Whether you agree with the tactics of Rory Sabbatini (and his wife, Amy) in his ongoing crusade over slow play on the PGA Tour, nearly every golfer can empathize with the frustration of playing with or behind tortoise types on the course.
Agonizingly slow play is perhaps the primary reason golfers don’t play more often and why new people aren’t eagerly taking up the game. When you add travel time to and from the course, plus pre-round warm up, the 4½ to 5½ hours of play becomes an all day 6-8 hours away from the family. With today’s hectic schedules, who has that kind of time more than once or twice a month?
I used to play with a regular group at a PGA tournament site on Saturday mornings. There were 4 or 5 foursomes who showed up when the gates opened at 6:30 am, and all our groups finished 18 holes in 2½ to 3 hours. We played “ready golf” before it became vogue, didn’t take 10 minutes to line up a 6-foot putt, and were headed home by mid-morning with most of the day left for other things.
This past week at the Players Championship, 2006 leading money winner Sabbatini’s complaint was being put “on the clock” when his group fell behind the threesome in front of them. The PGA Tour has changed its rules so officials can time the offending individual rather than the group, but this particular official apparently didn’t read the memo. Putting the rapid-fire Sabo on the clock is as ludicrous as it gets.
I was clocked once in a USGA qualifying competition after our twosome had fallen behind because my playing companion chose to go to his car between nines. Would it have been fair to penalize me for taking a few extra seconds on a single randomly timed shot when the other guy was at fault for wasting several extra minutes?
At least the USGA is willing to truly penalize slow players by assessing penalty strokes. The PGA Tour is reluctant to take on its pampered multi-millionaire stars by adding a stroke or two which might cost them a tournament win and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Supposedly they impose behind-the-scenes fines on slow players, but not high enough to cause any pain and squealing.
The Tour ought to time only the offending individuals, assess a one-stroke penalty for the first offense, two strokes for the second offense, four for the third, and so on, cumulatively through the year. If a player misses the cut, they should be fined $10,000 for the first slow-play violation, $20,000 for the second, $40,000 for the third … When the money gets serious enough, maybe the slow players will too.
The offending player paired with Sabbatini Friday was the notoriously fidgety Nick Faldo, whose game no longer deserves to be in competition. In fact, last year during the Ben Crane incident, Faldo – speaking as an ABC-TV commentator – suggested that players paired with Rory should deliberately “slow play” him in an attempt to throw Sabo off his game. That’s gamesmanship of the worst sort, not unlike Seve Ballesteros’ habit of jingling the coins in his pocket while his opponents putted.
Faldo (who, by the way, will be out of a TV job next year since ABC skipped the Tour bidding) tried to deflect the subject away from his agonizing pace with a crass retort. Sabbatini’s wife, Amy, wore a homemade t-shirt on Friday with a message clearly directed at Faldo: “Keep Up.” The over-the-hill Brit crudely suggested the theme had to do with the Sabbatinis’ bedroom intimacy. He owes Rory and Amy an apology.
Deal with the issue, Nick. Deal with the issue, PGA Tour officials. The slow-slow-slow pace we watch on the tube every week sets an atrocious example that millions of amateurs emulate. For the future of the game, pace of play is a far more important topic than whether hot golf balls are making a few tournament courses obsolete.
