Kevin Na
Kevin Na's endless fidgeting over the ball at the Players Championship has brought the endless issue of slow play to the front of golf discussions again. Maybe it will be a good thing in the end that his mind-bending habits have raised the problem of slow play again.
But for any progress to be made, the PGA Tour has to put the hammer down on slow players by penalizing them with shots, not money. Tiger Woods, who plays quickly, said after his final round, "Shots are money." They could represent a lot more money than the fines that the policy mandates, but more to their potential effectiveness, a penalty of one stroke could mean the difference between winning and losing.
The PGA Tour's current policy allows a golfer 40 seconds to play a shot from the fairway from the time it's his turn, and 60 seconds to hit his putt. Players are put "on the clock" when they're suspected of being slow. A warning is given to a player who gets a first "bad time." Woods said never mind the warning, slap the dawdler with a stroke right away.
The second bad time during a round is supposed to result in a one-stroke penalty and a $5,000 (all currency U.S.) fine. A third is supposed to generate a two-stroke penalty and a $10,000 fine. A fourth time compels a disqualification.
But the PGA Tour doesn't enforce its own policy and rounds often exceed five hours. Dillard Pruitt was the last player assessed a one-stroke penalty, in 1992. Pruitt, 50, is now a PGA Tour rules official.
Na shouldn't be blamed for his inability to commit to a shot. He was open about his difficulties and gained a lot of sympathy, as everybody wondered how he would handle the last round of the Players with a one-shot lead. He cut down on his waggles, shot 76, and placed seventh.
Maybe he lost ground because he got out of his rhythm, if that's what one can call his stops and starts. Still, sympathy has no place here. Golf is cutthroat. It's survival of the fittest, or should be. The player who missed a cut doesn't make a cent. The PGA Tour needs to make Na and other slow players – Bernhard Langer was very slow, and Ben Crane of the current crop of PGA Tour players is another – pay the price by being penalized with strokes.
The PGA Tour doesn't do this, so it's hard to know whether the punishment would speed things up. But golfers can always snap to it, even the slowest of them. Who hasn't noticed how quickly slow players move when darkness is approaching and they want to get their rounds in? Suddenly they're playing snappy golf, not sickeningly slow golf. They probably play better because they think less.
Slow play is a virus that has been hurting the game for years, and it's getting worse.
It boggles the mind to see how many ways golfers can play slowly. There's the golfer who needs precise yardage for every shot, even chip shots. The other day a golfer at a Toronto course was spotted using his laser rangefinder from just a few yards short of the green.
Or how about the recreational golfer who makes a bad swing and must – just must – hit another ball? Yet this golfer never practises. He also doesn't notice that he's fallen two holes behind the group ahead of him. Or there's the golfer on the phone, or texting. Or … you get the message.
Na didn't get whatever message he was looking for from his brain so that he could start his swing. Meanwhile, the message all golfers should get is to move it. Now. Please.
RELATED LINK: More blogs from Lorne Rubenstein
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf's Mysterious Genius (2012). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein