Huggan column: Shot penalties are the way to go to stamp out slow play

by John Huggan

Whenever the words ‘slow’ and ‘play’ are mentioned within the context of professional golf, the mind immediately goes back to the 2013 US Open at Merion. In the same week that it announced the now sadly-forgotten attack on golfing snails, “While We’re Young,” the United States Golf Association – not for the first or last time – made itself a total laughing stock. There it was, America’s national championship, on a storied course all but covered with long grass and with putting surfaces running at more than 13 on the Stimpmeter.

What a laugh that was, the irony inescapable. Or should it be hypocrisy? Take a minute – no longer mind – to imagine how long it would take, say, a 15-handicapper to make his way round a course set up in such an extreme fashion. He’d be looking for his ball on almost every hole. And the number of three or even four-putts would soon mount up. All of which would add who knows how many extra minutes to the time it should take him to complete the 18-holes.

Yet the USGA – at least by implication – tell us that the US Open is ‘proper’ golf. Grinding away is apparently how the game should be played and the most efficient method of identifying the most gifted practitioners.

Maybe so. But it is also the best cure I know for insomnia. In the third round that year the final group of Luke Donald, Phil Mickelson and Billy Horschel took a snail-like two hours and 50 minutes to play the first nine holes.

Such nonsense is the golfing equivalent of the British weather: everyone talks about it, but no one ever does anything about it. And, as Merion indicated all too clearly, that inactivity applies to the game’s officialdom as much as the players. The men in blazers have historically been strangely reluctant to do anything about golf’s longest-running plague.

Anecdotes are everywhere on tour. Former Ryder Cup player Andrew Coltart still shakes his head at the memory of playing behind a glacial Nick Faldo in the 2007 German Masters – and of finding time to read the paper on the way round. 1989 Open champion, Mark Calcavecchia, once described a round with Faldo as, “like playing alone, only a lot slower”.

BBC commentator Ken Brown was once drawn with Sandy Lyle in the old Lawrence Batley tournament at Bingley St Ives. When the pair reached the 12th hole, a couple of old Yorkshire worthies were leaning over the wall at the back of the tee. “I like Lyle,” said one to the other, “but that Brown is slower than soil erosion”.

Australian Peter Fowler, now plying his trade with some success on the European Seniors Tour, is another notorious slowpoke. When Fowler won the Australian Match Play Championship in 1986, beaten semi-finalist (and Fowler’s close friend), Mike Clayton, was asked to make a speech to thank the sponsor, who had just pledged to fund the event through the year 2000.

“Thank you, Bob,” said Clayton. “That’s a great gesture, committing to the tournament for another 15 years. The trouble is, as slow as ‘Chook’ (Fowler) plays, we might only have time to get 12 of them played by 2000!”

The now-retired Tony Johnstone of Zimbabwe was another known to take his own sweet time before hitting a shot. Once, when playing with Simon Hobday, Johnstone asked his compatriot to move. Hobday’s shadow was over the line of his putt. “Well, it wasn’t when you started,” shot back Hobday.

On the other hand, the never-ending war against slow play does have at least one unlikely hero. While it must be acknowledged that Rory Sabbatini is capable of behaving in a disappointingly boorish fashion on occasion, his lack of patience did once do the game a favour. Playing alongside the timeless Ben Crane a few years ago, the South African openly expressed his displeasure at his companion’s tardiness. Obviously seething, there was Sabbatini – arms crossed, hot steam metaphorically billowing from every orifice – by the 17th green at Congressional as Crane meticulously worked his way through his seemingly endless pre-shot routine a couple of hundred yards back down the fairway. Hilarious.

Okay, Sabbatini’s was perhaps not the most-subtle way of making even an oh-so justified point, but really, haven’t we all been there? Haven’t we all, at one time or another, been driven to distraction by a fully paid-up member of golf’s go-slow brigade?

Coltart – again – certainly has been. The Scot once tweeted the following: “Playing with Joachim Haeggman and Jarmo Sandelin tomorrow. We told Joachim to start now. We’ll catch him up at 15 tomorrow.”

Come to think of it, public humiliation might just be the way to go. Slow pokes must be identified, vilified and held up to the ridicule their graceless ways deserve. Let’s start by posting pictures of the deadbeats on tour websites, complete with their average “shot-times.” Embarrass them into speeding up. No one, after all, wants to be identified as the root of this particular golfing evil.

Action of this sort is long overdue. The reluctance of officials to do anything beyond administering almost pointless monetary fines has long been a disgrace. Hammering the culprits with multiple-shot penalties is the real way forward, the only way to get the attention of players indifferent to the damage they are doing to the professional game.

All of which is nothing new.  Slow play has been with us for years. Back in 2013 – in the same week that the USGA half-heartedly announced its short-lived attempt to combat this golfing cancer – Associated Press golf writer Doug Ferguson cited a notice given to competitors in the 1950 US Open at Merion: “Be observant, reach your decision quickly and execute your shots with promptness and dispatch.”

Clearly, no one has been listening.

So come on guys, get a move on. If you don’t, I’ll have to send Rory round to sort you out.

*This article was originally published in TGP on 8 June 2016.

Tagged Ben Crane, John Huggan, slow play, The R&A