Slow Play

what an unbelievable year, and no joke. I got to sit and watch Nelly Quorda hit golf balls for the last three days and if she's hitting golf balls on the driving range, I'm gonna sit and just I mean, it's like golf porn. I mean, the golf swing's just so good. You know the work she's done with Jamie Mulligan. But I just when you watch Nellie's golf swing, I mean, she is a player that I will stop and watch hit golf balls. It's that good. So she is a

privilege to watch. But it was Charlie Hall that made some comments about slow play, which is a serious issue on every single tour. It's taking you know, over five and a half hours to play golf in a tournament, which is just it's just ridiculous, and slow play is nothing new, right, And the thing is, this is just my opinion, but if the tours wanted to fix this, they could fix it, right, they could fix slow play, but it doesn't seem like they want to fix it.

So it was Charlie Hall that said, what was her quote, She said, I'm pretty ruthless. If you have three bad times in a year, you lose your card. She's like, that would stop, so pay immediately. You know what, She's one hundred percent right now. They're never going to do that. That might be a little bit extreme. The powers that be are never going to do that, but historically what they've done in the past is if you get a certain amount of bad times and you get fined and

stuff like that. Again solely my opinion, but I don't think the finds work. I mean certainly not on the

PGA tour. Those guys make so much money. If you're a big star, and there are some big stars that you know, everybody knows theyre slower The thing about slow play that drives me crazy, and I think drives everybody crazy that's involved, certainly at the professional level, is everybody on tour PGA Tour, Champions Tour, dp World Tour, LPGA Live, everybody that plays on those tours, everybody associated with those tours, everybody involved with those tours knows exactly who the slow

players are. Every player knows who the slow players are. Every caddy knows who the slow players are. Every rules official knows who the slow players are. Every tour commissioner knows who the slow players are. All the media know who they are. Everybody in the game knows who the slow players are. And the players that play fast don't affect the people that play slow because they just keep

playing slow. But slow play dramatically affects fast players. I happen to work for two of the fastest players in the game, Dustin Johnson and Brooks kept goa. They are fast, right, DJ maybe gets a little bit slower on the greens, But you know, the camera guys that you talk to from CBS or NBC or ESPN. If DJ's in the group and he's last to hit, they're kind of standing behind two of the players. They can't get the camera behind DJ fast enough because he's already gonna pull the trigger.

So when fast players are paired with slow players, and everyone knows who the slow players are, right, I mean, there will be players that you get paired with and you'll just go, oh man, we're gonna be on the clock NonStop. And that's the thing, right, So they tie the players. They have a certain amount of time. I think it's around forty seconds to hit your shot. There's some different rules if it's on a par three, if you're third to play, you're out of position, all that,

but generally it's about forty seconds. And I think most of the time they'll give the guys up to a minute. So you've get forty seconds to hit a shot right on a golf course, competitive around the golf So what I'm gonna do right now, okay, is I got my phone. I'm going to start my stopwatch. I am not going to say anything, and I am going to stop when we get to forty seconds. Okay, three, two, one go.

So that was forty seconds. And I did that to prove a point, right, that should have seen like a really long time of just dead air that's forty seconds. That's how much time you've got to hit a golf ball. So if you can't hit a golf ball in forty seconds, my question is, what the hell are you doing? Like,

what is taking so long? And I think one of the things that we're starting to see, and I think one of the reasons why slow play is such an issue is you go watch junior golf, you go watch AJJA golf, you go watch high school golf, you go watch college golf. It's like watching a glad. I mean, they are playing so slow. We have a college tournament at my club, the Floridian every year of the vast Bar Collegiate Invitational. They can't finish, like, they can't finish,

they run out of daylight. I think it took one of the final groups last week on the LPG almost five hours forty seconds. They finished in the dark. Now the quarter had to finish in the dark on Saturday night. You couldn't even see the flag because they're running out

of daylight because they can't finish faster. So everyone knows they've got X amount of time, right, And what happens is the slow players will just do their own thing until the group gets put on the clock, right, and as soon as the rules officials come out and say, okay, you guys are on the clock, the fast players all look at them and say, you know this isn't me, and the rules officials, the tour officials will go, yeah, no,

