November 21, 2024 • 26 mins
Motivated by Charley Hull's comments, Claude dives into the slow play epidemic effecting everyone from the pros to the everyday golfer, and ways to remedy the problem.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's the son of which podcast. I'm your host Claude
Harmon solo episode of the pod this week. I just
got back. I was over at the LPGA CME Globe
there kind of tour championship season ending for the LPGA Tour.
I was over there with the Marina Alex. I saw
Charlie Hull and I wanted to touch on some stuff.
Charlie said last week she was in the last group
(00:22):
last week with Nellye Korda, had a chance to win,
didn't get it done. Nelly Quorda won again. I mean,
what an unbelievable year, and no joke. I got to
sit and watch Nelly Quorda hit golf balls for the
last three days and if she's hitting golf balls on
the driving range, I'm gonna sit and just I mean,
it's like golf porn. I mean, the golf swing's just
so good. You know the work she's done with Jamie Mulligan.
(00:45):
But I just when you watch Nellie's golf swing, I mean,
she is a player that I will stop and watch
hit golf balls. It's that good. So she is a
privilege to watch. But it was Charlie Hall that made
some comments about slow play, which is a serious issue
(01:06):
on every single tour. It's taking you know, over five
and a half hours to play golf in a tournament,
which is just it's just ridiculous, and slow play is
nothing new, right, And the thing is, this is just
my opinion, but if the tours wanted to fix this,
they could fix it, right, they could fix slow play,
but it doesn't seem like they want to fix it.
(01:29):
So it was Charlie Hall that said, what was her quote,
She said, I'm pretty ruthless. If you have three bad
times in a year, you lose your card. She's like,
that would stop, so pay immediately. You know what, She's
one hundred percent right now. They're never going to do that.
That might be a little bit extreme. The powers that
be are never going to do that, but historically what
(01:50):
they've done in the past is if you get a
certain amount of bad times and you get fined and
stuff like that. Again solely my opinion, but I don't
think the finds work. I mean certainly not on the
PGA tour. Those guys make so much money. If you're
a big star, and there are some big stars that
you know, everybody knows theyre slower The thing about slow
play that drives me crazy, and I think drives everybody
(02:12):
crazy that's involved, certainly at the professional level, is everybody
on tour PGA Tour, Champions Tour, dp World Tour, LPGA Live,
everybody that plays on those tours, everybody associated with those tours,
everybody involved with those tours knows exactly who the slow
players are. Every player knows who the slow players are.
(02:34):
Every caddy knows who the slow players are. Every rules
official knows who the slow players are. Every tour commissioner
knows who the slow players are. All the media know
who they are. Everybody in the game knows who the
slow players are. And the players that play fast don't
affect the people that play slow because they just keep
playing slow. But slow play dramatically affects fast players. I
(02:55):
happen to work for two of the fastest players in
the game, Dustin Johnson and Brooks kept goa. They are fast, right,
DJ maybe gets a little bit slower on the greens,
But you know, the camera guys that you talk to
from CBS or NBC or ESPN. If DJ's in the
group and he's last to hit, they're kind of standing
behind two of the players. They can't get the camera
(03:16):
behind DJ fast enough because he's already gonna pull the trigger.
So when fast players are paired with slow players, and
everyone knows who the slow players are, right, I mean,
there will be players that you get paired with and
you'll just go, oh man, we're gonna be on the
clock NonStop. And that's the thing, right, So they tie
the players. They have a certain amount of time. I
(03:37):
think it's around forty seconds to hit your shot. There's
some different rules if it's on a par three, if
you're third to play, you're out of position, all that,
but generally it's about forty seconds. And I think most
of the time they'll give the guys up to a minute.
So you've get forty seconds to hit a shot right
on a golf course, competitive around the golf So what
I'm gonna do right now, okay, is I got my phone.
(04:01):
I'm going to start my stopwatch. I am not going
to say anything, and I am going to stop when
we get to forty seconds. Okay, three, two, one go.
(04:54):
So that was forty seconds. And I did that to
prove a point, right, that should have seen like a
really long time of just dead air that's forty seconds.
That's how much time you've got to hit a golf ball.
So if you can't hit a golf ball in forty seconds,
my question is, what the hell are you doing? Like,
what is taking so long? And I think one of
(05:15):
the things that we're starting to see, and I think
one of the reasons why slow play is such an
issue is you go watch junior golf, you go watch
AJJA golf, you go watch high school golf, you go
watch college golf. It's like watching a glad. I mean,
they are playing so slow. We have a college tournament
at my club, the Floridian every year of the vast
Bar Collegiate Invitational. They can't finish, like, they can't finish,
(05:38):
they run out of daylight. I think it took one
of the final groups last week on the LPG almost
five hours forty seconds. They finished in the dark. Now
the quarter had to finish in the dark on Saturday night.
You couldn't even see the flag because they're running out
of daylight because they can't finish faster. So everyone knows
they've got X amount of time, right, And what happens
is the slow players will just do their own thing
(06:01):
until the group gets put on the clock, right, and
as soon as the rules officials come out and say, okay,
you guys are on the clock, the fast players all
look at them and say, you know this isn't me,
and the rules officials, the tour officials will go, yeah, no,
we know it's not you. But we've got to put
the whole group on so they know who's the slow player,
they know who's the fast player. So what ends up
(06:23):
happening is once you get on the clock, you don't
want to get a bad time. The slow players speed
up and they start moving really really fast. And then
if you're not a slow player and you get out
of position and you need to take you know, time
to get yardage yourself, I've got no problem if you
need a little extra time. If you're in the rough right,
(06:45):
if you're out of position, off the tee, if you're
out of position and you now have a shot to
where you're not in a fair way, it's tough to
get a yardage. It's going to take some creativity. You're
going to have to try and you know, think on
the fly. I get that that can sometimes take a
long time. But if you're standing in the middle of
the fairway shouldn't take you two minutes to hit one.
