Perspective from the 19th Hole is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write. I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.
Guess what?
Two things:
- I am writing again about something that bugs me no end – slow play on the PGA Tour, with no one doing anything about it.
- A writer for Global Golf Post (GGP) agrees with me that there is a solution just waiting around the corner.
To the question in this blog headline, the GGP writer and I say the answer is “yes.”
Just impose a shot clock and use to impose penalties on pros who take too much time over a shot. That is the only way players who play for money will pay attention.
The GGP writer, Scott Michaux, put it this way:
“To anyone who thinks it can’t be done (using a shot clock in golf), professional golf has dipped its toe into the murky shot-clock waters once. The European Tour first tinkered with the idea in 2017 during team-match events called GolfSixes, in which a 30-second shot clock was applied starting on the fourth hole of the six-hole matches.
“But the Euro circuit went all in with a full-fledged 72-hole experiment in 2018, staging the annual Austrian Open as an event called the Shot Clock Masters at Diamond Country Club in Atzenbrugg, Austria.
“The rules were pretty simple:
- Players had 40 seconds to hit their shot (the first player to hit approach, chip or putt in each group was allotted an extra 10 seconds);
- Failure to hit a shot within the time limit incurred a one-stroke penalty;
- Players were allowed two extensions of time (40-second timeouts) per round.
“The time limits were enforced by rules officials riding with each group in carts with large digital clocks displaying the player’s name and remaining time.
“The results seemed transformational. The stated goal of then-European Tour CEO Keith Pelley was to try to reduce the average time of rounds by 45 minutes. It came close. The first round’s average time fell 34 minutes from the previous year’s Austrian Open – from 4 hours, 47 minutes to 4:13.
“First-round scoring averages dropped as well by more than half a stroke and no players were penalized for a shot-clock violation.
“What’s more, players who participated generally raved about it. Sweden’s Peter Hanson, who played in one of three threesomes in the first round that got around in less than four hours, said: “I think this is the way we should play golf, and this is the way I was born and raised to play the game.”
“The PGA Tour’s Billy Horschel even chimed in from afar while watching the Shot Clock Masters on television.
“’Loving this shot clock deal on the European tour,’ Horschel wrote on Twitter. ‘Amazing how fast rounds go when players play within the rules. And guys are still playing great golf. Shocking! Wish we had something like this on the PGA Tour.’”
If pro golf were to go in this direction, it could use baseball as an example.
Michaux wrote this:
“But with dwindling television ratings and fan frustration with the way golf presents itself in the modern era in which discretionary time is offered plenty of distractions, has golf reached the point where it must seriously enforce pace-of-play protocols with a shot clock?
“If so, baseball is a prime example for making a major change to a sport steeped in tradition that improved the quality of the entertainment product.
“Baseball and golf have more in common beyond being stick-and-ball games. Neither measure how long it takes to complete their competitions in units of time, but instead with innings and holes. Both endured issues with the expanding duration of how long it takes to reasonably finish, which deteriorated the experience of the players, as well as fans.
“And both similarly dragged their feet at doing anything about it, with successive PGA Tour commissioners content with play simply finishing by the end of the designated broadcast window, no matter how early the leaders needed to start to get that done.
“But golf – from the fans to players to tour administration – now seems ready to finally tackle the pace-of-play challenge.
“How baseball went about implementing a pitch clock to wide acclaim is a lesson for golf’s leadership. And, even though golf would require monitoring dozens of players simultaneously over hundreds of acres on a course instead of two players in a fixed spot separated by the 60 feet, 6 inches between the pitching mound and home plate, it is not an impossible challenge to consider.”
So, with Michaux, I say to pro golf leaders: Get about the business of speeding up the game before it’s too late.
Amateurs can do it, but, of course, they don’t play golf as a livelihood.
But, soon, I bet, pro golfers will have to accept playing with a shot clock or their sport will continue losing support, including in terms of TV viewer audiences.
Perspective from the 19th Hole 