we know it's not you. But we've got to put the whole group on so they know who's the slow player, they know who's the fast player. So what ends up happening is once you get on the clock, you don't want to get a bad time. The slow players speed up and they start moving really really fast. And then if you're not a slow player and you get out of position and you need to take you know, time to get yardage yourself, I've got no problem if you

need a little extra time. If you're in the rough right, if you're out of position, off the tee, if you're out of position and you now have a shot to where you're not in a fair way, it's tough to get a yardage. It's going to take some creativity. You're going to have to try and you know, think on the fly. I get that that can sometimes take a long time. But if you're standing in the middle of the fairway shouldn't take you two minutes to hit one.

And so what we're starting to see is the players on TV that everybody is watching, right, junior golfers, high school golfers, college golfers. They want to emulate the best players in the world, right, they want to emulate everything about them, their golf swings, their techniques, their routines, all of it. But what's happening is junior golf, the pace of play is just atrocious. Like it's criminal how bad it is. Right, college golf, I mean, it's brutal, how

slow it is. I think the coaches in college golf are basically now de facto caddies. Right, it's an individual sport. They're walking around with their players, they're getting yardage, they're looking at the yardage book. So at the elite Division one college golf, in all the big programs, the coaches are basically caddies. Right, They're getting the yardage, they're talking strategy and stuff like that. But that process is taken forever. The aim pointin from two feet is taken forever. Listen,

I'm not bashion on ame point. Right. I think there's a simple solution to this, right, slow players kind of fall into two categories. There'll be slow players that you know, do a bunch of regrips, that do a bunch of waggles. I mean, we know who those players are, right once they get over the golf ball, it just takes them forever to hit it. We know who those players are.

But what really slowing play is it's like nobody is ready to hit their shut So if you're the first person to hit, you're gonna get your information to go. So if you're the first person to hit and you're in a group of three, that means there's two other players that while you're getting your yardages, while you're getting all of your information, you and your caddy. We're talking about tour golf now, it's like, what are you doing.

You should be getting your yardage, looking at the shot, looking at the wins, so that when the player hits and it's your turn to hit, you would think that you'd just be ready to go. But it's almost like I joke about it all the time, but it's almost like, and this happens a lot in junior golf and in high school golf and in college golf. It's like, when it's your turn, to play. When it's your turn to pot, when it's your turn to hit your t shot, when

it's your turn to hit your iron shot or whatever. Right, it's almost like players turn into figure skaters. You know that scene in the Olympics a figure skater where they announce the figure skater who's next up, and they kind of skate up, and they kind of skate around and they skate into the middle of the rink. They throw their arms up in the air and stuff like that, and then they get into their pose and then they go into their routine. And I watched this, it's like, Okay,

you're second in the group to hit. The player who's hitting first, it's like they're not doing anything. It's like they're not getting the yardage. It's like they're not looking at the wind, they're not looking at the lie. They have no idea what club they hit. So then as soon as that person hit, it's like, Okay, all of a sudden, now I'm on stage and I've got to go through this elaborate routine. You couldn't be doing all that, not distracting the other player and stuff, but you can.

You'd be getting all of your yardages. You could be getting all of your data, gathering information and where the wind is, where the lie is, where the pin is. All of that. You can be doing that why somebody else is hitting. Be ready to go when it's your turn putting, I mean the putting green. How long does it take to putt these days? It just takes forever. And I played golf on Sunday for the first time

in about a year and a half. Right, I played an eighteen hole round of golf, and one of the guys that I was playing with said, man, you play really really fast. And I'm like, I don't really think I play fast. I just kind of get up, look at the shot, and hit it right. I mean I try and not stand over it. I try and not have a lot of thoughts in my head. And I think the longer you stand over a shot right, the

more waggles you take. I just I don't see golfers taking more time, and that being about positive things, I think the longer you stand there, in my experience, what you see is players in their head, they're doubting that their decision, they're not comfortable, they don't know what they're trying to do, and so it just takes them forever to hit it right. And I think if you can