(07:06):
And so what we're starting to see is the players
on TV that everybody is watching, right, junior golfers, high
school golfers, college golfers. They want to emulate the best
players in the world, right, they want to emulate everything
about them, their golf swings, their techniques, their routines, all
of it. But what's happening is junior golf, the pace
(07:27):
of play is just atrocious. Like it's criminal how bad
it is. Right, college golf, I mean, it's brutal, how
slow it is. I think the coaches in college golf
are basically now de facto caddies. Right, it's an individual sport.
They're walking around with their players, they're getting yardage, they're
looking at the yardage book. So at the elite Division
(07:48):
one college golf, in all the big programs, the coaches
are basically caddies. Right, They're getting the yardage, they're talking
strategy and stuff like that. But that process is taken forever.
The aim pointin from two feet is taken forever. Listen,
I'm not bashion on ame point. Right. I think there's
a simple solution to this, right, slow players kind of
(08:09):
fall into two categories. There'll be slow players that you know,
do a bunch of regrips, that do a bunch of waggles.
I mean, we know who those players are, right once
they get over the golf ball, it just takes them
forever to hit it. We know who those players are.
But what really slowing play is it's like nobody is
ready to hit their shut So if you're the first
(08:31):
person to hit, you're gonna get your information to go.
So if you're the first person to hit and you're
in a group of three, that means there's two other
players that while you're getting your yardages, while you're getting
all of your information, you and your caddy. We're talking
about tour golf now, it's like, what are you doing.
You should be getting your yardage, looking at the shot,
(08:52):
looking at the wins, so that when the player hits
and it's your turn to hit, you would think that
you'd just be ready to go. But it's almost like
I joke about it all the time, but it's almost like,
and this happens a lot in junior golf and in
high school golf and in college golf. It's like, when
it's your turn, to play. When it's your turn to pot,
when it's your turn to hit your t shot, when
(09:12):
it's your turn to hit your iron shot or whatever. Right,
it's almost like players turn into figure skaters. You know
that scene in the Olympics a figure skater where they
announce the figure skater who's next up, and they kind
of skate up, and they kind of skate around and
they skate into the middle of the rink. They throw
their arms up in the air and stuff like that,
and then they get into their pose and then they
go into their routine. And I watched this, it's like, Okay,
(09:35):
you're second in the group to hit. The player who's
hitting first, it's like they're not doing anything. It's like
they're not getting the yardage. It's like they're not looking
at the wind, they're not looking at the lie. They
have no idea what club they hit. So then as
soon as that person hit, it's like, Okay, all of
a sudden, now I'm on stage and I've got to
go through this elaborate routine. You couldn't be doing all that,
(09:57):
not distracting the other player and stuff, but you can.
You'd be getting all of your yardages. You could be
getting all of your data, gathering information and where the
wind is, where the lie is, where the pin is.
All of that. You can be doing that why somebody
else is hitting. Be ready to go when it's your
turn putting, I mean the putting green. How long does
(10:19):
it take to putt these days? It just takes forever.
And I played golf on Sunday for the first time
in about a year and a half. Right, I played
an eighteen hole round of golf, and one of the
guys that I was playing with said, man, you play
really really fast. And I'm like, I don't really think
I play fast. I just kind of get up, look
at the shot, and hit it right. I mean I
(10:40):
try and not stand over it. I try and not
have a lot of thoughts in my head. And I
think the longer you stand over a shot right, the
more waggles you take. I just I don't see golfers
taking more time, and that being about positive things, I
think the longer you stand there, in my experience, what
you see is players in their head, they're doubting that
(11:03):
their decision, they're not comfortable, they don't know what they're
trying to do, and so it just takes them forever
to hit it right. And I think if you can
just kind of be ready to go. I mean, we
walked to pro am today and you know, Marina Alex
Why teach on the Ladies Tour and four amateurs right,
and we see this across the board. How long it
(11:23):
takes golfers to hit shots, How long it takes them
to pull the club, to go through their routine, to
go through their practice swings, to figure out where they're
trying to It just takes forever. And I just don't
think that is helping golfers score better. I think the
longer you're standing there, the more time you take, you're
just creating more and more doubt. And I think what
(11:45):
players are doing, and when I ask players, this is
the response I get. I think a lot of players
that are slow are trying to make sure that they
don't leave any stone unturned in their preparation to hit
the shot right. They're going to try and take in
as much information is possible so that they don't hit
a bad shot, so that they don't mess it up.
(12:08):
And when I ask players, what are you doing? I
mean I will I film routines a lot, especially on
the putting Green. I will film players' routines in practice
and say, okay, do you realize you just took on
a fifteen foot pot. I'll say, okay, let's imagine your
first to play, right, You're first to play, and you're
(12:29):
gonna come up and mark it, okay. And what I'll
do is I'll film it and time it from the
time they mark the ball and they go into their
kind of information gathering phase. And you'll sometimes show players
you realize you took almost two minutes to hit a
fifteen foot pot. And so when they watch it back
and you film it, you watch it back and you
look at all the looks. I mean, that's another thing
(12:51):
that I talk to players about, and an effort to
try and get them to be more decisive, but an
effort to try and get them to play faster is
I'll film their routine and say, okay, hey, you just
took four looks. You just took five practice strokes. What
are the looks for? And what are the practice strucks for?
