Tiger Woods made TGL history on Monday night.
It just wasn’t the kind he was probably looking for.
Woods became the first player in what is now four weeks of the new tech-infused golf league to receive a shot-clock violation. On the first hole of singles opposite Rory McIlroy, Woods had 8 feet for birdie to tie, but before he could put a putter face on the ball, the buzzer sounded mid-stroke.
Woods missed the putt anyway, but the one-stroke penalty officially handed the point to McIlroy, giving BostonCommon a 2-1 lead over Jupiter Links with five singles holes to play.
Earlier on the hole, the par-5 10th called Spear, Woods flushed a 3-wood 267 yards to 30 feet. McIlroy then matched him with a towering 3-wood that traveled 270 yards to 20 feet. Woods ran the first putt well by, failing to judge the ridge that carried the ball up to a top shelf.
“Well, that’s not good,” Woods said to himself.
McIlroy cozied his to concession range to put the pressure on Woods.
It was apparently too much pressure.
Woods spent too much time reading the next putt with his teammates, Kevin Kisner and Tom Kim, letting the 40-second shot clock run down to about 10 seconds before he stepped over the ball.
Continued slow play on the PGA Tour has ramped up the conversation again following this weekend’s Farmers Insurance Open, where CBS on-course reporter Dottie Pepper criticized the pace on the broadcast. Many, of course, have been calling for the Tour to implement a shot clock, something that has been done on other tours.
Justin Thomas was asked after last week’s TGL match if a shot clock could be successfully implemented on the PGA Tour. Thomas didn’t seem too confident.
“It’s tough,” Thomas said. “The thing is you have to make such drastic changes for it to be noticeable. Pretty much a lot of the conversations end the same way; it’s like what are we trying to accomplish here. Are rounds going to be 12 minutes faster? Are they going to be 20 minutes faster? It’s hard to realistically make a big enough difference where people are like, wow, this is great. Rounds are only three hours now or three and a half hours instead of five. You know what I mean? It’s really hard to make that big of a change.
“Look, there definitely could be some things here and there that are done, but it’s also – I think there’s, like, a Fan Forward survey that the Tour does with fans. They like harder golf courses, they like watching us play difficult places, but they want us to play faster, so those two don’t go together. You’ve kind of got to pick and choose your battles.”
To Thomas’ point, even with a shot clock in place, this TGL match was on pace to exceed its two-hour broadcast window by at least 10 minutes.
