Posted on Sun, Jul. 20, 2008
It happened again, just the other day, when I was playing golf on vacation in North Carolina.
For nine holes or more, I zipped around the course with my son, my niece's husband and a young friend, the fastest foursome on wheels. Ready, golf. Find it. Hit it. Go find it again. Heck, at the rate we were playing, we figured we'd be back at the beach cottage in time for dinner - before that ominous cloud in the distance could spoil the fun.
But suddenly, not long into the back nine, the round ground to a halt. We'd caught up to the group that had been well in front of us, four yahoos who seemed to be under the mistaken impression that this was the final round of the U.S. Open.
While we stood on the tee or in the fairway, leaning on our club seething with impatience, they dawdled. This being cart-path golf, they'd walk out to their balls, realize they had the wrong club, then walk back to the cart for another. On the greens, they'd line up every putt from every angle, and plumb-bob as if they knew what they were looking at, oblivious or indifferent to the logjam they were creating behind them.
Where's a ranger when you need one?
By three holes, we'd had enough. We high-tailed it back to the clubhouse, with the rain and lightning in hot pursuit.
The same thing could have happened on almost any golf course anywhere, of course. Sad to say, but other than the high cost of golf and golf equipment, the biggest drag on the game these days is slow play.
The 31/2-hour round has turned into the 41/2-hour round, if you're lucky. Five-hour rounds are not unusual.
"Among golf leadership, the two biggest issues in growing the game are cost and time," said Jim Smith Jr., head pro at the Philadelphia Cricket Club and president of the Philadelphia Section PGA. "You hear about that more than all others combined."
No question, recreational golfers who either don't know any better, or don't care, like those knuckleheads in front of us that day, are a huge part of the problem. But golf courses also share in the blame, especially daily-fee courses that try to maximize revenue by squeezing too many people onto the course.
"Some of these resorts, if they can get two or three more groups on the course at $200 to $300 per round, multiply that out and it comes to significant dollars," said Jack Connelly, longtime head pro at Huntingdon Valley Country Club and past president of the PGA of America.
Significant as in 12 golfers at $300 per round comes to $3,600 per day.
One course in the area that does it right is the Golf Course at Glen Mills, where rangers roam the front and back nine, hurrying along slower groups, even encouraging some strugglers to forgo the championship tees in favor of the more forgiving forward tees. Most effective, however, is that Glen Mills spaces tee times 12 minutes apart.
"Other courses are at seven, eight or nine minutes," head pro Bob Pfister said. "We are at 12 minutes because our golf course is difficult, and it gives players a chance to get spaced out."
If recreational golfers look to PGA Tour pros on TV for tips on how to pick up the pace, they are looking in the wrong place. Tour pros can be among the worst offenders, fussing over every shot as if it were worth $50,000, which, come to think of it, it is.
"You're playing for $1 million," said J.B. Holmes, recently fingered by Golf World magazine as one of 10 known "slowpokes" on the PGA Tour. "If someone thinks I'm slow or taking too long, I don't care."
That Golf World list included Sean O'Hair from West Chester.
In their defense, there can be extenuating circumstances, such as the increasingly difficult setups of tournament courses.
"When the rough is deeper and the greens are like cement and the hole locations get close to the edges, you can't just expect guys to step up and hit it," Mark Russell, a tournament director for the PGA Tour, recently told Golf World.
There is a rather vague rule regarding slow play in the official Rules of Golf:
The Player must play without undue delay and in accordance with any pace of play guidelines that the Committee may establish.
On the PGA Tour, that has come to mean that if a group falls more than one hole behind the group in front of it, the group is put "on the clock." Once a group is on the clock, the first player to hit his ball is allowed 60 seconds, and the others in the group 40 seconds for each shot. If the group continues to lag, a 1-stroke penalty can be assessed along with a $5,000 fine.
But the last player the PGA Tour hit with a slow-play penalty was Dillard Pruitt, in 1992, in the GTE Byron Nelson Golf Classic.
For recreational golfers, slow play will only truly be attacked when golfers stop returning to courses where it's the biggest problem - assuming they let the course know why they aren't going back.
Contact staff writer Joe Logan at 215-854-5604 or jlogan@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/joelogan.
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