And invariably people can't give you an answer, but when
they do give you an answer, they're like, listen, you know,
(13:11):
I just want to make sure I go through my
process make sure I go through my routine, make sure
I go through all of that, and all of that
is so that you don't make a bad pot hit
a bad shot. But shouldn't the process and the thought
process be about, Okay, what am I going to do
here to hit a good shot? Right? What do I
need to do to focus in here on hitting a really,
really good shot? And I think if you can focus
(13:32):
on trying to hit a good shot as opposed to
trying to not hit a bad shot, the mindset changes
and the way that you are going to go about
your shot would be much much faster. So I'm timing
players you know in practice now, junior golfers, high school golfers,
college golfers, even you know players that are trying to
play years ago. I've had them on the pod. He's
(13:53):
a friend, Trevor Immlman. When Trevor and I work together
back in the day on the European Tour, Trevor was slow. Listen, Trevor,
you know, I got no problem saying Trevor slow. Trevor
knows he's slow. Trevor is meticulous, which is another way
of saying slow. Right, But Trevor got a bunch of
slow play bad times like first year, second year out
on European Tour, we were in Sweden. You got another
(14:16):
bad time, so he was gonna have to pay a fine.
And the fines accumulate, so the more fines you get.
Once you get a certain amount of bad times, you
get a fine, and then if you get another bad
time in that year, I think the fine doubles trip.
But if you continue to get bad times for slow play,
the finds escalate. And Trevor was about to get popped
for a pretty big number. I mean it was it
(14:37):
was five figures, right, And he was a rookie and stuff,
and so I actually the old kind of legend on
the European Tour, John Paramore, the head rules official, just
one of the coolest people you could ever meet. I
mean he was just a prince of a guy, I
mean a gentleman. I actually said to John, I said, listen,
we've got to try and fix this with Trevor. And
(14:58):
so in one of the practice I had John Paramore
come out and ride around with us for nine holes
and time Trevor. And when Trevor got out of time
or went over is a lot of time, he was like,
you're out of time, and I think it really kind
of helped Trevor see how to maybe streamline his routine.
I think a lot of it is you're trying to
get and we're not talking about tour golfers, right. I
(15:19):
mean sometimes when you go out on a golf course
and you're trying to get around a golf course, drive
around a golf course. I do that sometimes just to
go out and kind of take a look at the
golf course, and you'll get behind a group. I'm not playing,
I'm just riding around taking a look at We just
redid all our greens at the Floridian, did a couple
of redesigns some of the holes. So I did this
the other day. I wanted to go out our sixth
(15:39):
law re redesigned it. Wanted to go out and take
a look, and went out, drove around. I was pulling
up to the sixth hole and there was a group
before on the team. These were all like mid handicappers, right,
you know, just average recreational, everyday golfers, right, And so
I was trying to get around them and I had
to wait for them to tee off. Four of them.
The amount of time it took for four people to
(16:01):
tee off was a joke, Like it took forever to
have four people stand up and make golf swings in
hit a golf ball, and I just was blown away
at how long it took. And I don't think finds
are the answers. I really really don't. There was a
player who plays on the PGA Tour and is a
(16:23):
human rain delay. It's a glacier. That's how slow he is.
Everybody knows he's slow. Nobody wants to get paired with
the He won a tournament, made a poor on the
last hole, was on TV, and the last four or
five holes the back nine was just a joke. I
mean I think there were almost a hole and a
half two holes behind. This player made a great up
and down on the eighteenth hole to end up winning
(16:44):
by one. You wanted how to stop slow play. The
rules official walks up and goes, oh, and by the way,
you didn't win, We've docked you a stroke penalty. You're
going back to the eighteenth hole. You're now in a
playoff because of slow play. That would fix it. Finding
somebody fifty grand that's just made three million, four million,
two and a half million. It just doesn't work right.
(17:05):
It doesn't work. It might work early on, like I said,
the story I told about Trevor Immlman for rookies, but
the tour players and listen, there are some superstar household
names on all of the tours that are slow that
everybody knows slow. And then the other thing I think
that would change things is there's been zero transparency from
(17:26):
certainly from the PGA to there's a list of players
how much they're paying in slow play finds, how many
bad times they're getting, but none of that information ever
gets released, right, it's all kept in house. I think
if the fans knew how much certain players were getting fined, right,
how much they were paying over the course of the
(17:47):
year in slow play finds, I think the player's persona
might be different right in the public's eyes and the fans' eyes,
in the media's eyes, and I think maybe that would
somewhat be a catalyst to where you didn't want your
public image. I mean, listen, we all know who the
slow players are by the eye test, right by the
players in the group that they play with, if you're
(18:09):
following that, like, we know who those are. But if
there was a master list, and you could look at
you know, like every year, like the most penalized team
in the NFL. Right, you know who that is, right?
You know who the most penalized team in the NFL is.
I think if the tours would list slow play fines,
how many bad times where the public could go and
take a look at it. I think it would change
(18:29):
the way that the slow players played, I really do.
I think it would force them to kind of maybe
say listen, I don't want to have this image, but
I just don't think finds work. And I've talked to
a couple of rules officials that have said, listen, we
don't want to give a player a stroke penalty that
could affect their livelihood. Right, So you could give someone
(18:51):
a slow pay penalty one stroke and they end up
missing the cut and then they don't have an opportunity
to make money that week. I get that argument, and
I unders stand it. I don't agree with it because
I think that is just perpetuating the myth. And then
when they do find players, when they do give players
(19:11):
penalty strokes, it's never a player of any significance, Right,
It's never a superstar that is slow. It's always someone
that's at the back of the field, maybe an amateur,
maybe a qualifier and stuff, but it's never a superstar
that everybody knows is slow, right, that just doesn't happen.
So I just I think everybody in the game knows
(19:32):
its slow play is a problem. But I just question
if the powers that be really want to fix it
because every year we talk about it, every year they
say they're going to change it. And what it's doing.
It trickles down everything in the professional game, trickles down
to the average golfer, from the clothes that they wear,
(19:52):
from the mannerisms, from the swings, from the waggles to
the shoes to the potter. Right, everybody's trying to and
you'll the best players in the world. And one of
the really cool things about golf unlike professional football. Yeah,
you can go to a football game and wear a jersey, right,
and pretend like you're a part of the team, and
that's how you're showing your fandom. But in golf, you
(20:14):
can buy all of the equipment that your favorite player plays.
