The PGA Tour has been proactive in attempting to improve their product with rules changes in recent years, and that’s not always gone down well with players.
This year alone, the PGA Tour has reduced the number of fully exempt cards to 100 players, down from 125 last season, and Harris English revealed that the tour wants to remove signature events in place of around 20 equal tournaments in the future.
Right now, the first order of business is changing how event eligibility works, but back in 2019, slow play was top of the agenda.
Bryson DeChambeau was slammed by players for his slow play six years ago, which was part of the reason the PGA Tour changed several rules to speed up the game.
Those rules haven’t solved the issue, as slow play is still a problem on the PGA Tour, and Australian star Adam Scott was highly critical of the move at the time.
The rule changes that made Adam Scott call the PGA Tour a ‘laughing stock’
In 2019, the PGA Tour introduced a number of new rules to speed up play and simplify the game for fans.
These rules ranged from reducing the time players could spend looking for their ball, to allowing players to putt with the flagstick in. There were a lot of changes. It was the biggest modernization of golf in 60 years, encompassing 37 new rules.
Scott was not supportive of the overhaul, saying to the New York Times, “They’ve just written more gray areas into the game that were not necessary.”
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He continued, “We haven’t had a lot of changes in golf in the history of the game, and we’ve had a lot recently. Rules changing weekly in some cases, and it’s crazy.”
“I think we’re becoming the laughingstock.”
Two-time PGA Tour winner said new rules ‘missed the mark’
Scott wasn’t the only player to complain. Mackenzie Hughes, twice a winner on the PGA Tour, took to Twitter to comment on a number of new rules, which included forcing players to drop balls from knee height instead of shoulder height.
Although he did share his support for some changes, such as not allowing caddies to stand in players’ lines to help with alignment, and a rule change that lets players remove loose impediments in bunkers.
Hughes said: “I just went through the new rules of golf for 2019 again. I feel like a few of the changes are good (ex. caddie alignment, loose impediments in bunkers), but I feel like most of them missed the mark (ex. ball drop from knee height, damaged club, and more). Thoughts?”
Six years on, and we hardly think about these changes, but as the PGA Tour aimed to simplify the game, all they really did was confuse people.
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