PGA Tour pulls head out of bunker and finally tackles slow play

Telegraph

12-03-2025

At last. After years, neigh decades of shameful inaction, the PGA Tour has pledged to follow its own rules and hit the snails where it hurts – on their scorecards.
And not only will penalty shots be issued in the battle against slow play, but the circuit will also break the habit of several generations by naming and shaming the culprits.
The media assembled at Sawgrass on Tuesday to hear if there was any meaningful update on the tour's peace negotiations with the Saudi funders of LIV – there was not – but if that is an interminable process, at least Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, revealed there is some urgency over another hot topic.
Monahan made the long, long overdue revelation during his annual state-of-the-game address here at the Players Championship. Consider that the last golfer to receive a one-stroke penalty for slow play at a regular, individual PGA Tour event was Glen 'All' Day – in 1995 – then you will understand the magnitude of his comments.
'We've committed to addressing the speed of play,' Monahan said, trying to sound Winstonian, instead of woefully out of date.
'To that end, I'm excited to formally announce these recommendations from our player-led speed-of-play working group: We will begin publishing speed-of-play-related statistics later this season. We will also begin testing a new speed-of-play policy on the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour Americas, beginning next month, which will include assessing penalty strokes for slow play.'
Well, about flaming time. Essentially, the feeder leagues will stamp down on the meandering, meticulous miscreants who have forced three-ball rounds towards – and sometimes criminally – over the six-hour mark and two-balls past 4½ hours.
The trials will be launched with a view to bringing the refreshing shift of attitude on to the PGA Tour proper and, crucially, it will be made easier for referees to punish golfers falling foul of the stopwatch.
The PGA Tour's rules allow 50 seconds per shot for the first to play and 40 seconds for the others, but the regulation is broken so many times by so many players that it has become unenforceable. There has been way too much slack for the slugs to slip past the appropriate sanctions.
At the moment it is a four-step process. First a warning, then a timing, then what is known as a 'freebie' if the golfer records another bad time – and then, after all that, a one-stroke penalty.
The new policy takes out the 'freebie'. So it will be warning, timing, one-shot penalty. From there, they will deem to follow the rules of golf and this is when it could become exceptionally spicy. Regulation 5.6a states the second breach is two shots and the third is disqualification.
The rulebook does not actually mention fines as a deterrent, but that has been the PGA Tour's answer for so long. And such are the ludicrous sums now on offer that this approach is more ineffective than ever – as Collin Morikawa noted, a few hours before Monahan took the lectern.
'We just have to start stroking guys and giving guys actual penalties,' the two-time major winner declared. 'What I've learnt is that monetary fines are useless. We make so much money, and some guys frankly could not care less.'
Not only will their scores be affected, but so, too, will their cherished 'brands'. If it is not already, it will soon be starkly apparent who are the procrastinating pros when the PGA Tour acts out the intention to use the data to make public the identities.
'I think they [the names] should be released,' Morikawa said. 'I don't know why you wouldn't want them to be. What is there to hide, right? If you're slow, you know you're slow. I mean, if you don't know, then there's an issue...
'It's only going to make things better because then you're either going to have a target on you, put on a little more pressure and hopefully you pick it up – or you get penalised. It's very simple.'
Monahan now also seems to be of that mindset, although it is hard to tell what he is for and against when he is blurting out his corporate claptrap. Certainly, it would be yet another infamous Monahan about-turn if he has been transformed into a fierce opponent of the death by dawdle brigade.
Just a few years ago, Monahan intimated that the TV executives set their schedules by the pathetic average times and that is why there is no need for professionals to rush.
Fans have been put off in their millions
'We're in the entertainment business,' he said in 2023, presumably without any notion of the irony in that statement. 'We're on TV. Look at the number of times that we're finishing on time, if not early. That's a frustration of mine because we don't want people turning off CBS or NBC before the competition, before 6pm.'
Incredible. So what has convinced him and his board otherwise? Apart from the player directors, who since staging their power-grab at board level at the peak of the LIV civil war now have more of a say, Monahan acknowledged that they have finally listened to the fans, who have been put off in their millions.
The PGA Tour commissioned a survey of 50,000 fans last year and seemed to be genuinely surprised by the audience's negative reaction to being subjected to watching selfish multi-millionaires taking more than two minutes over four-foot putts.
'I think a lot of the feedback from the 'Fan Forward' project has been that they would like to see the game speed up,' Gary Young, the PGA Tour's senior vice-president of rules and competitions, said.
Yes, it is rather like headmasters suddenly realising that their pupils do not like the cane, but that is the stubborn, know-it-all world of golf officialdom for you. Furthermore, in this new quest to overhaul the lamentable pace of play, the circuit will allow the use of rangefinders in the six tournaments between the Masters and the US PGA.
'We're listening to our fans, and we're responding,' Monahan said. 'I think there's a real commitment from players across the board to make certain that we're doing everything that we possibly can to improve. And these steps are just the start.' Only 30 years too late.