Pelley has to try and speed up the game

by Graham Otway

Keith Pelley is this week holding what could turn out to be the first in a long series of meetings with the Royal and Ancient rulemakers at St Andrews.

It is the start of his crusade to stamp out the curse of slow play, which is one of the biggest bugbears of golf at all levels, wherever it is played in the world.

The European Tour’s new Chief Executive has an admirable intention, but he will soon discover that while he has little, if any, opposition to his principle objective, imposing sanctions on the many golf course tortoises is going to be nigh-on impossible.

Providing his players agree, it may turn out to be easy for Pelley to write stricter rules to get the pros to play quicker at tournaments and set a good example for the thousands of fans behind the ropes and those watching on TV.

But Pelley would need a small army of referees at every event to make sure the rule book is adhered to.

However, as The R&A tries to draw up new measures to speed up the progress of monthly medals, how could they ever be strictly enforced when at nine o’clock on  Sunday mornings in most clubhouses the only worker present is the cleaner.

Yes, club golfers can be advised to walk quicker down the fairways and rather than watching their opponent play his next shot start thinking about what club they are going to be hitting next a lot earlier.

And with greater pressure these days in the workplace and youngsters having many alternative sports they can play, if a round of golf could be reduced from four and a bit hours to a shade under three, then the game would be a more attractive proposition at grassroots level.

Doubtless The R&A new chief executive Martin Slumbers sees the issue as an early opportunity to stamp his authority on the game, but Pelley’s target with the professionals seems much more in reach.

Under the current system at European Tour events the players are all given a series of target times as to where they should be on the golf course after so many minutes of their round.

If they fail to meet them, or worse still lose a complete hole to the group playing in front, a referee will turn up on his golf cart and warn them they are ‘on the clock’.

In a pro three-ball the first man to hit his shot on the fairway is given 50 seconds to do so from the time he arrives at his ball. Given that his two playing partners have that time to think about what they are going to do they are only allowed 40 seconds.

But the slower players have been known to take up to a minute and a half or more doing things like checking the yardage chart with their caddies, putting on their golf gloves and removing the odd leaf that might be close to their ball.

However, it is also not unusual for a player in that mode to suddenly speed up everything from the split second they see a referee’s cart approaching in the distance and so when they are ‘on the clock’ they are not likely to fall foul of the rules.

It has been suggested that SKY TV should put a stopclock on TV screens showing just how long it takes a player to hit the ball, but that could never be used to sanction the slowcoaches since on most days at a tournament when the cameras are following the leaders, only 15 per cent of the players are seen in action on air.

What Pelley needs to devise is a thorough system where every player is timed on every hole and then impose strict punishments for those who lag behind the pace of the day.

Given the amount many of the players earn each week, imposing a fine for each breach would have little effect. But handing a one-shot on the spot penalty each time someone dilly dallies between playing an eight or nine-iron would certainly make them think twice about doing it again.

That timing could be done by a volunteer marshall walking the course, with each group using a phone or something similar to take a video of the preparation for each shot and one of the Tour referees being called in when it looks like a shot penalty has to be handed out.

Or Pelley might find it worthwhile to invest in research into the ‘shot tracker’ system used on the US Tour to record every shot played by every player on every hole to produce a mountain of statistics at the end of every day’s play.

Sometimes it does seem over the top when the American TV commentators come out with something like “that’s the 30th time this year he’s got up and down from 35 yards out”, and such detailed and dull

statistics are not worth the breath that is used in making such a statement.

But if with a little bit of adaptation the ‘shot tracker’ could monitor the speed of every player’s progress and provide the evidence to sanction those guilty of slow play, then few lovers of the game of golf would argue with its introduction alongside much-needed stiff penalties to make the infringers mend their ways.

Tagged European Tour, Keith Pelley