It’s about time … seriously
Slow play continues to be a topic of conversation on golf's professional tours, so what will be done? Here’s a novel idea: A shot clock. Like the one used for the Shot Clock Masters. Remember it?
Is anything less popular than slow play on the PGA Tour?
Monday pro-ams? Slow greens? Air pollution? Greg Norman?
No one wants slow play. No one expected the Spanish Inquisition once upon a time, either, yet there it was.
The solution for golf is in plain sight. Basketball has a shot clock. Football has a play clock. Baseball has a pitch clock. Hockey has frozen pucks and … never mind.
Attention, golf: It’s the economy shot clock, stupid.
I’ve been a proponent for years. So have others. The reason slow play is still a problem on the PGA Tour, something Lanny Wadkins has complained about since the 1970s (and rightly so), is that the PGA Tour doesn’t crack down on slow-playing, turtle-esque players despite its many rules and regulations. Only two players have been penalized strokes for slow play since 1995. The last time it happened was 2011. You know, in the old days before John Daly looked like Bad Santa.
Twice in almost 30 years, that’s how seriously the Tour addressed slow play.
Oh, wait. Is it different now? The tour just implemented big changes for 2026 by kicking a bunch of players to the curb. The exempt list will shrink from 125 to 100. The remaining full-field tournaments will be reduced from 156 players to 144 or 120. And the big-money, FedEx Cup-points-loaded Signature Events already field a mere 72 players with no cuts — appearances fees (and valuable FedEx Cup points) for everyone lucky enough to be invited to these exclusive picnics.
These changes from “Honey, I Shrunk the Tour” were made because the PGA Tour is so concerned about speeding up the pace of play. Uh-huh.
“Hiding behind the pace of play challenges our intelligence,” veteran player Lucas Glover told Golfweek.com. “They think we’re stupid.”
Well, Glove Man, whether the Policy Board thinks you’re stupid or not, it approved the new formats and field sizes.
Initiating the use of a shot clock at tournaments could have made some of those changes unnecessary. Faster play would allow more players to navigate 18 holes even if field size was the problem. The Tour’s changes appear to be aimed at the game’s top players, who now have the clout to pull up the ladder behind them while they roll around in fields of golf.
Meanwhile, an undetermined number of hundreds of players will get bumped out of professional golf through the trickle-down effect. Some of them might have been late bloomers, like Steve Stricker or Tom Lehman, but we’ll never know.
The main cause of slow play on the PGA Tour isn’t field size, it’s “The kabuki dance they do on the greens,” as a golf industry friend of mine refers to Tour players putting out. Sure, the faster the greens roll and the more slope they have, the tougher it is to ascertain the read. That takes time. But unless you’re first to putt, you’ve got ample time before your turn to get most of that done.
The second biggest slow play cause is distance. Nearly every par 5 on the PGA Tour is reachable in two for a majority of the field. Players in the fairway must wait for the green to clear to hit the second shots, thus causing those on the tee to wait, thus causing those coming off the previous green to wait behind the guys waiting on the tee, thus causing … well, you get the idea. It’s the 805 Freeway in Los Angeles at rush hour.
The shortsighted trend of creating drivable par 4s is another path to slow play. Players on the tee wait for the green to clear before they can hit their drives, causing more backups. Hasn’t anybody at the Tour thought of that?
Nobody wants to discuss how distance causes slow play because there is no answer for that. Sure, golf’s governing bodies are going to roll back the ball in 2028 to put a slight damper on distance but unless they add a second component to the rollback, like limiting the size of driver heads, it’s probably not going to make a game-changing solution.
Plus, the USGA has a spotty record on equipment rules. It agreed to allow square grooves in a 1991 lawsuit settlement, then reneged on that agreement in 2009 and banned them again. The change did nothing to affect scoring in the pro ranks.
So, a shot clock is pro golf’s answer. It is not a crazy idea and it’s not impossible. In fact, it’s already been done.
Meet the greatest tournament ever played — the 2018 Shot Clock Masters, a European Tour (now DP World Tour) event at Diamond Country Club in Atzenbrugg, Austria. Each player was allotted 40 seconds to hit their shot once it was their turn, with the first player to hit in each group getting an extra 10 seconds. Each competitor was allowed two time extensions — or timeouts. It was a one-stroke penalty if a player didn’t hit the shot before time expired.