You can buy his driver, the same shaft with the
same grip. Do that with every club in the bag.
You could get the same wedges, you get the same
stamps on the wedges, you get the same putter, same
grip on the putting right. You can emulate that, and
you can buy all that. Like nobody's buying shoulder pads
and all the stuff that you would need helmets to
(20:36):
play in the NFL. No one's buying that stuff, right,
So everyone is trying to emulate what PJ door player
is doing, especially junior golfers, college golfers, high school golfers
and stuff like, they're definitely trying to emulate it. And
so a lot of times you watch enough golf on
TV and you see how many looks these guys are taken,
and how elaborate some of the routines, I mean, some
(20:56):
of the routines on the putting greens are I mean,
they're just so much going on, so many reads, taking
so much time, so many looks, And so that is
trickling down to junior golf. That is trickling down to
high school golf. It's trickling down to college golf, and
those junior golf, high level junior golf at the AJGA level,
(21:19):
high school golf, high level high school golf, college golf,
Big Division I college program to joke how slow it is.
I mean, the rounds just take forever, So be ready
to hit when it's your turn. I understand that there
are great rules in golf, and I understand that there's
history and tradition and all of that stuff. But as
(21:41):
we come to the end of twenty twenty four, can
we just play ready golf? Right? Can we just play
ready golf? If you're ready to hit and you're not
in the line of sight of your other player, you're
not going to affect their shot, and you're ready to go,
pull the train and hit it, hit it. You don't
(22:02):
need to wait. In tournaments, they have to wait, right.
In tournaments, by the rules, they have to wait. But
if you're not in a tournament, you're just playing at home,
say to your playing partners, hey, guys, any chance we
can play ready golf today? If you're ready to go, peggett,
send it, hit it, go right. If you're not gonna
get in somebody else's way, right, if you're on the
(22:23):
putting green, if someone's got a forty footer and you've
knocked it in there fifteen feet and you're not in
their line, and you're not gonna be in their through
line and they're taking a bunch of time and stuff,
and you're ready to go. Say hey, I'm ready to go.
Do you mind if I go ahead and putt right?
Play ready golf, be ready to go. When it's your turn,
(22:47):
take your practice swings and do all of the drills
and the mimics and all that stuff. Do all that
stuff while the other guys are hitting, and you can
get out of the other player's line of sight right,
you can get out of that. I think sometimes people
don't want to do that because they're like, I don't
want to mess them up. But you can make your
practice swings right so that way as soon as the
other player has hit their shot, so you've done it
(23:07):
in the middle of the fairway, you're the longest right.
You're playing a group of three. By the time the
other two people have hit, you should be already walking
into it and be ready to go because you've had
ample time to get the club, get the yardage, figure
out the lie, figure out the wind, figure out where
you're trying to land it. You've got ample time to
(23:28):
do that. But on the PGA Tour you've got forty
seconds to do that, and so time yourself, go out,
put your phone in your pocket, hit the stop watch,
put it in your back pocket and say, all right,
I'm gonna try and hit the shot in under forty seconds.
Put a timer on. We're starting to do that a
lot with our juniors. We're putting them in drills and
in situations where there's time constraint to where they can't
(23:50):
take a lot of time, so they have to think
clear and they have to make better decisions. But I
like what Charlie Hall said, love it. It's never gonna happen.
Maybe it's a little too much, but it's not getting
any better. I actually think it's getting worse. I think
slow play is getting worse year on year. It's getting
(24:12):
worse at the competitive level. Without a doubt, at the
elite competitive level, slow play is a massive, massive issue.
It just is. And I just think that if everybody
would be ready to go focus on hitting good shots,
do all of your information gathering before your playing partners hit,
(24:32):
and then have a specific routine that you stick with, right,
I mean, do you need five six practice swings? I
mean I watched the guy today on the golf course,
a twenty five handicapper off on a tea box. The
guy made six practice swings and then backed off and
then got back in and made two more. You're like, dude,
what are you doing? And then do you think the
shot was good? Rarely do I see a player take
(24:54):
an enormous amount of time. We see this at the
Elite Tour level because obviously they're the best players in
the world world. So some of the slowest players in
the game are also some of the best players in
the game. Right when they're slow, they hit good shots. Rarely,
if ever, do I see someone take an eternity in
their information gathering and then all the waggles and the
(25:14):
practice swings. Rarely do I see a player hit a
good shot and in my head, I'm like, you could
have gotten up there, not made a practice swing, had
one waggle, took a look at the target, and hit
the exact same shitty golf shot and done it in
under forty seconds, done it under twenty seconds. So next
time you go out to play, think about your routine.
(25:35):
See if you can maybe scale back your routine and
work on on the driving range and say, all right,
let me tie myself and see if I can get
my routine. You know, all the practice swings, all the
drill feels, everything that I need to do to hit
the golf ball. Give yourself the tour mark, start it
a minute, and then see if you can get it
down to forty seconds. Right, So time yourself. There's timers
on everybody's phones. Time it. See if you can hit one.
(25:57):
Go through your full routine and under a minute, and
then start pairing it down and say, all right, let
me see if I can get it to fifty. And
then let's see if I can get it to forty.
And I'm gonna go out on a limb and say,
you might find that you play better because you're gonna
have to think faster, and you're gonna have to think less,
and you're gonna have to rely a little bit more
on being an athlete and instinct and things like that.
(26:20):
But I take my hat off to Charlie for having
the guts to put that out there. It's controversial, it's
never gonna happen. Maybe it's an overreach, but something needs
to be done about slow play and we got to
fix it. So ready golf, be ready when it's your turn,
and if you're ready to go, send it. Son of
(26:40):
a butcher comes to you almost every week. Rate review,
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Can't thank everybody enough
for listening. We will be back next week.
