Why pace-of-play problems are every player’s responsibility

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Nelly Korda. Matthew Fitzpatrick. Lucas Glover. It’s a trio that would make almost no golf fan’s list of malcontents, complainers or loud mouths, yet all three spoke out in 2024 about slow play, as one of golf’s perennial sore points crawled back into the spotlight. Average golfers may not relate to the tour pros when it comes to driving distances and scoring ability, but when it comes to pace of play, we’re all on equal footing.

“It’s one set of problems at the elite level,” said Michael Breed, a longtime GOLF Magazine Top 100 Teacher and the host of a SiriusXM Radio show. “For the recreational player there are different issues, but it’s just as big of a problem.”

Recent USGA research shows that the average time of a round has ballooned to 4 hours and 30 minutes, a new high.

“Golfers identify pace of play as the No. 1 thorn in their side detracting from their enjoyment of the game,” said Lucius Riccio, Ph.D., a former commissioner of New York City’s Department of Transportation, who laid out the similarities between roadway bottlenecks and those on the course in his 2013 book, “Golf’s Pace of Play Bible.”

“And as much as the total time to play, it’s about how long [golfers] had to wait between shots,” he said. “If the first group of the day goes out and plays in 4:15, they’re happy. If the second group goes around in 4:15 but waited on every shot, they’re unhappy.”

Riccio lays a fair portion of the blame on golf courses, for ill-considered course setups and misaligned tee-time intervals. “You can put everyone on the Cross Bronx Expressway in a Corvette,” Riccio said, “but if there are too many cars on the road, they still won’t go more than 10 miles per hour.”

Still, beyond asking the director of golf to make operational changes, there are things the golfer can do to cut wasted time. “If your group goes off 10 minutes behind the group in front, but finishes 11 minutes after, that backs up the whole course by one minute,” said Matt Pringle, Ph. D., managing director of the USGA’s Green Section. “If every group does that, the afternoon groups will finish 35 or 40 minutes behind pace.”

The typical suggestions — ready golf, remaining conscious of your position relative to the group in front of you and keeping up, even if it means picking up — still apply, but there are other actions each golfer can focus on to keep the trains moving.

Like not nearly enough things in our collective history, this life-changing moment came over a donut and a Dr. Pepper:

Scott Dawley was at his desk eating that “breakfast” one morning when he saw an ad for a speed golf tournament. After stints on the golf team at the University of South Carolina and the University of Houston, Dawley turned pro in 2005, grinding away on the mini-tours. By 2009 he’d given up the dream, taken an office job and — surprise, surprise — gained a bit of weight. To counter the latter development, he started running, and thought speed golf might be a way to combine his workouts with his first love.

Six months later he was teeing off in the post-dawn gloom and taking off in the general direction of his ball. “What a rush it was running down the fairway in the dark,” he said. “It just felt so freeing.”

He finished the round less than an hour later. His score: 75.

Dawley now runs and competes in SpeedGolf USA, but he still enjoys a leisurely round, often paired with his 79-year-old father. He wants people to know that playing fast and playing well aren’t mutually exclusive — in fact, the first often leads to the second.

“People need to see pace as a way to better golf,” said Dawley, whose speed golf world record stands at 65 strokes in 42 minutes at Horton Smith Golf Course in Springfield, Mo. “Going faster puts you in the zone. There’s no time to think about anything but what you’re doing. There’s no time to be upset or happy. When you’re going fast, you let go and perform better.”

Almost everything about golf would seem to say the opposite. TV analysts, swing coaches and psychologists all talk about going slow. Visualize the shot. Don’t swing before you’re ready. Have a multi-step pre-shot routine. “That has been the approach to good golf,” Dawley said, “but it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Don’t imitate the Tour!” Breed, known for his exuberance when he was the host of “The Golf Fix” on Golf Channel, is not quite shouting, but it feels like he is. “It’s almost as if people are under the assumption that the more time they take, the better they’ll play,” he said. “The truth is all that analysis and preparation can lead to confusion.”

Like Dawley, he sees the green as a place where players can pick up time. “The make percentage on a 10-footer is relatively low, even for a pro,” Dawley said. “The average golfer grinding over multiple angles isn’t going to change that number. Give it one look from behind and trust it. Be an athlete.”

Golf can take a cue from Major League Baseball, another sport that struggled with slow pace but took action to improve, including the installation of a clock in 2023 that limits the amount of time pitchers and batters have to be ready for a pitch. When it comes to the pre-shot routine for golfers, Dawley suggests cutting it in half, from the typical 45 seconds to around 20. “Fewer practice swings will actually make you play better,” he said. “I’ve taken hundreds of people out for their first round of speed golf, and they’re almost always surprised how much better they play compared to expectations.”