just kind of be ready to go. I mean, we walked to pro am today and you know, Marina Alex Why teach on the Ladies Tour and four amateurs right, and we see this across the board. How long it takes golfers to hit shots, How long it takes them to pull the club, to go through their routine, to go through their practice swings, to figure out where they're trying to It just takes forever. And I just don't

think that is helping golfers score better. I think the longer you're standing there, the more time you take, you're just creating more and more doubt. And I think what players are doing, and when I ask players, this is the response I get. I think a lot of players that are slow are trying to make sure that they don't leave any stone unturned in their preparation to hit

the shot right. They're going to try and take in as much information is possible so that they don't hit a bad shot, so that they don't mess it up. And when I ask players, what are you doing? I mean I will I film routines a lot, especially on the putting Green. I will film players' routines in practice and say, okay, do you realize you just took on a fifteen foot pot. I'll say, okay, let's imagine your first to play, right, You're first to play, and you're

gonna come up and mark it, okay. And what I'll do is I'll film it and time it from the time they mark the ball and they go into their kind of information gathering phase. And you'll sometimes show players you realize you took almost two minutes to hit a fifteen foot pot. And so when they watch it back and you film it, you watch it back and you

look at all the looks. I mean, that's another thing that I talk to players about, and an effort to try and get them to be more decisive, but an effort to try and get them to play faster is I'll film their routine and say, okay, hey, you just took four looks. You just took five practice strokes. What are the looks for? And what are the practice strucks for?

And invariably people can't give you an answer, but when they do give you an answer, they're like, listen, you know, I just want to make sure I go through my process make sure I go through my routine, make sure I go through all of that, and all of that is so that you don't make a bad pot hit a bad shot. But shouldn't the process and the thought process be about, Okay, what am I going to do here to hit a good shot? Right? What do I need to do to focus in here on hitting a really,

really good shot? And I think if you can focus on trying to hit a good shot as opposed to trying to not hit a bad shot, the mindset changes and the way that you are going to go about your shot would be much much faster. So I'm timing players you know in practice now, junior golfers, high school golfers, college golfers, even you know players that are trying to play years ago. I've had them on the pod. He's a friend, Trevor Immlman. When Trevor and I work together

back in the day on the European Tour, Trevor was slow. Listen, Trevor, you know, I got no problem saying Trevor slow. Trevor knows he's slow. Trevor is meticulous, which is another way of saying slow. Right, But Trevor got a bunch of slow play bad times like first year, second year out on European Tour, we were in Sweden. You got another bad time, so he was gonna have to pay a fine. And the fines accumulate, so the more fines you get.

Once you get a certain amount of bad times, you get a fine, and then if you get another bad time in that year, I think the fine doubles trip. But if you continue to get bad times for slow play, the finds escalate. And Trevor was about to get popped for a pretty big number. I mean it was it was five figures, right, And he was a rookie and stuff, and so I actually the old kind of legend on the European Tour, John Paramore, the head rules official, just

one of the coolest people you could ever meet. I mean he was just a prince of a guy, I mean a gentleman. I actually said to John, I said, listen, we've got to try and fix this with Trevor. And so in one of the practice I had John Paramore come out and ride around with us for nine holes and time Trevor. And when Trevor got out of time or went over is a lot of time, he was like, you're out of time, and I think it really kind of helped Trevor see how to maybe streamline his routine.

I think a lot of it is you're trying to get and we're not talking about tour golfers, right. I mean sometimes when you go out on a golf course and you're trying to get around a golf course, drive around a golf course. I do that sometimes just to go out and kind of take a look at the golf course, and you'll get behind a group. I'm not playing, I'm just riding around taking a look at We just redid all our greens at the Floridian, did a couple of redesigns some of the holes. So I did this

the other day. I wanted to go out our sixth law re redesigned it. Wanted to go out and take a look, and went out, drove around. I was pulling up to the sixth hole and there was a group before on the team. These were all like mid handicappers, right, you know, just average recreational, everyday golfers, right, And so I was trying to get around them and I had to wait for them to tee off. Four of them.

The amount of time it took for four people to tee off was a joke, Like it took forever to have four people stand up and make golf swings in hit a golf ball, and I just was blown away at how long it took. And I don't think finds are the answers. I really really don't. There was a player who plays on the PGA Tour and is a human rain delay. It's a glacier. That's how slow he is.

