ST. ANDREWS, Scotland – Can’t figure out why professional golf is so slow? Get to St. Andrews as fast as you can.
The pace of play over the first two days gives new meaning to the term snail’s pace. Snails would be embarrassed by the time it’s taking the women to go around the Old Course.
Some of these women should have shells on their backs.
The last two groups failed to finish on Thursday, even though the final two tee times were 3:38 and 3:49. It doesn’t get dark in Scotland this time of year until well after 9 p.m.
But with rounds taking as long as five hours and fifty minutes, no wonder they had to come back on Friday morning to complete the last three holes.
These are extenuating circumstances at St. Andrews.
The 14 double greens mean that players have to be conscious of another group on the same green playing the opposite nine.
Moreover, most tees are very close to the greens, meaning that players often have to wait to putt until the group ahead has teed off.
Then there is the inevitable bottleneck that builds up out at the loop, where the 7th fairway crosses the 11th hole.
Even so, rounds lasting nearly six hours are hardly a glowing advertisement for the game.
Play didn’t exactly get any quicker on Friday. Paula Creamer teed off at 11:37am and holed out on the 18th green at 5:19.
That’s five hours and forty-two minutes. If I ever spend that much time on a golf course I will get homesick.
There was an incident on the first hole that highlighted one of the reasons why play is so slow.
Creamer’s playing companion Se Ri Pak hit her approach shot into the Swilken Burn on the first hole en route to a double-bogey six.
Anyone familiar with the Old Course knows the Swilken Burn is hardly the Mississippi River. It’s about five yards wide, if that. Trying to discern the point of entry is not exactly rocket science.
Besides, Pak’s ball was clearly visible in the burn. The option available to her was crystal clear. In fact, any handicap golfer worth his or her salt would have taken about five seconds to figure out that the correct play was to drop another ball, keeping the point of entry between him or her and the flag.
Not Pak. She called for a ruling.
It took the rules official about eight minutes by my watch to get to the scene. She turned up in her cart, got out, looked at where the ball was lying and pointed to the spot where Pak was to drop the ball and left.
The rules official was there for less than a minute.
At least Creamer and Japan’s Momoko Ueda had the good sense to finish the hole while Pak waited for the rules official. But why couldn’t a player with Pak’s experience figure out the most basic of rules?
Another example of why play is so turgid came from the Natalie Gulbis, Ai Miyazato and Cristie Kerr group.
The concept of being ready to play seemed to be lost on Gulbis on the second hole. Kerr and Miyazato played their shots, and only then did Gulbis start to consult her yardage book with her caddie,
Why she couldn’t have been doing that while they were playing is beyond me.
These incidents may seem trivial, but in a round of golf they all add up – to nearly six hours.
The last thing golf needs this week is slow play. Not when there’s a crying need to get more young girls into the game.
Scottish golf in particular is desperate for more young girls. Numbers are down at the Home of Golf. According to research conducted in 2005, there were only 2,700 girls under the age of 18 playing the game as opposed to 25,000 boys.
Scotland is lagging way behind other countries. Sweden, for example, has 22,000 girls taking to the fairways.
No wonder there is an initiative underway to double the number of Scottish girls playing the game.
It’s a tall ask in an age when many kids prefer to be online than reading lines.
So the last thing young girls here at St. Andrews need is to get bored watching the world’s elite inch their way around the Old Course.
The LPGA is proud of the slogan “These girls rock.” That might be true, but they don’t exactly roll.
They need to if they are to inspire a new generation to take up the game.
Posted: 8/3/2007
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