The speed at which Dylan Menante plays golf seems appropriate for a discussion of pace of play.
“I was always the fastest,” he said the other day.
The fastest as a junior in Nevada, playing so fast his father had to step in and slow him down. Fastest in college, when opponents intentionally paired him with one of their slower players as a psychological warfare tool. The fastest on the Korn Ferry Tour, and now with the hard data to prove it. Last month, the PGA Tour feeder circuit was done the first major tournament to be published “game speed” times.
Ask about KFT and everyone mentions Menante’s rhythm. (Do the same thing on the PGA Tour, and they talk about it Ludwig Aberg.) Off the tee, Menante hits 16 seconds faster than the KFT average. On approach shots and around the green, he is 14 seconds faster. Sunset is where he slows down, clocking a glacial pace of 9.62 seconds faster than the average of KFT. The man absolutely cooks his way around a golf course.
The only problem is that for every Dylan Menante – a veritable crowd on a distribution curve as you can see below – there’s a mill on the other side. And for every player even moderately faster than average, there are others who are moderately, or significantly, slower. Not much, but enough that the PGA Tour wants to do something about it.
“It’s only a very small percentage that each week can seem to improve their pace of play,” says Jordan Harris, KFT’s head referee. “And that’s going to be an interesting indicator, I think, of how this all works. After it’s been posted for a little while, how do those guys — do they change their behavior?”
Generating the data is simple in theory, but it depends on the tour volunteers who walk with the groups and handle the output. Volunteers carry a phone with them, using an app that prompts them with a trigger. When players hover over a shot, volunteers place their thumb on the screen, holding it in place until contact is made, at which point they release their thumb. The clock is constantly ticking … for everyone. Once Player 1 plays a shot, that shot is timed to the second. After Player 2 makes contact, that shot is also timed. While the time between these stamps includes innocent gray areas—like, say, waiting for Player 1 to drop the ball, or waiting for a caddy to calm the fans—in general, these timestamps inform everything. If you are a slow player, you will be exposed.
KFT rules officials can use the same app to track timestamps throughout the course in real time. But each player’s stamps are added up to see how fast (on average) they are ready to play by chasing the player in front of them. They are also divided by type of shot: off the tee, approach, around the green and putting. The system isn’t perfect — the first player to play is never on time, an issue the Tour is trying to address — but it has produced a set of data that matches what officials (and even players) believe they’re experiencing from week to week.
“Every week, we look at the list and confirm what we’re seeing with our heads,” said Harris. “We see no anomalies.”
Harris jokes that he has become the “Pace of Play Guy” for KFT, and he explains the system well. He should, because he’s tasked with telling players when they’re procrastinating. He knows how tough this outdoor sport that is played over hundreds of acres can be. For example, what if there is a decision that requires a drop? Those times are thrown away. 10 percent of the slowest instances are also thrown for each player each week. Players in the competition always play slower, Harris explained, adding that most KFT winners in recent years ended up with an “average stroke time” violation — playing their shots more than seven seconds slower than the course. The only recent winner who didn’t? Yes, Dylan Menante.
Menante is, in some ways, the crown jewel of data. KFT wants to create positive stories about the pace of its players, and he is a great example. But the other three objectives revolve around helping (or fixing) slower professionals. KFT wants to (1) provide better context for fans, (2) support members who have been wrongly labeled as slow, and (3) inform the turtles that it’s time to get it. This is where things can get complicated.
“If you ask the Korn Ferry guys, ‘Is the tempo of the game a problem?’, I bet 80% of them say, ‘Yes,'” said KFT pro Cole Sherwood. “But then if you ask them, ‘How do we fix it?’, I think people just draw a blank because it’s not one thing in particular.”
Sherwood is on the slower side of the standings, 113th out of 137, 3.45 seconds slower than average, or about 20 seconds slower than Menante. Sherwood isn’t terribly slow in any category; just a little slow across the board. But never to the point of being a problem. When he looks at the data, a major theme emerges.
“If you look at the middle 50%, take out the outliers,” he said, “that’s maybe a seven-second difference.”
Not even! The middle 50%—players 34 through 103—are separated by about five seconds across all shots. KFT officials feel mostly good about that group. They are more concerned about the slowest 10 to 15 players. Each week, the data is broken down and any player who takes seven seconds or more to play than the court average receives an “average shot time violation.” When a certain player gets five of those fouls, the CFT steps in with a simple message.
“Hey, we don’t want you to have to pay to play golf, do we?” Harris said. Translation: On the 10th offense, players are fined $50,000. For their 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th offenses, it’s $5,000 each week. And beyond that, $10,000 more for each violation. It’s a system that only penalizes players when they’ve consistently played at an extremely slow pace and haven’t changed much in their processes to play faster.
As always, it is an easy subject to misperceive. There are no freeway shooting hours. Or beepers like you’ll find on TGL. Sherwood has been playing with Ian Gilligan of late, who ranks as the second slowest player in the CFT this year and is no doubt working towards a fine season. But…
“There was never once that I thought he was slow,” Sherwood said. “It never occurred to me.”
Sherwood is a little more accepting of golf’s fate as a slog; he doesn’t see a solution like baseball being flavored with the introduction of a pitch clock. But as baseball did with its minor leagues, so is the PGA Tour trying to use KFT to create change. Harris is quick to cite how it took more than a decade for pitching clocks to graduate from baseball’s feeder leagues to the majors. He’s seen enough of the data that he thinks it would be a good thing for the PGA Tour to follow suit. (PGA Tour he said he wants tobut not yet.)
What about our speed demon?
“It seems like in the bigger tournament it’s a bigger issue,” Menante said. “And I think it’s coming out more and more where guys are being signed up by her fans Oh it took you a minute and 20 seconds to hit a six footer. Like, come on.
“It should just be faster. I think on our tour, they’re really doing a good job. I hope it carries over to the PGA Tour just because accountability is key. Everybody should have a level playing field. It shouldn’t be unfair.”