What happened? The European Tour cut 30 minutes from its average pace of play to 4 hours, 13 minutes. (PGA Tour players are hard pressed to beat that these days even in Sunday twosomes.) Five hours on weekday rounds are common on the PGA and LPGA Tours.
Five threesomes played the Shot Clock Masters’ opening round in less than four hours and while it was far too small a sample to draw a conclusion, the Shot Clock Masters’ first-round scoring average dropped from 72.96 to 72.36. So they played faster and better? Yes.
Only four penalties were assessed during the tournament. Most of the offenders admitted they had simply forgotten there was a shot clock.
The European Tour had a shot-clock and timer with each group — a total of 26 shot-clock timers. The PGA Tour utilizes far more volunteers than that for its ShotLink operation and it already has a walking scorer with every group.
The Shot Clock Masters was a masterful experiment that exceeded all expectations. Only one problem: The sponsor didn’t re-up so it was a one-off despite being a huge success.
American Billy Horschel played in the Shot Clock Masters and tweeted this in 2018: “Loving this shot-clock deal … Amazing how fast rounds go when players play within the rules. And guys are still playing great golf. Shocking!”
This tournament happened on Keith Pelley’s watch as the tour’s CEO. Pelley told Sky Sports at the time, “We’ve seen that this (shot clock) can definitely improve the game. It also shows that if players get into the right mindset, they can play quicker. It makes a better viewer experience, a better customer experience and golfers love it as well.
“The response that we've had socially and from the players themselves has been overwhelming. When you catapult ahead 10 years, we'll be saying how archaic what we did in 2018 was.”
Pelley was prophetic but in the wrong way. The shot-clock concept is archaic because seven years later, no one else has had the guts or foresight to try something that was a proven success.
Meanwhile, Pelley is out of golf and into the National Hockey League, which has frozen pucks and … never mind. He took a job with the Toronto Maple Leafs as president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment.
So far, he is the only the second member of the Stop Slow Play Hall of Fame. I’m grandfathering in the late Arnold Palmer, who made a series of commercials for the USGA about the topic with the catchphrase, “While we’re young!” Those spots were a great idea but were aimed at recreational golfers, not tour pros, and urged faster play without offering ways to do it, such as quit looking for lost balls for so long.
The LPGA’s Charley Hull might get nominated for my SSP Hall of Fame. She recently suggested, possibly half-joking, that every slow-play timing should be a two-shot penalty and players should lose their tour cards if they get three such timings.
Harsh. Ruthless, even. But effective.
The slow-play rules currently in place don’t work because officials are loathe to affect a tournament’s outcome by slapping slowpokes with strokes, because millions of dollars are at stake and because they see these players every week and are friendly with many of them.
The shot clock works because it’s black and white, yes or no. Did you get the shot off before the buzzer sounded? Tour officials don’t have to make a judgment call.
Major-league baseball cut 27 minutes off the average game time since initiating a pitch clock in 2023 (along with some other modifications on pickoff attempts and pitching changes). An average nine-inning game in 2022 was 3 hours, 3 minutes. Last season, it was 2 hours, 36 minutes.
A shot clock for golf would be a win-win for a sponsor, who would get huge amounts of attention for supporting this innovative and surely popular change.
Rolex has been the LPGA’s official timekeeper since 1980 and sponsors multiple golf events and the Rolex World Rankings for women’s golf. Wouldn’t a Shot Clock Masters be right up its alley?
Also, the shot clock adds an element of competition that other sports have, but golf doesn’t — the buzzer-beater moment. CBS’ Jim Nantz loves those in the NCAA Basketball Championships. Why not in golf?
Imagine this: “Friends, the gallery is hushed here at the 18th green as Scottie Scheffler iooks over a 20-foot birdie putt to win the Masters. He’s taking a long look but Sir Nick, I think he’s forgotten about the shot clock. It’s down to eight, seven, six … Now Scheffler sees the clock and you can see the surprise on his face. He hurries into his stance … three, two, one … and strokes the putt off just before the buzzer echoes through the cathedral of pines. The putt is tracking, tracking … it’s in! Great Scott, he’s won the Masters again and beaten Father Time with one for the ages in one magic moment going going gone slamma-jamma ding dong.”
Or something like that.
The Shot Clock Masters rocked. Too bad it was ahead of its time.
Let’s fix that.
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Lasers are allowed in PGA Championship. seems to work just fine. good point. thx!
Limit caddie involvememt. Sometimes on the LPGA it looks like the player is a puppet or robot.