Everybody knows he's slow. Nobody wants to get paired with the He won a tournament, made a poor on the last hole, was on TV, and the last four or five holes the back nine was just a joke. I mean I think there were almost a hole and a half two holes behind. This player made a great up and down on the eighteenth hole to end up winning by one. You wanted how to stop slow play. The rules official walks up and goes, oh, and by the way, you didn't win, We've docked you a stroke penalty. You're

going back to the eighteenth hole. You're now in a playoff because of slow play. That would fix it. Finding somebody fifty grand that's just made three million, four million, two and a half million. It just doesn't work right. It doesn't work. It might work early on, like I said, the story I told about Trevor Immlman for rookies, but the tour players and listen, there are some superstar household names on all of the tours that are slow that

everybody knows slow. And then the other thing I think that would change things is there's been zero transparency from certainly from the PGA to there's a list of players how much they're paying in slow play finds, how many bad times they're getting, but none of that information ever

gets released, right, it's all kept in house. I think if the fans knew how much certain players were getting fined, right, how much they were paying over the course of the year in slow play finds, I think the player's persona might be different right in the public's eyes and the fans' eyes, in the media's eyes, and I think maybe that would somewhat be a catalyst to where you didn't want your

public image. I mean, listen, we all know who the slow players are by the eye test, right by the players in the group that they play with, if you're following that, like, we know who those are. But if there was a master list, and you could look at you know, like every year, like the most penalized team in the NFL. Right, you know who that is, right? You know who the most penalized team in the NFL is.

I think if the tours would list slow play fines, how many bad times where the public could go and take a look at it. I think it would change the way that the slow players played, I really do. I think it would force them to kind of maybe say listen, I don't want to have this image, but I just don't think finds work. And I've talked to a couple of rules officials that have said, listen, we don't want to give a player a stroke penalty that

could affect their livelihood. Right, So you could give someone a slow pay penalty one stroke and they end up missing the cut and then they don't have an opportunity to make money that week. I get that argument, and I unders stand it. I don't agree with it because I think that is just perpetuating the myth. And then when they do find players, when they do give players penalty strokes, it's never a player of any significance, Right,

It's never a superstar that is slow. It's always someone that's at the back of the field, maybe an amateur, maybe a qualifier and stuff, but it's never a superstar that everybody knows is slow, right, that just doesn't happen. So I just I think everybody in the game knows its slow play is a problem. But I just question if the powers that be really want to fix it because every year we talk about it, every year they say they're going to change it. And what it's doing.

It trickles down everything in the professional game, trickles down to the average golfer, from the clothes that they wear, from the mannerisms, from the swings, from the waggles to the shoes to the potter. Right, everybody's trying to and you'll the best players in the world. And one of the really cool things about golf unlike professional football. Yeah, you can go to a football game and wear a jersey, right, and pretend like you're a part of the team, and

that's how you're showing your fandom. But in golf, you can buy all of the equipment that your favorite player plays. You can buy his driver, the same shaft with the same grip. Do that with every club in the bag. You could get the same wedges, you get the same stamps on the wedges, you get the same putter, same grip on the putting right. You can emulate that, and you can buy all that. Like nobody's buying shoulder pads and all the stuff that you would need helmets to

play in the NFL. No one's buying that stuff, right, So everyone is trying to emulate what PJ door player is doing, especially junior golfers, college golfers, high school golfers

and stuff like, they're definitely trying to emulate it. And so a lot of times you watch enough golf on TV and you see how many looks these guys are taken, and how elaborate some of the routines, I mean, some of the routines on the putting greens are I mean, they're just so much going on, so many reads, taking so much time, so many looks, And so that is trickling down to junior golf. That is trickling down to

high school golf. It's trickling down to college golf, and those junior golf, high level junior golf at the AJGA level, high school golf, high level high school golf, college golf, Big Division I college program to joke how slow it is. I mean, the rounds just take forever, So be ready to hit when it's your turn. I understand that there are great rules in golf, and I understand that there's history and tradition and all of that stuff. But as we come to the end of twenty twenty four, can

