Naming and shaming slow players at all levels may be the way forward to combating “the blight” of slow play, a R&A hosted conference on the problem heard yesterday and they started with as big a name as they could find.
Jordan Spieth, the game’s newest superstar, was “outed” as going on the clock after repeated warnings during the third round of the Open Championship in July as experienced European Tour ref Kevin Feeney highlighted in detail their stringent approach to the issue.
Feeney himself put the group of Spieth and Sergio Garcia on the clock, he told the R&A’s “Time for Golf” conference, held over two days at the Old Course Hotel in St Andrews with many leading stakeholders in the sport present.
Speaking on behalf of the European Tour, Feeney challenged the perception that not enough is done in the professional game to stop slow play by highlighting the Spieth case and giving figures showing toughened policies.
In the case of Spieth and Garcia, the players had been repeatedly asked to speed up during the Open where the European Tour’s slow play policy is used – but only Garcia responded, he said.
Eventually Spieth had gone on the clock, with Feeney adding that he believed the problem was his use of the “Green Book”, the new tool in addition to a yardage book used by some players that has a detailed computer mapping of every borrow on each green.
“I watched the game myself and Sergio had clearly made the effort to speed up, but Jordan had not,” he continued.
“After we put him on the clock, Jordan went birdie-birdie-birdie, and actually came to myself and (R&A rules director) David Rickman later to thank us for giving him the kick up the backside he needed.
“We’re continually asked why we don’t penalise players shots and we actually have, 24 times in the last 15 years.”
Players getting “bad times”, the sanction before a penalty shot is imposed, were fined £2000 a time, the fee doubling for every instance it occurred on a season-to-season basis. There had been 51 such instances during the 2015 season, and 369 warnings, but figures showed a gradual decline over the last three years with the tour’s policies having an effect, they believed.
A list of players with bad times and warnings was updated each week and placed on noticeboards at European Tour events, he added.
“The perception is that we’re not doing enough, and people don’t understand what we do, but if we aren’t getting the message out, that’s our own fault, “ he added.
The most high-profile slow play penalty in recent years was Ross Fisher getting a stroke docked while leading the Wales Open three years ago a decision his coach, Denis Pugh, told the conference he actually agreed with.
“I try to coach my players to “see, feel, hit”, but there are some who just don’t have it in them to make that snap decision, and Ross is an example,” said Pugh, who also coached Colin Montgomerie for over a decade as well as being a Sky Sports analyst.
“Monty was the complete opposite, he’d said that his feel after one practice swing was 100 per cent and the longer he waited the more it diminished.”
Pugh admitted to his growing frustration, especially when working as a studio analyst in PGA Tour coverage on Sky and is collaborating with others on a plan to have clubs time members in medal play which would identify which were the fast and slow players.
“We could either post the times to point out the slow players, or we could reward the good players, but either way it would be an incentive to speed up play,” he said.
Leading tour players Stephen Gallacher and Rebecca Hudson also addressed the conference yesterday, with Gallacher saying he believed penalty strokes were the only effective sanction against slow players.
“I played with one guy in the States who carries his cheque book with him and just pays the fines on the spot,” said the Ryder Cup player. “He’s paying $60 to $80,000 a year in fines but he doesn’t care because the total prizefund every week is $6 million.”
Gallacher, one of Europe’s quickest players, said that he had actually had to develop a different pre-shot routine for playing with colleagues he knows to be notoriously slow.
“Those Green Books, I think you need to be a physicist to use them,” he added. “You have to be precise about where the holke is and where you are or you’ll be getting completely the wrong reads.”