The end of slow play, really?

The end of slow play, really?
The end of slow play, really?
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Proposed changes adopted Monday by the PGA Tour are supposed to speed up the pace of play. But for certain players like Lucas Glover and Charley Hull, there are more effective solutions to this scourge.

By reducing the number of participants and removing Monday qualifiers, tournaments on PGA Tour should become less prone to delays. Additionally, new timing policies and tougher penalties for slow players should encourage better time management by golfers. On paper anyway.

On the ground, not everyone agrees. Lucas Glover was the first to react by describing these proposed changes as “terrible”. The former US Open winner is one of the fastest players on the tour and he has seen with his own eyes the pace of play gradually deteriorate. He says there were only a handful of slow players 20 years ago, but now there are 50.

Charley Hull's radical solution

Pour Lucas Gloverthe solution would be to find a better rule relating to the pace of play, or to better apply the existing one. “If I'm in a slow group and an official comes to me and says, 'You're late, this isn't a warning, you're on the clock and if you have a bad time it's a penalty stroke,' guess who will run towards his ball? This is what we have to do,” he added.

Also considered one of the fastest players on the circuit, Matt Fitzpatrick expressed his frustrations on Twitter: Responding to a post from the author of the article weekhe suggested that speeding things up is a topic that is always on the agenda and always ignored.

The English are intractable on the subject, since these comments follow criticism from Charley Hull with regard to the pace of play on the LPGA Tour. “I'm pretty ruthless but I said, look, if you get penalized three times for overtime, each time it's a two-stroke penalty. If you have three, you instantly lose your circuit map. I'm sure that would speed up a lot of people and they wouldn't want to lose their card,” she declared after Nelly Korda and herself took five hours and 38 minutes to complete their third round of l'ANNIKA Pelicanin the dark due to the pace of the previous groups and the fact that the second round had extended into Saturday morning. “It would end the slow game, but they never will”…

“Slow players simply need to be punished”commented Nelly Korda, who even if she said she found her colleague's proposal funny, considers that the slow game is a big problem. “We need more people on the field to monitor the pace of play.” What if we started with that?

Photo © Richard Heathcote/R&A/R&A via Getty Images

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