Punish slow play or risk viewers flocking to LIV golf
At 10.23pm, with the 18th green wreathed in a Stygian gloom, Robert Dinwiddie sank his final putt at an hour when many of St Andrews’ revellers were sinking their final drinks. Six hours, seven minutes, it had taken him and his playing partners to reach the clubhouse: a time that would scarcely be tearing up trees for a marathon, never mind a threeball. The marshals’ glazed-over expression called to mind the old Groucho Marx joke: “Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.”
It was believed to be the latest finish in Open history, bringing exasperation wherever you looked. Richard Bland appeared as if he could bear it no longer, at one point sitting on his bag with his head in his hands. Collin Morikawa, the defending Open champion and one of golf’s more equable souls, lamented: “I knew it would be slow – but I didn’t know it would be this slow. We were waiting on groups at tees, waiting on fairways. We’re watching more golf than we ever have.”
The pace of play at this Open has been absurdly lackadaisical, with Jordan Spieth and Padraig Harrington scrutinising lines and gradients with the intensity of amateur cartographers. As usual, players could afford these indulgences in the certain knowledge that they would not be punished. A one-stroke penalty, the sanction that could snuff out the curse of slow play in an instant, is the one that the game’s governing bodies consistently neglect to invoke, for fear of embarrassing the star names.
With Matt Fitzpatrick branding his six-hour ordeal a “joke”, those mischief-makers over at LIV Golf could not resist the chance to plug their own more abbreviated product. When the curtain finally fell on a sprawling epic of a first day, after 16 hours’ uninterrupted golf, the Saudi-bankrolled breakaway tour posted a “150th Open leaderboard” featuring only their expensively-acquired recruits. In their rendering, Lee Westwood, he of the self-styled “Majesticks”, was leading the tournament.
You can see why the disruptors would have sensed a commercial opportunity. LIV’s slogan, after all, is “blink and you’ll miss it”: an optimistic claim for a spectacle that itself takes at least four hours to complete. But sending 48 players out in a shotgun start still takes up a quarter of the time as a 156-man field playing in regular rotation in these interminable threeballs. If an age-old barrier to golf’s appeal lies in its drawn-out nature, this first-round go-slow constituted the worst possible advert to win over the sceptics.
Nobody should rush to acclaim LIV, a soulless money-grabbing venture with its tanks on the lawns of golf’s oldest and grandest championship, as a compelling alternative to anything. But when you see the game played as torturously as this, it does make you wonder if there is not a case for forcing repeat offenders to hurry up. Padraig Harrington was so obsessive in his set-up routines that Tiger Woods, made to wait time and again in the group behind, grew visibly annoyed.
There are complexities particular to St Andrews, where the double greens and short par-fours, driveable by many of these players, can yield longer-than-usual rounds. But spinning 18 holes out for six hours is utterly unacceptable, especially when crowds here are being implored to leave the course early due to rail strikes. “Play faster,” Woods once said. “I’ve played 18 hours in under an hour, no problem – it helps having a fast cart,” he said. Under an hour? Now there is a claim to stretch credulity. But as a round finally stretches out beyond the dreaded six-hour mark, golf’s authorities should be reminded that the patience of the golfing public has its limits.
Who to blame for six-hour rounds at The Open and how to fix slow play
By Tom Morgan
Matt Fitzpatrick has been among players to hit out at the "ridiculous" pace of play at The 150th Open, labelling the situation as a "joke" after rounds were taking over six hours to complete. With competitors suffering lengthy delays on tee boxes and with approach shots into many holes, Telegraph Sport explores how a perfect storm of factors at the Old Course is to blame:
Vagaries of the Old Course
Play is inevitably slowed down by seven shared greens, with only the first, ninth, 17th and 18th holes having their own individual greens. Many of the par-fours are driveable off the tee for longer hitters, leading to players waiting for long periods at multiple points during their rounds.
The Old Course, also known as the Old Lady or the Grand Old Lady, has a historical links layout, which is firmly designed, deciphered, and, unlike newer venues, the track isn't overtly long and the landing areas and greens complexes were designed with anemometers in mind.
A narrow slip of land with shared fairways, greens and tees all crunched into it, is a bad starting point for quick golf. As many as 12 people are at work most of the time on the double greens.
Size of the field
The first group of Paul Lawrie, Webb Simpson and Min Woo Lee on Thursday got round in four hours 24 minutes. Times got slower and slower as the day wore on. Tiger Wood's group, who got away at 3pm, ended six hours and nine minutes later, with light fading.
A field of 156 meant days one and two were inevitably going to start with reasonably quick rounds and then get slower and slower as increasing numbers clogged up the shared greens.
The queues grew deeper as it quickly emerged talk of 59s here this weekend were unrealistic. The course played to a 72.7 scoring average in the first round - a higher average than the first round in the 2010 Open at St Andrews.
Modern golf's big hitters and the failure to rein back the ball
"Everything bad in golf is traceable back to one thing," tweets the golf writer John Huggan. "The pace of play at the Open today was in large part due to how far elite players hit the ball. End the madness…" Authorities have spent years discussing and reviewing the prospect of reining in the ball, given building longer courses at the likes of St Andrews is impossible.
Jack Nicklaus has previously called on the likes of the R&A "to wake up sooner or later" on the issue. "They can’t just keep burying their heads on this," he said. "They see it, they watch television, they see where these guys hit the golf ball. It isn’t about how far they hit it. You just can’t keep making golf courses longer. You just don’t have enough land, you don’t have enough money to do it.”
With the course playing as fast as this week, the Old Course's solution was to move the pins into fruity positions. Tackling the ball instead, and leaving the pins where they normally are, is what the purists want.
Weather and firm conditions
Given a lengthy spell of dry weather at St Andrews, organisers could have considered having more grass on the fairways to combat the inevitably firm conditions. John Murray, the BBC commentator, compared the fairways yesterday to a parched cricket pitch. St Andrews has not seen the same surging temperatures of other parts of the UK in recent days, but there has been precious little rain prior to Thursday.
Friday morning, however, has seen consistent rain showers, and the third and fourth rounds can almost all expected to be a more reasonable four-and-a-half hours.
