New Tour chief to stamp out slow play

Keith Pelley has set his stall out with  plans to turn the European Tour into a financial fortress to rival the PGA in America, while also targetting pace of play issues across all levels of the game.

Three months into his new role as Europe’s chief executive, Pelley predicted that by 2018 the prize money available for his players would have increased dramatically.

And he introduced a new membership rule that will make it easier for many top European golfers currently living and playing full-time in America to cross back over the Atlantic to play on his new-look tour.

But while the measures could attract bigger crowds alongside the fairways at European events – and bigger television audiences – Pelley also has a major plan to improve the golfing fortunes of the millions of club golfers playing their Sunday morning medals.

He has declared a ‘personal war’ against slow play on the golf course, and has agreed to meet with The R&A’s rule-makers to formulate a programme that will improve the speed of golf at all levels.

Ironically, his announcement in Dubai yesterday came just 48 hours after an incident in the final hour of the BMW Masters in Shanghai, where Spain’s Sergio Garcia was involved in a 15-minute discussion with a referee over where he should drop his ball after hitting it into the lake beside the 18th green at Lake Malaren.

“Slow play drives me mad,” said Pelley.

“I have had the chance to talk to a number of players at all levels – the elite, the medium and low-ranked players – and one of the things that keeps coming up, and which we are going to address, is slow play.

“We are going to be the leaders in dealing with slow play.

“I cannot tell you what that means from a concrete perspective right now, but I have had significant dialogue with Martin Slumbers from The R&A, and they are in violent agreement that it is something we need to deal with. There is a conference call next week with The R&A. We will participate in it and do this in cooperation.

“I can tell you that when we sit here next year we will have a completely different philosophy on slow play. Slow play is a critical part of our game and we will address it.”

However, Pelley’s plans to have a ‘viable alternative’ to the US Tour by raising prize purses over ‘the next three to five years’ has suffered a considerable setback.

Next year’s Race to Dubai Final Series will be reduced to just two events before the DP World Tour final in Dubai after BMW pulled the plug on The Masters at Lake Maclaren on Sunday night.

A statement issued by the German car firm gave no hints to its decision. It said simply:“At BMW, it is standard practice to regularly check all our commitments not only in sports using a certain list of criteria and, where necessary, to adapt the strategy accordingly.

“We have decided not to continue the staging of the BMW Masters after 2015. As a brand having been engaged with golf sport for nearly 30 years on a global basis, BMW will continue to support professional and amateur golf in the world and in China, which is in line with our long term sport marketing strategy.”

Sources within the European Tour could not expand on that decision even though they were given a month’s notice  of it. It is thought falling car sales in China along with organisational difficulties at Lake Malaren, caused by the resort losing hugging sums of money, were the main factors.

Pelley glossed over the China problem but then explained that the decision to make the previous week’s HSBC Champions in Shanghai simply a WGC event and not part of the final series had caused next year’s schedule to be reshaped.

The Turkish Airlines Open will again start the Final Series but Europe’s top players will then have to fly to South Africa to take part in the Nedbank Challenge at Sun City where the field will be expanded from  30 players to 72 to create more opportunites.

European officials only learned in the early of yesterday morning that Nedbank had agreed to upgrade their tournament and the follow on process from Sun City to next year race to Dubai final in The Desert has yet to be made public.

*This article was originally published in TGP on 18 November.

 

Tagged European Tour, Keith Pelley