Chameleons killing golf
Golf
By
Mike The Pro Kibunja
| Sep 03, 2019
Let’s cut to the chase: the slow pace of play in golf today is turning away new golfers, putting off regular golfer and slowly killing the game.
At the turn of the last century, the favourite sport of yuppies and middle-level managers was squash.
The major attraction in squash was the vigorous, fast pace and most importantly, the short time it took.
In just 40 minutes, a time-constrained person could get a full-body workout and come out totally exhausted.
That left time for a shower, the customary drink with his opponent, traffic on Ngong Road and still enough time to get home in good time to sign off Junior’s homework.
Unlike tennis, golf or even rugby, basketball or squash is played inside a lighted room, hence even a harried manager who gets late at the office can still play after dark.
Not so with golf. In theory, a round of golf should take four and a half hours or thereabout. I say in theory because with the rising popularity of golf in the country, courses are getting jammed up, and rounds are taking longer and longer. Five-hour rounds are not uncommon these days.
Slow pace of play is killing golf
We all enjoy the exercise and the fresh air in the open fairways when golfing; but it is absolutely boring, tiring and annoying to stand on the fairway or tee doing nothing! Slow pace is one of the reasons golf is being labelled a dying sport.
Blame it on the golfers themselves. It is time they realised that one day, there just may not be enough of them to sustain clubs, which will then die due to lack of golfers and depleted finances.
This is already happening in the USA and Australia, where golf courses are closing. Should that happen here, rest assured that land grabbers are waiting, and salivating, mouths wide open.
Politicians too are watching the juicy tracts of well-located prime land. Venezuela’s former president Hugo hated golf with a passion, questioning why so much land was reserved for so few. “Bourgeoisie!” he would sneer.
How many of us remember there was a Go-Kart racing track in Langalanga, Nakuru? That was low hanging fruit for land grabbers since it was owned by the Nakuru Town Council.
There used to be a horse racing track in Limuru. Probably the only people who remember it are the golfers of Colonial Golf and Country Club in San Diego California.
Kikuyu grass
Their Tiger-beating Riviera course is known for its tough Kikuyu grass that was actually imported from Limuru for their horse racecourse but was eventually found most useful for the golf course.
The changing demographics are throwing golf another curveball: Generation-Z, brought up on fast foods, high-speed internet, drive-through restaurants, and fast everything, are squeezed for time and are not going to tag behind a bunch of slow coaches for five hours! Boring!
Let’s also not forget that golf’s core TV audience is diminishing. One 2014 survey, noted that 63 per cent of the PGA’s television audience was over the age of 55, while only 12 per cent was younger than 35. Golf needs to attract more young people.
Compare that to the NBA where only 25 per cent of the NBA’s audience is 55 or older, and 47 per cent is younger than 35. The PGA Tour has the oldest TV viewership of any competition in the US at average age 64.
The biggest culprits for growth of slow pace in golf are the rule-makers. For a long time, they have refused to do anything to tame slow play.
The best they did was launch a handbook on Pace of Play in 2016. The existence of the manual is only known by a few golf captains and even fewer club golfers.
The effects of slow play are being felt not just at club level, but also on the golf Tours. There is no question that the R&A robbed Matt Kuchar a chance to win his first major at the 2017 British Open by not penalising Jordan Spieth for slow play.
They indulged Spieth by allowing him upwards of twenty minutes, yes twenty minutes, to figure out how to play his errant ball.
He had missed the fairway so far out into the driving range, it should have been Out of Bounds, but somebody negligently did not mark the area off.
The rule-makers, R&A and USGA, and tournament organisers have allowed tortoise pace to pervade the sport to the point where it is spectators who have been forced to raise hell to get slow golfers moving.
Countless waggles
Notable miscreants are the likes of Kevin Na. Back in 2012, he would take countless waggles and walk at a painfully slow pace. Spectators would get booed with a song, “Na, Na, Na, Na….”
Sergio Garcia would milk his golf grip a dozen or so times before pulling the trigger, irking eager spectators, in turn, they would taunt him by loudly counting the number of re-grippings.
It was not until the 2013 Masters when 14-year old teenager Tianlang Guan was slapped with a rare penalty for a slow play that slow play became a talking point. Prior to that, Glen Day had suffered one at the 1995 Honda Classic, almost twenty years earlier.
