There is some better news for golf fans hoping to see the PGA Tour act when it comes to addressing slow play after what has been such a frustrating start to the year for the tour.
The opening events of 2025 have been largely overshadowed by slow play problems at both The American Express and the Farmers Insurance Open. While fans now expect rounds to take a long time, it was no surprise that there was so much criticism after the final round of The American Express – which took almost six hours.
Meanwhile, there were further complaints when the leaders took three hours to finish the front nine on Saturday at the Farmers.
The PGA Tour has not been helped by the start of TGL, which has shown how quickly some of the world’s best players can hit their shots when there is a timer. But it is surely in the tour’s best interests to act sooner rather than later.
PGA Tour told there is an easy way to fix slow play problem
Speaking on Subpar this week, Colt Knost hit out at how toothless the current policy is in eradicating slow play.
He went on to suggest what he believes to be the ‘easy’ solution to the problem.
“We could talk about this all day, the pace of play policy the PGA Tour has sucks. We were talking about it on radio today. Basically, a rules official will come up to you when you’re out of position and be like, ‘hey, you need to close the gap’. If you don’t close the gap, then they come up, ‘hey, you’re on the clock’. Okay, cool. ‘You have 40 seconds to play your shot’. If you get a bad time, ‘okay, that was your first bad time, next one’s going to be a stroke’. You have to f— up four times in order to get a penalty,” he said.
“No, here’s how we need to do this. Okay, you’re behind, you’re on the clock. You get a bad time, you know you have 40 seconds, boom, there’s one shot. You get another one? Boom, there’s two shots. And then you get a third one? Guess what, you’re terrible, you’re out. This is taking too long, this should be so easy to fix, it’s horrible.”
The PGA Tour could soon take action on tackling slow play
The PGA Tour has conducted a survey with fans, and are now considering a number of changes – including sharing data on the average shot time of the players.
It is definitely a start. However, you could understand if some felt that the penalties still need to be stronger. Ultimately, fans can probably have a decent guess at the slowest players anyway, so confirmation of that may not inspire much of a change.
There was support for Charley Hull’s suggestion to strip players of tour cards on the LPGA Tour late last year. And clearly, more and more are starting to favour harsher sanctions.
There will be times when players are unfairly treated, when perhaps they are enduring an off-day and needing more time to get their ball around the course. But some will probably feel that the problem has reached a stage where the tour has no choice but to make significant changes that some may not like.
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