It's the son of which podcast. I'm your host Claude
Harmon solo episode of the pod this week. I just
got back. I was over at the LPGA CME Globe
there kind of tour championship season ending for the LPGA Tour.
I was over there with the Marina Alex. I saw
Charlie Hull and I wanted to touch on some stuff.
Charlie said last week she was in the last group
(00:22):
last week with Nellye Korda, had a chance to win,
didn't get it done. Nelly Quorda won again. I mean,
what an unbelievable year, and no joke. I got to
sit and watch Nelly Quorda hit golf balls for the
last three days and if she's hitting golf balls on
the driving range, I'm gonna sit and just I mean,
it's like golf porn. I mean, the golf swing's just
so good. You know the work she's done with Jamie Mulligan.
(00:45):
But I just when you watch Nellie's golf swing, I mean,
she is a player that I will stop and watch
hit golf balls. It's that good. So she is a
privilege to watch. But it was Charlie Hall that made
some comments about slow play, which is a serious issue
(01:06):
on every single tour. It's taking you know, over five
and a half hours to play golf in a tournament,
which is just it's just ridiculous, and slow play is
nothing new, right, And the thing is, this is just
my opinion, but if the tours wanted to fix this,
they could fix it, right, they could fix slow play,
but it doesn't seem like they want to fix it.
(01:29):
So it was Charlie Hall that said, what was her quote,
She said, I'm pretty ruthless. If you have three bad
times in a year, you lose your card. She's like,
that would stop, so pay immediately. You know what, She's
one hundred percent right now. They're never going to do that.
That might be a little bit extreme. The powers that
be are never going to do that, but historically what
(01:50):
they've done in the past is if you get a
certain amount of bad times and you get fined and
stuff like that. Again solely my opinion, but I don't
think the finds work. I mean certainly not on the
PGA tour. Those guys make so much money. If you're
a big star, and there are some big stars that
you know, everybody knows theyre slower The thing about slow
play that drives me crazy, and I think drives everybody
(02:12):
crazy that's involved, certainly at the professional level, is everybody
on tour PGA Tour, Champions Tour, dp World Tour, LPGA Live,
everybody that plays on those tours, everybody associated with those tours,
everybody involved with those tours knows exactly who the slow
players are. Every player knows who the slow players are.
(02:34):
Every caddy knows who the slow players are. Every rules
official knows who the slow players are. Every tour commissioner
knows who the slow players are. All the media know
who they are. Everybody in the game knows who the
slow players are. And the players that play fast don't
affect the people that play slow because they just keep
playing slow. But slow play dramatically affects fast players. I
(02:55):
happen to work for two of the fastest players in
the game, Dustin Johnson and Brooks kept goa. They are fast, right,
DJ maybe gets a little bit slower on the greens,
But you know, the camera guys that you talk to
from CBS or NBC or ESPN. If DJ's in the
group and he's last to hit, they're kind of standing
behind two of the players. They can't get the camera
(03:16):
behind DJ fast enough because he's already gonna pull the trigger.
So when fast players are paired with slow players, and
everyone knows who the slow players are, right, I mean,
there will be players that you get paired with and
you'll just go, oh man, we're gonna be on the
clock NonStop. And that's the thing, right, So they tie
the players. They have a certain amount of time. I
(03:37):
think it's around forty seconds to hit your shot. There's
some different rules if it's on a par three, if
you're third to play, you're out of position, all that,
but generally it's about forty seconds. And I think most
of the time they'll give the guys up to a minute.
So you've get forty seconds to hit a shot right
on a golf course, competitive around the golf So what
I'm gonna do right now, okay, is I got my phone.
(04:01):
I'm going to start my stopwatch. I am not going
to say anything, and I am going to stop when
we get to forty seconds. Okay, three, two, one go.
(04:54):
So that was forty seconds. And I did that to
prove a point, right, that should have seen like a
really long time of just dead air that's forty seconds.
That's how much time you've got to hit a golf ball.
So if you can't hit a golf ball in forty seconds,
my question is, what the hell are you doing? Like,
what is taking so long? And I think one of
(05:15):
the things that we're starting to see, and I think
one of the reasons why slow play is such an
issue is you go watch junior golf, you go watch
AJJA golf, you go watch high school golf, you go
watch college golf. It's like watching a glad. I mean,
they are playing so slow. We have a college tournament
at my club, the Floridian every year of the vast
Bar Collegiate Invitational. They can't finish, like, they can't finish,
(05:38):
they run out of daylight. I think it took one
of the final groups last week on the LPG almost
five hours forty seconds. They finished in the dark. Now
the quarter had to finish in the dark on Saturday night.
You couldn't even see the flag because they're running out
of daylight because they can't finish faster. So everyone knows
they've got X amount of time, right, And what happens
is the slow players will just do their own thing
(06:01):
until the group gets put on the clock, right, and
as soon as the rules officials come out and say, okay,
you guys are on the clock, the fast players all
look at them and say, you know this isn't me,
and the rules officials, the tour officials will go, yeah, no,
we know it's not you. But we've got to put
the whole group on so they know who's the slow player,
they know who's the fast player. So what ends up
(06:23):
happening is once you get on the clock, you don't
want to get a bad time. The slow players speed
up and they start moving really really fast. And then
if you're not a slow player and you get out
of position and you need to take you know, time
to get yardage yourself, I've got no problem if you
need a little extra time. If you're in the rough right,
(06:45):
if you're out of position, off the tee, if you're
out of position and you now have a shot to
where you're not in a fair way, it's tough to
get a yardage. It's going to take some creativity. You're
going to have to try and you know, think on
the fly. I get that that can sometimes take a
long time. But if you're standing in the middle of
the fairway shouldn't take you two minutes to hit one.