Things came to a head in 2018, with the emergence of JB Holmes. Holmes has taken the slow play to a whole new level.
At the 2019 Genesis Open in Riviera, Holmes was thoroughly blasted for his slow play.
On the fourth hole, Holmes decided to wait and do nothing rather than line his putt while his partner was reading his.
He only started lining up his putt when it was his turn to play, that alone taking him over a minute to measure. Then he missed it. Nobody felt sorry for him.
As one observer noted, JB Holmes paced the 15-foot putt, checked his yardage book thoroughly, presumably looking over notes that he had taken during a practice round.
Then plumb bobbed with his putter, stepped away and plum bobbed again, stared down the line of the putt, stood over the ball, then finally hit the shot. And missed the putt.
It got worse: he then took 50 seconds to hole the one-footer that remained, an age for something even amateurs would consider a tap-in.
Took his sweet time
On the 18th hole, he took a whole four minutes and ten seconds to play his second shot to the green, but instead of going for the green, opted to lay up. Spectators were disgusted.
But guess what, he won! Coming from four shots behind Justin Thomas. He was not apologetic about his slow sped.
The current King of slow play is Bryson DeChambeau, whose speed makes JB Homes pace look like a runner on steroids. He has become a target of ire because of his incessantly slow play, a result of overanalyzing that takes so long.
While most Pros are content with working out just the effective shot distance, apparent wind speed and direction, DeChambeau insists on figuring everything, earning him the former physics major the moniker, “the mad scientist”.
You would think he is trying to calculate barometric pressure, how fast the grass is growing and the effects of the Moon’s gravity on the ball!
Served him right
For example, in one instance he took more than three minutes to play a 70-yard shot.
The display reached full boil at the Fedex Cup playoffs, PGA Tour's Northern Trust held at Jersey City National, where he took 2 minutes 20 seconds to play an eight-foot putt that he also missed.
Christina Kim, a vocal LPGA player, couldn’t help throwing a scorcher at him: “After two minutes the earth had turned on its axis and affected the gravitational pull on the slope!” We had no idea these perky girls could pull one-liners!
Tour players are so pissed off with him, English pro golfer Eddie Pepperell said DeChambeau’s self-indulgent, selfish slowness "makes the game less enjoyable", and called him an "unaffected single-minded twit!”. Touché!
This guy is in trouble. When even Babes start itching to get your goat, you have some serious self-introspection to do. And to think that he had the cheek to attempt justifying himself later!
With almost everybody but the Blue Jackets screaming their heads off, something had to be done. Some of the top players, among them Justin Rose and Brooks Koepka, have joined the call for action.
Slouches’ list
Earlier in the year, Eduardo Molinari compiled and published a list of the slowest golfers on tour to shame them.
PGA Tour winner Matt Every took the protest a notch higher at the Web.com Tour's Lecom Suncoast Classic this year, when he grabbed a chair from a volunteer, planted it on the fairway and took a snooze, as he waited for the fairway to clear. Well, almost a snooze.
The tours claim that they have been hitting Pro golfers with some undisclosed financial penalties, but the small fines are so insignificant, their effect only comparable to a mosquito biting a rhino’s rump.
And now, the penalties
That Sunday after Byron’s unapologetic, excessive idiosyncrasies, the PGA TOUR announced it was in the process of reviewing its pace-of-play policy. The good news is that something has now been done.
Starting from late November, a player on the European Tour will incur a one-shot penalty for incurring two bad times in a single round. Suddenly it has sunk into the minds of the ruling bodies that stroke penalties as the best way to counter slow play!
In addition, a player who is timed 15 times next season will be fined £26,000 compared with £9,000 now. Hitting them hard in the pocket is sure to work.
Rory Sabatini is finally absolved. Most golfers thought his action at the 2005 Booz Allen Classic was crass when he ditched Ben Crane, one of the Tour's slowest players, while Crane was lining up his shot from the fairway.
The group had been put on the clock, meaning they were behind the accepted tournament pace of play. Sabattini saw the penalty coming and bolted.
We may vilify these slow Tour golfers, but what would you say about the log in your eye? How slow is your pace of play, and what do you plan to do about it? Food for thought.
Enjoy your golf, keep up the pace.
Pigamingi@yahoo.com