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Stenson left fuming following slow play debacle at Bay Hill

By: Golf Shake | Tue 24 Mar 2015


Post by Golf Journalist, Nick Bonfield 


Well, I wondered how long it would take for the issue of slow play to rear its ugly head in 2015. So far this year, we've enjoyed a series of memorable tournaments - particularly on the PGA Tour – without much discussion of pace of play. For once, golf has been talked about exclusively in a positive light - with post-tournament coverage focusing on the immense skill and massive excitement levels on offer, rather than any unsavory or untoward factors. How irritating, then, that golf's biggest scourge came to the surface the week after the Valspar Championship - a tournament many, myself included, believed to be the best of the year so far.

During the final round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, the final pairing of Henrik Stenson and Morgan Hoffman were placed on the clock on the 15th hole. The Swede proceeded to three-putt the 15th and 16th hole, eventually missing 20-foot birdie putt on the 72nd to miss out on a play-off by one shot. After the conclusion of the tournament, a clearly disgruntled Stenson said: "It's hard when you don't feel like you can take the time you want. It's busy enough trying to close out a golf tournament and play the finish holes without being on the clock. I did not see the reason for that really."

Henrik Stenson

In my mind, the ineptitude of PGA Tour officials has been a major contributory factor towards this poisonous issue. Stenson rightly feels aggrieved for being put on the clock, even though it was warranted because of the final group's pace of play. That sentence, in itself, shows how absurd the situation has become. Everyone understands that rules are in place to safeguard the integrity of the sport, but something that seems to be sorely missing across the board is consistency. How often to you hear a football manager decry a decision because last week an opponent wasn't pulled up for the same thing? Sadly, this has now found its way into golf.

By the letter of the law, a group is put on the clock if it falls behind the allotted time for each hole and falls considerably behind the group ahead. After that, players are timed on every shot, and receive a one-stroke penalty for the second time they take too long (not the first). This protocol is very straightforward. Each group has a rules official monitoring it and a number of others in the entourage - from on-course commentators to score trackers - who could easily identify when it's slipped behind the requisite pace. Easy to pick up on, right? It should be, but the difference between the existence of a rule and its implementation lies at the hands of officials, who have done an abysmal job in counteracting slow play on the PGA Tour.

It's a sorry state of affairs when someone feels wronged when they're rightly put on the clock. Stenson's group had fallen foul of the rules and deserved to be more closely monitored, but how often does that end up happening? Can you remember the last time a group was put on the clock? And yet slow play happens week in, week out on the PGA Tour. It seems as if some officials are prepared to implement the rules, and others continue to turn a blind eye. The result is grave inconsistency and the continuing presence of something that really shouldn't be too difficult to curtail.

The last two high-profile cases of slow play are Stenson's, and 14-year-old youngster Guan Tianlang at last year's Masters. The Chinese amateur was the first person in the history of the Masters to be penalised a stroke for slow play. The official who enforced the rule? John Paramor, the European Tour's chief referee. Many people criticised his actions, but what else was he to do? He warned Guan three times before delivering the penalty. It's not his fault if other rules officials fail to do their job, and frankly unfair that he was so heavily scrutinised simply for following the letter of the law. The subject was of course unfortunate, but Paramor should be commended for sticking to the rules, even though he knew he'd attract significant criticism for doing so. That's the sign of good leadership - someone who sticks stringently to what's right when many others would take the easy option.

Unfortunately, that's what the vast majority of tournament officials do week in, week out on the PGA Tour. The result of that? A landscape where people are vilified for doing the right thing. The PGA Tour is completely geared towards making its members happy, and without wishing to make spurious claims, I wouldn't be surprised if some form of direction has filtered down to rules officials about penalties for slow play. After all, it's a circuit that rewards its players with a ludicrously lucrative pension scheme and one that isn't obliged to reveal suspensions for forbidden substance abuse. Slow play has been a perennial issue for as long as I can remember, yet the last person to suffer a penalty in a non-major event was Glen Day at the 1995 Honda Classic. It's absurd how little the tour has done to make strides in this sphere. On the European Tour, the last player to suffer a penalty was Ross Fisher at the 2012 Celtic Manor Resort Wales Open. You guessed it - Paramor was the one to enforce the ruling on that occasion.

More can also be done east of the Atlantic, but at least the European Tour's head referee is setting the correct example. PGA Tour rounds often take more than five hours to complete, but we seldom see any action from officials in an attempt to address what's widely regarded as one of the main inhibitor's to golf's growth. So well done, whoever put Stenson on the clock, for doing the right thing in an age where it's so easy to employ a laissez-faire approach to slow-play rules administration.
 


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Tags: PGA Tour Henrik Stenson



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