(07:06):
And so what we're starting to see is the players
on TV that everybody is watching, right, junior golfers, high
school golfers, college golfers. They want to emulate the best
players in the world, right, they want to emulate everything
about them, their golf swings, their techniques, their routines, all
of it. But what's happening is junior golf, the pace
(07:27):
of play is just atrocious. Like it's criminal how bad
it is. Right, college golf, I mean, it's brutal, how
slow it is. I think the coaches in college golf
are basically now de facto caddies. Right, it's an individual sport.
They're walking around with their players, they're getting yardage, they're
looking at the yardage book. So at the elite Division
(07:48):
one college golf, in all the big programs, the coaches
are basically caddies. Right, They're getting the yardage, they're talking
strategy and stuff like that. But that process is taken forever.
The aim pointin from two feet is taken forever. Listen,
I'm not bashion on ame point. Right. I think there's
a simple solution to this, right, slow players kind of
(08:09):
fall into two categories. There'll be slow players that you know,
do a bunch of regrips, that do a bunch of waggles.
I mean, we know who those players are, right once
they get over the golf ball, it just takes them
forever to hit it. We know who those players are.
But what really slowing play is it's like nobody is
ready to hit their shut So if you're the first
(08:31):
person to hit, you're gonna get your information to go.
So if you're the first person to hit and you're
in a group of three, that means there's two other
players that while you're getting your yardages, while you're getting
all of your information, you and your caddy. We're talking
about tour golf now, it's like, what are you doing.
You should be getting your yardage, looking at the shot,
(08:52):
looking at the wins, so that when the player hits
and it's your turn to hit, you would think that
you'd just be ready to go. But it's almost like
I joke about it all the time, but it's almost like,
and this happens a lot in junior golf and in
high school golf and in college golf. It's like, when
it's your turn, to play. When it's your turn to pot,
when it's your turn to hit your t shot, when
(09:12):
it's your turn to hit your iron shot or whatever. Right,
it's almost like players turn into figure skaters. You know
that scene in the Olympics a figure skater where they
announce the figure skater who's next up, and they kind
of skate up, and they kind of skate around and
they skate into the middle of the rink. They throw
their arms up in the air and stuff like that,
and then they get into their pose and then they
go into their routine. And I watched this, it's like, Okay,
(09:35):
you're second in the group to hit. The player who's
hitting first, it's like they're not doing anything. It's like
they're not getting the yardage. It's like they're not looking
at the wind, they're not looking at the lie. They
have no idea what club they hit. So then as
soon as that person hit, it's like, Okay, all of
a sudden, now I'm on stage and I've got to
go through this elaborate routine. You couldn't be doing all that,
(09:57):
not distracting the other player and stuff, but you can.
You'd be getting all of your yardages. You could be
getting all of your data, gathering information and where the
wind is, where the lie is, where the pin is.
All of that. You can be doing that why somebody
else is hitting. Be ready to go when it's your
turn putting, I mean the putting green. How long does
(10:19):
it take to putt these days? It just takes forever.
And I played golf on Sunday for the first time
in about a year and a half. Right, I played
an eighteen hole round of golf, and one of the
guys that I was playing with said, man, you play
really really fast. And I'm like, I don't really think
I play fast. I just kind of get up, look
at the shot, and hit it right. I mean I
(10:40):
try and not stand over it. I try and not
have a lot of thoughts in my head. And I
think the longer you stand over a shot right, the
more waggles you take. I just I don't see golfers
taking more time, and that being about positive things, I
think the longer you stand there, in my experience, what
you see is players in their head, they're doubting that
(11:03):
their decision, they're not comfortable, they don't know what they're
trying to do, and so it just takes them forever
to hit it right. And I think if you can
just kind of be ready to go. I mean, we
walked to pro am today and you know, Marina Alex
Why teach on the Ladies Tour and four amateurs right,
and we see this across the board. How long it
(11:23):
takes golfers to hit shots, How long it takes them
to pull the club, to go through their routine, to
go through their practice swings, to figure out where they're
trying to It just takes forever. And I just don't
think that is helping golfers score better. I think the
longer you're standing there, the more time you take, you're
just creating more and more doubt. And I think what
(11:45):
players are doing, and when I ask players, this is
the response I get. I think a lot of players
that are slow are trying to make sure that they
don't leave any stone unturned in their preparation to hit
the shot right. They're going to try and take in
as much information is possible so that they don't hit
a bad shot, so that they don't mess it up.
(12:08):
And when I ask players, what are you doing? I
mean I will I film routines a lot, especially on
the putting Green. I will film players' routines in practice
and say, okay, do you realize you just took on
a fifteen foot pot. I'll say, okay, let's imagine your
first to play, right, You're first to play, and you're
(12:29):
gonna come up and mark it, okay. And what I'll
do is I'll film it and time it from the
time they mark the ball and they go into their
kind of information gathering phase. And you'll sometimes show players
you realize you took almost two minutes to hit a
fifteen foot pot. And so when they watch it back
and you film it, you watch it back and you
look at all the looks. I mean, that's another thing
(12:51):
that I talk to players about, and an effort to
try and get them to be more decisive, but an
effort to try and get them to play faster is
I'll film their routine and say, okay, hey, you just
took four looks. You just took five practice strokes. What
are the looks for? And what are the practice strucks for?
