At the 2013 Masters the 14-year-old Chinese amateur Guan Tianlang was penalised a shot for slow play on the 17th hole of his second round.
It caused such a tremor that both of his playing partners, Ben Crenshaw and Matteo Manassero, were invited to the media centre, even though neither of them had a score worth talking about. Between them they were asked 20 questions, 19 of which were about Tianlang.
Part of what made it so extraordinary was that the teenager was the first player to be penalised for slow play at a PGA Tour event since Glen Day at the Honda Classic, 18 years earlier, even though pace of play had been a stone in golf’s shoe for all that time.
What also made it extraordinary was that of all the repeat offenders on tour they brought the guillotine down on the youngest player ever to play in the Masters. Remarkably, Tianlang still made the cut.
Did they have the guts to go after any of the big guys? A year ago, they balked at yet another chance. For the opening two rounds Tyrell Hatton was fuming in a log jam behind a group that included Patrick Reed.
Reed, the former Masters champion and LIV defector, was clearly the problem and Hatton has never been known to bottle his feelings. After round two he unloaded on Reed in the media centre.
“The lads in front have been so slow,” he said. “It’s pretty poor form from the officials that it took 32 holes to put them on the clock. Yesterday they’d lost a hole and a half, and then for the second round they were just brutal.”
Scroll back 11 years: Guan’s group were deemed out of position on the 10th hole, he was put on the clock on the 12th hole and was warned on the 13th. Four holes later he was penalised a shot. The whole disciplinary process took just seven holes. And yet Reed was allowed to stroll around Augusta for 32 holes before he became the subject of light touch regulation.
A year earlier, 2023, the pace of play among the leaders in the final round of the Masters was so tortuous that Brooks Koepka took a swipe at Patrick Cantlay in his press conference. Koepka was playing alongside Jon Rahm in the final group, directly preceded by Cantlay and Vicktor Hovland.
Cantlay – a recidivist, unrepentant, high-profile offender - was clearly the problem. On one hole Hovland was so worn out from waiting that he took his chip shot before Cantlay and his caddie had reached the green. It was an offence against golf’s good graces, but it paled alongside Cantlay’s heedless foot-dragging.
“The group in front of us was brutally slow,” said Koepka. “Jon went to the bathroom like seven times during the round and we were still waiting.”
Cantlay, however, escaped the censure that was meted out to the 14-year-old Chinese amateur.
Augusta has many idiosyncratic customs and practices, such as the caddies wearing white jumpsuits and a farcical stipulation that the fans must be referred to as “patrons”. One of the least well known is that it does not announce when groups are put on the clock. It is as if they would prefer the issue to be swept under the carpet and not discussed in public.
Until very recently, that approach would have been common practice on the professional tours. The scourge of slow play would erupt every so often to a chorus of exasperated tut-tutting and virtue-signalling, but nothing of substance was ever done.
Since the beginning of this year, and probably for the first time, it has felt like a full-blown crisis. The PGA Tour is still locked in unresolved peace talks with LIV and all the while is losing its television audience. For committed viewers, the pace of play has become oppressive.
Even the PGA Tour’s broadcast partners have abandoned some of their obsequiousness to address the problem. On the last day of the Farmers Insurance tournament at Torey Pines early in the season, the leading groups took a staggering three hours to complete the front nine.
Dottie Pepper, a two-time Major winner and CBS veteran on-course commentator, scolded the players that week, calling on them to have “respect” for the fans, the broadcasters and their fellow players. A week earlier, at the American Express, the final group had taken 5 hours and 39 minutes.
At the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am every player that appeared in front of a microphone was asked about slow play. The PGA Tour sent out a number of executives to discuss it with the media on-site, peddling some news lines about proposed solutions which were eventually announced by Jay Monahan in the middle of March.
As you might expect they were far from draconian. In a name-and-shame initiative, player statistics will be published later in the year; from the middle of April, new slow play penalties will be trialled on the Korn Ferry Tour; and at selected tournaments, after the Masters, players will be allowed use Range Finders in order to speed up play.
Monahan has been a weak leader for the tour. These solutions are toothless.
The issue reached a grotesque tipping point at the Houston Open a couple of weeks ago. On the 8th hole, Min Woo Lee, the eventual winner, called a rules official for a routine penalty drop which, in the end, took 12 minutes to execute. This infuriated his playing partner Alejandro Tosti, who was already fuming about the pace of play.
Tosti has a reputation for explosiveness and on this occasion his response was to deliberately walk 50 yards behind his playing partners on the 12th, so that the hole took an age to complete. Jim “Bones” McKay, the on-course commentator and former caddie, called him out in the live TV broadcast to which Tosti replied the following day in an expletive-laden tweet. By the time he deleted it the message had landed.
Tosti is not in the field at the Masters this week, but the problem will be plain to see. Will Augusta lead the charge on reform?
Since Guan, the only other player to be penalised for slow play at Augusta is Anna Davis. She was 19 when she fell foul of a one stroke penalty at the 2021 Augusta National Women’s Amateur.
The pattern is clear to see.
