to Andrew Beaton at [email protected], catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on live currency. Catch the direct action on IPL 2024 with the full IPL schedule, and their IPL points tab, also know who is currently holding the IPL Purple Cap and IPL Orange Cap. Download Themint News -APP to get daily market updates. More Topics #Sports Mint Specials