we just play ready golf? Right? Can we just play ready golf? If you're ready to hit and you're not in the line of sight of your other player, you're not going to affect their shot, and you're ready to go, pull the train and hit it, hit it. You don't need to wait. In tournaments, they have to wait, right. In tournaments, by the rules, they have to wait. But if you're not in a tournament, you're just playing at home, say to your playing partners, hey, guys, any chance we

can play ready golf today? If you're ready to go, peggett, send it, hit it, go right. If you're not gonna get in somebody else's way, right, if you're on the putting green, if someone's got a forty footer and you've knocked it in there fifteen feet and you're not in their line, and you're not gonna be in their through line and they're taking a bunch of time and stuff, and you're ready to go. Say hey, I'm ready to go. Do you mind if I go ahead and putt right?

Play ready golf, be ready to go. When it's your turn, take your practice swings and do all of the drills and the mimics and all that stuff. Do all that stuff while the other guys are hitting, and you can get out of the other player's line of sight right, you can get out of that. I think sometimes people don't want to do that because they're like, I don't

want to mess them up. But you can make your practice swings right so that way as soon as the other player has hit their shot, so you've done it in the middle of the fairway, you're the longest right. You're playing a group of three. By the time the other two people have hit, you should be already walking into it and be ready to go because you've had ample time to get the club, get the yardage, figure out the lie, figure out the wind, figure out where

you're trying to land it. You've got ample time to do that. But on the PGA Tour you've got forty seconds to do that, and so time yourself, go out, put your phone in your pocket, hit the stop watch, put it in your back pocket and say, all right, I'm gonna try and hit the shot in under forty seconds. Put a timer on. We're starting to do that a

lot with our juniors. We're putting them in drills and in situations where there's time constraint to where they can't take a lot of time, so they have to think clear and they have to make better decisions. But I like what Charlie Hall said, love it. It's never gonna happen. Maybe it's a little too much, but it's not getting any better. I actually think it's getting worse. I think slow play is getting worse year on year. It's getting

worse at the competitive level. Without a doubt, at the elite competitive level, slow play is a massive, massive issue. It just is. And I just think that if everybody would be ready to go focus on hitting good shots, do all of your information gathering before your playing partners hit, and then have a specific routine that you stick with, right, I mean, do you need five six practice swings? I mean I watched the guy today on the golf course,

a twenty five handicapper off on a tea box. The guy made six practice swings and then backed off and then got back in and made two more. You're like, dude, what are you doing? And then do you think the shot was good? Rarely do I see a player take an enormous amount of time. We see this at the Elite Tour level because obviously they're the best players in the world world. So some of the slowest players in the game are also some of the best players in

the game. Right when they're slow, they hit good shots. Rarely, if ever, do I see someone take an eternity in their information gathering and then all the waggles and the practice swings. Rarely do I see a player hit a good shot and in my head, I'm like, you could have gotten up there, not made a practice swing, had one waggle, took a look at the target, and hit the exact same shitty golf shot and done it in

under forty seconds, done it under twenty seconds. So next time you go out to play, think about your routine. See if you can maybe scale back your routine and work on on the driving range and say, all right, let me tie myself and see if I can get my routine. You know, all the practice swings, all the drill feels, everything that I need to do to hit the golf ball. Give yourself the tour mark, start it a minute, and then see if you can get it

down to forty seconds. Right, So time yourself. There's timers on everybody's phones. Time it. See if you can hit one. Go through your full routine and under a minute, and then start pairing it down and say, all right, let me see if I can get it to fifty. And then let's see if I can get it to forty.

And I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, you might find that you play better because you're gonna have to think faster, and you're gonna have to think less, and you're gonna have to rely a little bit more on being an athlete and instinct and things like that. But I take my hat off to Charlie for having the guts to put that out there. It's controversial, it's never gonna happen. Maybe it's an overreach, but something needs to be done about slow play and we got to

fix it. So ready golf, be ready when it's your turn, and if you're ready to go, send it. Son of a butcher comes to you almost every week. Rate review, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Can't thank everybody enough for listening. We will be back next week.