So maybe slow play isn’t like the weather.
Yeah, everybody complains about it, but maybe you can actually do something about it.
Edoardo Molinari hopes so.
Bravo to the Italian European Tour pro, who last weekend publicly unveiled his tour’s list of players who have been timed and fined for slow play this season. Someday, we may remember him as the patron saint of Accelerare il Processo (speeding up the process). Yes, that will probably require a miracle, but hooray to Molinari for so provocatively daring to tackle the problem.
This brand of public shaming alone won’t be the remedy – there may never be one – but it’s a promising start to quickening the most unabashed and unapologetic tour tortoises.
That’s the thing. Slowdowns in play will always be with us. Threesomes taking five hours may be the new norm. It’s the nature of lengthened courses and quick, contoured greens, but we don’t have to tolerate tortoises - those players who slow poke with impunity, even when the course is wide open.
Heaven knows complaining alone doesn’t do anything.
Sometimes, it seems like Howard Beale planted the seed that became Twitter four decades ago. He’s the fictitious, unstable TV anchor whose epic rant in the movie “Network” still echoes today:
We know things are bad, worse than bad. They’re crazy . . . I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write your congressman . . . I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Things have got to change, but first you’ve got to get mad!
That’s what Twitter is like sometimes, the unhinged anger of millions who have found a window.
But when the anger’s aimed at slow players, it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
A social media mob took up pitchforks in a public shaming campaign after J.B. Holmes took 4 minutes and 10 seconds to decide to lay up at the 72nd hole of the Farmers Insurance Open last year. Holmes didn’t back down in the aftermath, defending his pace of play.
The complaints of big-name players haven’t inspired change, either.
Adam Scott told PGA Tour brass he would be willing to take a slow-play penalty, to be made an example of, to help send a message that the Tour getting serious about quickening play. The slow-play penalty Tour officials handed out at the Zurich Classic last year was its first in more than 20 years.
“We’ve seen too many years, too much complaining about it,” Scott told Golf Digest earlier this year. “And zero action about it.”
Brooks Koepka called out tortoises and Tour rules staff back in January.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Koepka said. “I just don’t get why you enforce some things and don’t enforce others.”
So Molinari is right in recognizing it’s time for players to take this matter into their own hands, to police slow play themselves.
Hey, this may be Howard Beale crazy, but wouldn’t it be great if a player with a math/science gift took the next step in policing and hijacked Shotlink’s “time par average” and developed an Official World Pace Ranking, to rate the worst players in pace of play. And then tweeted that out every week? This might be the perfect job for Bryson DeChambeau, if he weren’t a tortoise himself.
The frustration is that some of the wisest players on Tour are throwing up their hands in surrender.
“Listen, golf courses are long,” Graeme McDowell said. “Golf courses are hard. We’re playing for a lot of money. It’s a big business. It is what it is.
“There’s just no way to speed the game up, really. You can try these small percentiles, but at the end of the day it’s very hard to get around a 7,600-yard golf course with tucked pins, with a three-ball, in less than 4:45, 5 hours. You can’t do it.”
McDowell, as usual, is probably right about the overall numbers, but this is more about the viewing experience, about the frustration fans feel watching a professional take three minutes to make a two-second swing with his group a hole behind. That’s what this is all about.
“Until sponsors and TV tell the commissioner you guys play too slow and we’re not putting money up, it’s a waste of time talking about, because it’s not going to change,” Scott said.
He’s right, too. The answer may ultimately lie beyond what a player police force can do, but at least Molinari’s willing to lead a revolt that could lead there.