Golfers can further cut time by playing to the middle of the green. “It’s boring but it’s faster,” Breed said, because going for the flag more often ends in a missed green.

“Remember the 150-yard bush next to the fairway that served as a marker?” he asked. “Back when that was all you had, you knew roughly how far you were as you walked up to your ball, so you just pulled a club and hit. Yardage markers on sprinkler heads and rangefinders cause internal debate. I love rangefinders, but when you get a really precise number, it makes you start to think.”

Ask any course ranger what happens when they ask a group to pick up the pace, never mind pick up their ball, and stories of creative swearing, arguments and even physical confrontation will follow. Such results are born of a ingrained mentality, according to Riccio, that focuses too much on punishing slow play rather than reinforcing positive habits. When a group falls behind, it’d be better for the ranger to ride along for a few holes acting as a forecaddie and encouraging ready play.

“There needs to be a perspective shift,” Dawley said. “When your day on the course is all about your score, you have no incentive to go faster. When your time is part of your score, it completely changes your approach.” He’s not suggesting that people outside the speed-golf world use time-based scoring, but simply that everyone approach their round with pace of play, and therefore enjoyment, in mind.

Breed is on board with the suggestion, calling for golfers to get on Lombardi Time, referencing the legendary NFL coach’s axiom that players who showed up for anything — practice, meetings, etc. — less than five minutes early were actually late. “Think about the shot well before you get to the shot,” he said. “Prepare for your putt before it’s your turn to putt.”

That mentality extends to what he calls “the traveling tea party,” during which players walking together or riding in carts don’t begin assessing their shot until they arrive at the ball, sometimes even continuing their chat before they get to the business of hitting. “The conversation should stop 50 yards before you get to the ball,” Breed said.

Players have 45 seconds to hit, but unless you’re up first, you also have the 45 seconds of all the others ahead of you to prepare. “If you’re driving the cart, drop the other player off and move toward your ball,” said Riccio. “Don’t sit in the cart next to him while he hits, then drive to your ball.”

Riccio has two organizations devoted to speeding play, FairwayIQ, a consulting service for course operators, and the Three45 Golf Association, a research lab and promotional outlet. The latter denotes a target time for 18 holes but also a series of shorter range guidelines based on his research, in which three and 45 emerged as key numbers: “Walk 3 miles per hour, take three minutes or less to clear the green, no more than three people should search for a ball (while the fourth hits), don’t search for more than three minutes and hit your shot in 45 seconds or less,” he says.

Breed counters with a rule of his own: one in, one out. “After you hit your driver, don’t put it in the bag,” he said. “Carry it with you until you reach your ball. Then put the driver away as you pull out the next club you need. If you do that on every shot, you cut down the number of times you have to go in and out of the bag.”

All those techniques won’t help, though, if the course sets golfers up to fail. “We did a study at a municipal course in California that had eight-minute tee time intervals a few years ago,” said the USGA’s Pringle. “The play was slow and almost every golfer complained about the group in front of them, but it wasn’t any group’s fault. With so many golfers on the course, they never had a chance to get around in decent time. We increased the tee time intervals, and the situation improved.”

As usual, the short holes create pinch points: par 3s and short 4s and 5s. Golfers could help by waving groups up on those holes. “Then you’re walking instead of waiting while the group in front of you putts,” said Riccio. But most golfers don’t wave fellow players up unless there’s a sign on the hole or a culture at the course dictating that they do so.

“If the facility is taking the proper steps, it doesn’t matter that much what individual golfers do,” Pringle said. “If they’re not, mathematically they’re setting you up to fail.”

That math, according to Riccio, includes another interesting fact. Although the average time for a full round is 4 hours and 17 minutes, the average time for the first group out in the morning is 3 hours and 45 minutes. This suggests that pace of play deteriorates over the course of the day, sometimes because there are too many players on the course, but also because subsequent groups don’t keep up.

“If you play alone on an empty course and walk 3 miles per hour over a 4-mile course, that’s 80 minutes of walking,” Riccio said. “If you hit 100 shots at 45 seconds each, that adds another 75 minutes for a total playing time of 2:35. But if you’re in a foursome, you have to add the time it takes your playing partners to hit, which comes to another 80 minutes or 3:55 total. Everything beyond 3:55 is lost time — to inefficient play or mismanagement by the course. That’s the amazing part.”

It’s also the annoying part, and where everyone — from players to course operators to rangers — should focus on improvement.