Discussions drawn by player-caddies do not help the pace of play.
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Golf-on-TV, a different sport than the one we all play, is at a fast pace. Golfwhich drives the golf business in every possible direction, has become so slow as to be completely out of step with the culture at large, which is built for speed.
If you own a phone, you know it.
I watched you like 20 seconds ago. You did not answer!
Major League Baseball has done the same in recent years to improve the pace of its games, and the passing game is better for it. Pitcher is on an hour now and that has had a big impact. But just as big, if not bigger, is putting the bullet in the box and shooting it and it stays there. Golfers-on-TV must have a club in hand While their playing partners are playing. They almost never do.
Golf would be the best and fastest way and if players could read their putts only from behind the ball. It might be a rule.
But more than anything, we want to make our cover here Dottie Pepper in her Howard Beale moment the other day. (Fictional anchorman Howard Beale, in the seminal film of social commentary NETWORK: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not taking it anymore.”) Her use of the word respect it was perfect.
The desire to make Golf a faster-paced game isn’t just about catering to a world spinning at Hyper-Speed. It’s about players showing a sense of perspective. You’re playing golf, folks. You are not performing open heart surgery. Players who drag around their shots are actually trashing the fans, the broadcasters, and the traditions of the game. Just So Me-Me-Me. That is ultimately why it is painful. Golf is meant to teach respect for others.
That was Pepper’s call-to-action commentary on live TV Saturday, speaking with another player-turned-broadcaster, Frank Nobilo. Both of them, as players, were part of the solution, not the problem. Dottie said:
“You know, Frank, I think we’re starting to need a new word to talk about this pace of play thing, and it’s respect. For your competitors, for fans, for broadcasts, for all. It just has to get better. “
Let’s spend just one the second Here considering its source and medium. Yes, Pepper was a straight-wire player in her long LPGA career. But she’s also a founding figure in golf (ex PGA of America Board Member) working for the Ultimate Foundation Golf Network (CBS). And she’s a reporter, not a polemicist. So her prayer was unexpected.
IN Farmers Insurance Tournament At Torrey Pines, she was covering a tee that would take close to 5.5 hours to play a round of golf. The golf had no pace, the tournament, despite a deadlocked driver, no sense of urgency. It was hard to watch and care. Piper felt the moment. She didn’t have a tirade. But she had reached her breaking point.
A week before that, in perfect weather in the California desert in American Express Tournamentthe final group took 5 hours and 39 minutes to play 18 holes.
If you watch clips from the final, the fans in hand seemed to be crystallizing on their standing sticks.
Unless there is revolutionary change here, these high priests, the men and women who play golf on TV, will lose their priestly status with us.
Since Major League Baseball instituted a series of rule changes in 2023, the average time of a game has gone from 3:03 in 2022 to 2:38 in 2024. Baseball! TarvalThat most hidden sport of all time! But it’s not just the half hour stripped down that has made baseball a better game. It’s like all the parties at hand – players, umpires, fans, managers, bench players – are at their fingertips.
Jack Hirsch
Golf was never meant to be a daytime activity, not playing it, not watching it. But Golf-On-TV is an all day and overnight activity. And the children who come to the game, seeing these high priests, take all their cues from what they see on TV. The impact is suffocating.
Have you played with any good young golfers lately? They take off their gloves to hit chip shots. You may ask, why?
If you are indeed Think you have to take your glove off to hit a chip shot, no matter who you are, you have enough common sense to take it off while walking to your ball. Because, and this may shock you: no one wants to watch you take off the glove.
It’s another act of total self-absorption that’s stealing air from the game and replacing it with goo so heavy it takes you a full minute to line up and hit a 40-inch shot.
Some of these golf carts have all the steps of an underwater roller coaster race.
Three weeks into the TGL experiment, one thing is clear: the world’s best players can easily play a shot in under 40 seconds if there is a clock, and peer pressure, to do so. Golf needs a shot clock. It will not be difficult for players to adapt to it.
When three or four tournament players go out for a round of trash talk golf at Medallion or Dye Preserve or The Bear’s Club, they play well under four hours. The guy plays his next goal, the other guy goes. One boy plays, the other boy goes. They are the best players in the world. They know what they are doing!
Caddies should be required to walk directly to their player’s ball. Players don’t want to be far from their caddies and bags. With Caddy on the ball, the player will want to get faster. Players must have a plan in their head and a club in their hands before the previous player’s shot stops.
Bobby Jones and Mickey Wright and a hundred other golf legends did NO Think of a round of golf as an all-day activity. The game was better for him. As is often the case, you look back to look forward. Supply your movie reference.