And invariably people can't give you an answer, but when
they do give you an answer, they're like, listen, you know,
(13:11):
I just want to make sure I go through my
process make sure I go through my routine, make sure
I go through all of that, and all of that
is so that you don't make a bad pot hit
a bad shot. But shouldn't the process and the thought
process be about, Okay, what am I going to do
here to hit a good shot? Right? What do I
need to do to focus in here on hitting a really,
really good shot? And I think if you can focus
(13:32):
on trying to hit a good shot as opposed to
trying to not hit a bad shot, the mindset changes
and the way that you are going to go about
your shot would be much much faster. So I'm timing
players you know in practice now, junior golfers, high school golfers,
college golfers, even you know players that are trying to
play years ago. I've had them on the pod. He's
(13:53):
a friend, Trevor Immlman. When Trevor and I work together
back in the day on the European Tour, Trevor was slow. Listen, Trevor,
you know, I got no problem saying Trevor slow. Trevor
knows he's slow. Trevor is meticulous, which is another way
of saying slow. Right, But Trevor got a bunch of
slow play bad times like first year, second year out
on European Tour, we were in Sweden. You got another
(14:16):
bad time, so he was gonna have to pay a fine.
And the fines accumulate, so the more fines you get.
Once you get a certain amount of bad times, you
get a fine, and then if you get another bad
time in that year, I think the fine doubles trip.
But if you continue to get bad times for slow play,
the finds escalate. And Trevor was about to get popped
for a pretty big number. I mean it was it
(14:37):
was five figures, right, And he was a rookie and stuff,
and so I actually the old kind of legend on
the European Tour, John Paramore, the head rules official, just
one of the coolest people you could ever meet. I
mean he was just a prince of a guy, I
mean a gentleman. I actually said to John, I said, listen,
we've got to try and fix this with Trevor. And
(14:58):
so in one of the practice I had John Paramore
come out and ride around with us for nine holes
and time Trevor. And when Trevor got out of time
or went over is a lot of time, he was like,
you're out of time, and I think it really kind
of helped Trevor see how to maybe streamline his routine.
I think a lot of it is you're trying to
get and we're not talking about tour golfers, right. I
(15:19):
mean sometimes when you go out on a golf course
and you're trying to get around a golf course, drive
around a golf course. I do that sometimes just to
go out and kind of take a look at the
golf course, and you'll get behind a group. I'm not playing,
I'm just riding around taking a look at We just
redid all our greens at the Floridian, did a couple
of redesigns some of the holes. So I did this
the other day. I wanted to go out our sixth
(15:39):
law re redesigned it. Wanted to go out and take
a look, and went out, drove around. I was pulling
up to the sixth hole and there was a group
before on the team. These were all like mid handicappers, right,
you know, just average recreational, everyday golfers, right, And so
I was trying to get around them and I had
to wait for them to tee off. Four of them.
The amount of time it took for four people to
(16:01):
tee off was a joke, Like it took forever to
have four people stand up and make golf swings in
hit a golf ball, and I just was blown away
at how long it took. And I don't think finds
are the answers. I really really don't. There was a
player who plays on the PGA Tour and is a
(16:23):
human rain delay. It's a glacier. That's how slow he is.
Everybody knows he's slow. Nobody wants to get paired with
the He won a tournament, made a poor on the
last hole, was on TV, and the last four or
five holes the back nine was just a joke. I
mean I think there were almost a hole and a
half two holes behind. This player made a great up
and down on the eighteenth hole to end up winning
(16:44):
by one. You wanted how to stop slow play. The
rules official walks up and goes, oh, and by the way,
you didn't win, We've docked you a stroke penalty. You're
going back to the eighteenth hole. You're now in a
playoff because of slow play. That would fix it. Finding
somebody fifty grand that's just made three million, four million,
two and a half million. It just doesn't work right.
(17:05):
It doesn't work. It might work early on, like I said,
the story I told about Trevor Immlman for rookies, but
the tour players and listen, there are some superstar household
names on all of the tours that are slow that
everybody knows slow. And then the other thing I think
that would change things is there's been zero transparency from
(17:26):
certainly from the PGA to there's a list of players
how much they're paying in slow play finds, how many
bad times they're getting, but none of that information ever
gets released, right, it's all kept in house. I think
if the fans knew how much certain players were getting fined, right,
how much they were paying over the course of the
(17:47):
year in slow play finds, I think the player's persona
might be different right in the public's eyes and the fans' eyes,
in the media's eyes, and I think maybe that would
somewhat be a catalyst to where you didn't want your
public image. I mean, listen, we all know who the
slow players are by the eye test, right by the
players in the group that they play with, if you're
(18:09):
following that, like, we know who those are. But if
there was a master list, and you could look at
you know, like every year, like the most penalized team
in the NFL. Right, you know who that is, right?
You know who the most penalized team in the NFL is.
I think if the tours would list slow play fines,
how many bad times where the public could go and
take a look at it. I think it would change
(18:29):
the way that the slow players played, I really do.
I think it would force them to kind of maybe
say listen, I don't want to have this image, but
I just don't think finds work. And I've talked to
a couple of rules officials that have said, listen, we
don't want to give a player a stroke penalty that
could affect their livelihood. Right, So you could give someone
(18:51):
a slow pay penalty one stroke and they end up
missing the cut and then they don't have an opportunity
to make money that week. I get that argument, and
I unders stand it. I don't agree with it because
I think that is just perpetuating the myth. And then
when they do find players, when they do give players
(19:11):
penalty strokes, it's never a player of any significance, Right,
It's never a superstar that is slow. It's always someone
that's at the back of the field, maybe an amateur,
maybe a qualifier and stuff, but it's never a superstar
that everybody knows is slow, right, that just doesn't happen.
So I just I think everybody in the game knows
(19:32):
its slow play is a problem. But I just question
if the powers that be really want to fix it
because every year we talk about it, every year they
say they're going to change it. And what it's doing.
It trickles down everything in the professional game, trickles down
to the average golfer, from the clothes that they wear,
(19:52):
from the mannerisms, from the swings, from the waggles to
the shoes to the potter. Right, everybody's trying to and
you'll the best players in the world. And one of
the really cool things about golf unlike professional football. Yeah,
you can go to a football game and wear a jersey, right,
and pretend like you're a part of the team, and
that's how you're showing your fandom. But in golf, you
(20:14):
can buy all of the equipment that your favorite player plays.
You can buy his driver, the same shaft with the
same grip. Do that with every club in the bag.
You could get the same wedges, you get the same
stamps on the wedges, you get the same putter, same
grip on the putting right. You can emulate that, and
you can buy all that. Like nobody's buying shoulder pads
and all the stuff that you would need helmets to
(20:36):
play in the NFL. No one's buying that stuff, right,
So everyone is trying to emulate what PJ door player
is doing, especially junior golfers, college golfers, high school golfers
and stuff like, they're definitely trying to emulate it. And
so a lot of times you watch enough golf on
TV and you see how many looks these guys are taken,
and how elaborate some of the routines, I mean, some
(20:56):
of the routines on the putting greens are I mean,
they're just so much going on, so many reads, taking
so much time, so many looks, And so that is
trickling down to junior golf. That is trickling down to
high school golf. It's trickling down to college golf, and
those junior golf, high level junior golf at the AJGA level,
(21:19):
high school golf, high level high school golf, college golf,
Big Division I college program to joke how slow it is.
I mean, the rounds just take forever, So be ready
to hit when it's your turn. I understand that there
are great rules in golf, and I understand that there's
history and tradition and all of that stuff. But as
(21:41):
we come to the end of twenty twenty four, can
we just play ready golf? Right? Can we just play
ready golf? If you're ready to hit and you're not
in the line of sight of your other player, you're
not going to affect their shot, and you're ready to go,
pull the train and hit it, hit it. You don't
(22:02):
need to wait. In tournaments, they have to wait, right.
In tournaments, by the rules, they have to wait. But
if you're not in a tournament, you're just playing at home,
say to your playing partners, hey, guys, any chance we
can play ready golf today? If you're ready to go, peggett,
send it, hit it, go right. If you're not gonna
get in somebody else's way, right, if you're on the
(22:23):
putting green, if someone's got a forty footer and you've
knocked it in there fifteen feet and you're not in
their line, and you're not gonna be in their through
line and they're taking a bunch of time and stuff,
and you're ready to go. Say hey, I'm ready to go.
Do you mind if I go ahead and putt right?
Play ready golf, be ready to go. When it's your turn,
(22:47):
take your practice swings and do all of the drills
and the mimics and all that stuff. Do all that
stuff while the other guys are hitting, and you can
get out of the other player's line of sight right,
you can get out of that. I think sometimes people
don't want to do that because they're like, I don't
want to mess them up. But you can make your
practice swings right so that way as soon as the
other player has hit their shot, so you've done it
(23:07):
in the middle of the fairway, you're the longest right.
You're playing a group of three. By the time the
other two people have hit, you should be already walking
into it and be ready to go because you've had
ample time to get the club, get the yardage, figure
out the lie, figure out the wind, figure out where
you're trying to land it. You've got ample time to
(23:28):
do that. But on the PGA Tour you've got forty
seconds to do that, and so time yourself, go out,
put your phone in your pocket, hit the stop watch,
put it in your back pocket and say, all right,
I'm gonna try and hit the shot in under forty seconds.
Put a timer on. We're starting to do that a
lot with our juniors. We're putting them in drills and
in situations where there's time constraint to where they can't
(23:50):
take a lot of time, so they have to think
clear and they have to make better decisions. But I
like what Charlie Hall said, love it. It's never gonna happen.
Maybe it's a little too much, but it's not getting
any better. I actually think it's getting worse. I think
slow play is getting worse year on year. It's getting
(24:12):
worse at the competitive level. Without a doubt, at the
elite competitive level, slow play is a massive, massive issue.
It just is. And I just think that if everybody
would be ready to go focus on hitting good shots,
do all of your information gathering before your playing partners hit,
(24:32):
and then have a specific routine that you stick with, right,
I mean, do you need five six practice swings? I
mean I watched the guy today on the golf course,
a twenty five handicapper off on a tea box. The
guy made six practice swings and then backed off and
then got back in and made two more. You're like, dude,
what are you doing? And then do you think the
shot was good? Rarely do I see a player take
(24:54):
an enormous amount of time. We see this at the
Elite Tour level because obviously they're the best players in
the world world. So some of the slowest players in
the game are also some of the best players in
the game. Right when they're slow, they hit good shots. Rarely,
if ever, do I see someone take an eternity in
their information gathering and then all the waggles and the
(25:14):
practice swings. Rarely do I see a player hit a
good shot and in my head, I'm like, you could
have gotten up there, not made a practice swing, had
one waggle, took a look at the target, and hit
the exact same shitty golf shot and done it in
under forty seconds, done it under twenty seconds. So next
time you go out to play, think about your routine.
(25:35):
See if you can maybe scale back your routine and
work on on the driving range and say, all right,
let me tie myself and see if I can get
my routine. You know, all the practice swings, all the
drill feels, everything that I need to do to hit
the golf ball. Give yourself the tour mark, start it
a minute, and then see if you can get it
down to forty seconds. Right, So time yourself. There's timers
on everybody's phones. Time it. See if you can hit one.
(25:57):
Go through your full routine and under a minute, and
then start pairing it down and say, all right, let
me see if I can get it to fifty. And
then let's see if I can get it to forty.
And I'm gonna go out on a limb and say,
you might find that you play better because you're gonna
have to think faster, and you're gonna have to think less,
and you're gonna have to rely a little bit more
on being an athlete and instinct and things like that.
(26:20):
But I take my hat off to Charlie for having
the guts to put that out there. It's controversial, it's
never gonna happen. Maybe it's an overreach, but something needs
to be done about slow play and we got to
fix it. So ready golf, be ready when it's your turn,
and if you're ready to go, send it. Son of
(26:40):
a butcher comes to you almost every week. Rate review,
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Can't thank everybody enough
for listening. We will be back next week.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com